Books Five Very Good Cat People in SF and Fantasy One obvious way to improve humans is by combining them with cats. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on June 5, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share All across Earth there are billions of people who adore cats. At the same time, there are some people who can only grudgingly tolerate other humans. Imagine if one could somehow combine the best aspects of humanity—thumbs, can openers—with the grace1, style, glorious fur, and sociopathy of cats. What wonders might we see? A considerable number of science fiction authors2, presumably all uncompensated servants to their furry masters cat fanciers, have attempted to answer that question. Here are five vintage answers… The Ballad of Lost C’Mell by Cordwainer Smith (1962) (Originally published in Galaxy Magazine, later collected in The Best of Cordwainer Smith) The Instrumentality of Man solved the servant problem with Underpeople: animals transformed into humanoid shape, given human-level intelligence, enslaved, and denied any semblance of human rights. Subject to draconian laws, Underpeople serve until they die3. Everyone wins! Or at least the humans do. Unsurprisingly, Underpeople like the catgirl C’mell yearn for freedom. More surprisingly, some humans are sympathetic to their plight. Lord Jestocost is one such. Apart, neither C’mell nor Lord Jestocost are likely to significantly advance the cause of the Underpeople. Together, however… While many of the means by which the Underpeople have been kept enslaved are quite familiar, the Lords of the Instrumentality have one novel twist, which is that the process used to transform animals into Underpeople does not produce heritable changes. Without access to that biotechnological tweak, Underpeople cannot produce more Underpeople and would quickly go extinct. The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1964) Foreshadowing Disco Era disaster films, a diverse cast of characters find their lives upended by calamity. The human race is imperiled by “The Wanderer,” a planet-sized starship filled with sexy bohemian catgirls4 who want to dismantle and steal the Earth’s moon. The Wanderer is massive enough for its tidal forces to shred the moon. The effect on Earth is reduced by distance, but still calamitous. Alien catgirl Tigerishka takes the time to explain what’s going on. The beings who call the Wanderer home are free-thinking sexy beasts who totally reject conformity, man. Buzzkill galactic squares want to harsh the wanderers’ joie de vivre. The Wanderer needs to refuel and flee before the cosmic fuzz shows up. If a few billion hairless apes are collateral damage, well, freedom has its price. However awesome “a planet-sized starship filled with sexy bohemian catgirls who want to dismantle and steal the Earth’s moon” sounds, the reality of the actual novel is far more dismal. There are cool ideas here, none of them executed particularly well5. Perhaps some young author will want to riff on this notion. Godsfire by Cynthia Felice (1978) Although Heao’s pre-scientific cat people would not think in such terms, living in the shadowed region under their world’s Saturn-like rings means that they are denied a clear view of Godsfire, as they call their sun. The King-conqueror has nightmares about Godsfire. To better comprehend the sun, an expedition must be dispatched out of the twilit realm into the fully illuminated regions. Scholar Heao is part of the expedition. Heao and her kin discover that the sunlit regions are already populated, not by fellow cat people, but by cousins to the hairless human slaves who serve Heao’s people. These humans enjoy a vast technological advantage over Heao’s people. The off-worlders do not approve of their cousins’ plight. Among the tools available to express human displeasure? Weapons very much like the Godsfire that haunts the King-conqueror’s nightmares. Godsfire is an example of another subgenre of SF: stories told from the alien perspective. Identifying with the cat people may be distressing to some readers, as it’s pretty clear that humans refuse to engage in peaceful co-existence with technologically disadvantaged non-humans. The book ends before the ramifications of this refusal are fully explored. Breed to Come by Andre Norton (1972) The Demons created Furtig’s feline people, as well as the porcine Tuskers, the ratlike Rattons, and the canine Barkers—all transformations of what were considered mere animals. The Demons were smarter than they were wise and exterminated themselves. The world is now the domain of the four kinds. Young Furtig wishes only to prove himself to Those Who Choose, the breeding-age cat-women of his tribe. Fate is unkind to Furtig. Not only is he not a match for his rivals, more calamitous challenges loom. The Demons did not all die. Some fled to another star system. Now, a starship full of Demons have returned to their long-lost home planet, Earth, a world they very much regard as theirs, no matter what some uplifted animals might think. Breed to Come parallels in some respects Jack Kirby’s comic Kamandi. While Kamandi was clearly influenced by The Planet of the Apes6, I suspect that Norton’s primary influence was that she really liked cats. Breed to Come and Kamandi appeared almost simultaneously, yet another example of two authors simultaneously appearing at similar destinations via dissimilar routes. Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann (1993) Created as expendable soldiers during the Pan-Asian War, the human-animal hybrids dubbed Moreaus are one of America’s grudgingly tolerated minorities. The baseline human majority graciously permits Moreaus to eke out livings in designated ghettos… at least until legislation can be passed to deport or sterilize the Moreaus. Pantherian Nohar Rajasthan is a private detective in decidedly unglamorous Cleveland. Prudence dictates a low profile. Nevertheless, Nohar agrees to investigate a murder to which the police seem oddly indifferent. The clues lead to a global conspiracy responsible for Earth’s crapsack status. Knowing too much means that Nohar’s already dismal probable lifespan is now much, much shorter. It’s depressing how many of these books feature cat people created for various untoward purposes, rather than because cat people would be awesome. The moral appears to be “humans are jerks”7. In this work, there are a few mitigating circumstances. These are just a few examples of the subgenre and not recent ones at that. Many of you likely have your own favorites. Feel free to mention them in comments below.[end-mark] The writing of this article was punctuated by the thud of a cat rolling into the gap between the sideboard and the wall. If it could speak, I am sure it would tell me that it did this on purpose. ︎It’s not just SF authors writing about cat people, of course, but if I were to list all the manga examples, we’d be here until the end of the century. ︎No doubt if there were an afterlife and if the Instrumentality could access it, they would compel the shades of the Underpeople to continue slaving away. ︎Not just catgirls. There are other flavors of humanoids. ︎As you know, The Wanderer won the Best Novel Hugo. How, you ask? Well, it was a weak year. The other novels on the ballot were Pangborn’s Davy, Smith’s The Planet Buyer, and Brunner’s The Whole Man. While Davy was a strong contender, one could argue that neither the Smith nor the Brunner were quite Hugo-level. Also, the voting pool was miniscule: Wanderer won with 52 votes to Davy’s 48 to The Planet Buyer’s 34 to The Whole Man’s 26. Small voting pools can easily produce odd results (ask me about juried awards). However, what I think got The Wanderer that four-vote edge over the superior Davy was Leiber’s absolutely shameless sucking up to fans throughout his novel. ︎Kirby was influenced by DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino’s request that Kirby to create a comic similar to Planet of the Apes without (quite) infringing on The Planet of the Apes IP, which Marvel Comics owned. ︎An exception to this generalization would be the Leiber novel. I suppose that its moral is “this counterculture is rich with hot but off-handedly deadly sociopaths.” That seems a little harsh. ︎The post Five Very Good Cat People in SF and Fantasy appeared first on Reactor.

On Thursday, Andy Ngo, the award-winning undercover riot reporter with The Post Millennial, joined Tony Kinnett’s show on 93 WIBC Indianapolis to discuss the crucial components of any political riots and how to defuse them before they become violent and destructive like the Kenosha and Minneapolis riots during the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. Following is the transcript of the interview: Tony Kinnett: Let’s dig right into the biggest thing that you talk about, “Unmasked,” which is, again, “Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.” How do these protests go from some kind of a nebulous idea to “everyone out in the streets” and then things start getting violent—because it always seems like we immediately flip from the concerns about protests to boom, it’s a riot. Andy Ngo: Social media can actually play a role in revolution, believe it or not. It was what protesters used in the Middle East and North Africa for the Arab Spring, for example. Twitter was the vehicle for which information, videos, photos went out and inspired people to take to the streets to protest.  So, 2016 was a very big year. Turning point in the United States in November, there was the surprise election win of Donald Trump. And that was the first time that we saw social media being used to mobilize and I would say agitate—for bad faith actors and violent militants and revolutionaries to take to the streets ostensibly to protest what they said was a fascist candidate who had been elected.  From that moment onward, a lot of the strategies and networks, which have been in the works for many, many years, really got to test and to try out some of their tactics and with a lot of success.  So, Portland became quite an epicenter for a lot of Antifa violence against right wingers, for example, for four years leading up to 2020. Then after the death of George Floyd, Portland became—Portland had the longest riots out of anywhere in the United States for 120 days straight. And then for really, actually, for a year, there were riots periodically.  So, fast forward four years from now, we’ve experienced a little taste of that this year in the form of the encampments that have been happening at the universities. There’s a new cause now, and that would be for Gaza, for Palestine, but the cause actually doesn’t really matter.  Ultimately, the agenda of the agitators—and there are professional riders for professional agitators involved in these encampments. And protests are wanting to work toward a revolution and they believe that they can damage America with a million cuts with the value thousand cuts. You can think of it as ants slowly and over time eating away at a body and in one isolated incident, you don’t really think of it as a big deal.  And in some ways, a lot of Americans naively looked at the riots that have been going back to 2016 and even beyond that with Occupy Wall Street and before that as well with other movements as isolated things that can be sort of just brushed off and life goes back to the status quo. What we have now is a generation of revolutionaries, and we see them concentrated at universities, but also in other parts of society, who are ready to mobilize for the cause. And the cause changes, but the goal is to destabilize the United States and ultimately to overthrow the United States government and also to attack the friends and allies on the global stage of the United States, which is why Israel is such a target currently. Kinnett: That’s really key.  We’re on with Andy Ngo talking a little bit about what goes on on the inside of these protests and riots and maybe some of the rough things to come. That’s the key, though, not just the United States, but the allies in Western civilization. Of course, we saw in Mexico City, the protesters set fire to the Israeli Embassy. And what happened a few hours later, Mexico announced that it would be joining the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, those movements to investigate and prosecute Israel. And then, of course, over here on the American side of the border, we’ve seen President [Joe] Biden kind of capitulate in ways to the far left side of this debate. Because it’s not a debate. It’s one side that’s articulating specific policies, actions, societal goals, and then it’s the other side that’s threatening to burn down whatever or, you know, quite succinctly, turn Chicago into 1968 again if they don’t get their way. And that’s what’s bad about it.  Wild to me, most of all, is that we’re not even seeing a direct cause of action is, well, we want the city to defund the police. Well, we want the city council members to do this. We will burn down the city until the federal level does what we want.  And so the question that a lot of Americans are asking is, are we expecting a fully loaded riot season heading into the summer of 2024 or do you think that that remains to be seen?  Ngo: It does remain to be seen. I think, broadly, we’re still feeling a bit of riot fatigue in the United States four years after George Floyd. Even though some of these encampments were very large at the university levels, we’re not seeing the same type of numbers that are showing out on the streets for Palestine like we did for BLM with George Floyd.  And the size of the crowd does matter because it’s the violent militants, the extremists need the human body shields to be able to better hide into a crowd in order to agitate for violence. Kinnett: Is that one of the things that whips them up, is just the more bodies you have, the easier it is to spin out of control, for lack of a better way to phrase it? Ngo: Absolutely. You only need a small number of violent militants within a larger crowd to really change the dynamic of a crowd. Breaking a window for a business, for example, is blood in the water. Starting fires in the street is also another tactic for blood in the water.  And though some of the Palestine demonstrations have indeed been very big, if you compare not just the scale, but the frequency to the George Floyd riots, they’re not as big.  So, the variables are slightly different, which is why, in my opinion, the strategy has been shifted to instead of having it be, for example, trying to take over a part of the city, let’s focus—and when I say “let’s,” I’m speaking as if I was one of the militant organizers—let’s focus it to a smaller area.  Like a university, for example, where they know the administrations will be cowed, where they know that the university’s presidents, many of them are left wing themselves and sympathetic to the cause, and will allow the encampments to go on, will give into the demands.  And this is exactly what has happened. For example, Portland State University, University of Washington in Seattle, the university presidents there have capitulated, allowed the militants who destroy property to shut down parts of campus and also to not face any liabilities. Kinnett: The question that a lot of people have to be asking—and whether they’re tuning into the show or whether they’re quite honestly following these crazy stories either on encampments or maybe they’re worried about some kind of a situation, you start to reach a point where the protest feels like it’s here to stay. It’s not just an afternoon march holding some posters. Now it feels like it’s moving on to that next step. How do city council members or local police or officials of any sort, whether, again, you’re in a private area, like a private university or in a public space, how do you start to diffuse it? Because you’ve been on the inside, you have been among the people. The individuals who have whipped things up into a very, very fiery inferno, a frenzy. So, how do you start to diffuse that when you realize things are starting to go to the next level?  Ngo: There are two prongs to this. First and foremost is a law enforcement answer because there are a lot of criminal activities happening. It’s not OK, for example, for protesters and rioters to shut down roads, but we’ve come to accept that when they have their direct actions that this is what happens and nobody faces any consequences. So, that type of baseline has to change, first of all.  And when people harass and intimidate people in a criminal manner, vandalize, obviously, all those things seem to be prosecuted. But often what happens is these types of actions are organized intentionally in cities where prosecutors are openly progressive, left wing, and don’t prosecute those who carry out left-wing political violence. The other thing is also for a change in the way that the culture views violence from far-left extremism.  I think part of the success of these movements, no matter how violent or deadly they are, how frequently they happen, their outbursts of violence, the wider public is gaslit and misinformed about the threat of far-left extremism. All of the nonprofit groups, for example, that purport to keep an eye out on hate and extremism, these are all left-wing groups that obfuscate the violence of the Left and/or defend it or are part of it in terms of the propaganda themselves.  That’s a big problem. So, we need leadership, particularly among Democrats, to speak out and say, “This is not the norm.” And we’re not talking about censoring people or taking away First Amendment rights. We’re talking about pushing back against those who advocate for a normalization of political violence. And that’s what we’ve seen in America. Kinnett: Like Bill Clinton pushing back against the far left back in the ’90s that tried to, you know, gaslight everything. And he kind of came out, strangely so, and kind of slapped everything down. Is that the kind of Democrat leadership, at least in that moment, you’re kind of talking about? Ngo: Yes, but even more so. Like, by Democrat, I’m also referring to a lot of legacy media who allied themselves with Democrats, cultural institutions that are liberal, liberal institutions, and of course liberal politicians themselves. All that really, they have to speak out and, unfortunately, they don’t because they buy into a lot of the propaganda that these protesters are doing, things in the name of social justice or racial justice or anti-racism or anti-fascism, and they give into the propaganda. So, unfortunately, there’s been a lot of misinformation and disinformation happening from organizations, media institutions that really should be the ones illuminating the public, that say, “We have a problem here.”  Kinnett: I think you’re dead-on. Yep. As usual, Andy Ngo, bestselling journalist, senior editor over at The Post Millennial, we’re obviously big fans of Libby Emmons’ crew over there. Also, don’t forget to pick up his book “Unmasked: “Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.” It’s got a new afterword in it that I gotta say is, again, as is his brand, pretty dead-on. Andy, thank you so much for joining us.Ngo: My pleasure. The post EXCLUSIVE: Andy Ngo Dissects the Recipe for Political Riots appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Left’s main smear organ has targeted an openly gay organization and groups of doctors who oppose “gender-affirming care” in efforts to silence opposition to the transgender agenda and drag queen story hours. The Southern Poverty Law Center released its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report Tuesday, warning about encroaching “theocracy” and an “authoritarian takeover” as part of the “organizational infrastructure … upholding white supremacy in the United States.” As I explain in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained fame by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy. It later took the project it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it against mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits, putting them on a “hate map” along with Klan chapters. On Tuesday, the SPLC raised the alarm about having “documented 86 active anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups—about 33% higher than 2022, and the highest number ever recorded by the SPLC.” Of course, the SPLC isn’t “documenting” these “hate groups”—it’s smearing organizations by comparing them to the real hate of the Klan. By warning about the “increase” of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” it is ratcheting up the alarmist rhetoric and demonizing Americans who dare to dissent from its transgender agenda. It’s also scaring donors into ponying up cash in what a former SPLC employee described as a “highly profitable scam.” Most of the increase in its count of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups” comes from the SPLC’s decision to add state-based family policy councils, groups of doctors who oppose transgender medical interventions, and chapters of the group Gays Against Groomers to the list. These groups don’t support “hate”—they merely oppose the SPLC’s agenda. The SPLC added to the list policy groups that oppose radical laws to promote transgender identity. These groups support legislation to ensure that males cannot enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and prisons in the name of gender identity; legislation to protect children from “gender-affirming care” that may sterilize them; and legislation to prevent schools from hiding children’s “transgender” identity from parents. These new “hate groups” are: Advocates Protecting Children in Virginia, the California Policy Council, the Center for Christian Virtue in Ohio, the Child and Parent Rights Campaign in Georgia, the Family Action Council of Tennessee, the Florida Family Policy Council, Frontline Policy Council in Georgia, the Louisiana Family Forum, Massachusetts Family Institute, the Montana Family Foundation, Pennsylvania Family Institute, and the Family Foundation of Virginia. The SPLC also demonized groups of doctors who oppose experimental “transgender” medical interventions. These interventions, euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care,” involve drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones to make males seem female and vice versa, and surgeries to remove healthy reproductive organs. While much of the medical industry has been captured by gender ideologues who champion these interventions, many brave doctors have spoken out against them. Now, they find themselves on a map with the Klan in a report on “white supremacy.” These groups include Do No Harm, Genspect, Partners for Ethical Care, and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. The “Year in Hate” report also cites another report the SPLC released last year that demonized opposition to transgender orthodoxy as “pseudoscience” and a tool of “theocracy.” In an ironic twist of fate, the SPLC also added an explicitly homosexual group to the anti-LGBTQ+ category this year: Gays Against Groomers. The group began as a Twitter account created by Jaimee Michell, and according to the SPLC, it has four chapters. The headquarters in Milwaukee has three offshoots in Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington. Michell started Gays Against Groomers to warn against the sexualization of children and to highlight the fact that not all people who identify as LGBTQ+ support sexual lessons and events geared toward kids. The SPLC condemns Gays Against Groomers for making “amplifying anti-trans and anti-drag messaging key to its online and in-person activity.” The SPLC dismisses any concern that LGBTQ+ lessons and events might sexualize children and make them vulnerable to abuse. In fact, the report on “Hate and Extremism” trumpets the phenomenon referred to as “Drag Queen Story Hour,” in which scantily clad men in exaggerated feminine dress and makeup read books to children. “Drag, which often challenges strict adherence to binary gender roles, poses a problem for hate and antigovernment groups because it offers freedom from the restrictive ideologies they espouse,” the SPLC’s R.G. Cravens claims. He also argues that “drag performs an important role in American democracy in addition to its artistic value,” because “drag artists” can use their platform to “educate people on the importance of voting and other forms of democratic engagement.” Cravens never admits the sexualized nature of Drag Queen Story Hour. Instead, he demonizes opposition to it by suggesting that it is rooted in hatred. He claims that “the activities of anti-LGBTQ+ groups overlapped with white nationalist, neo-Nazi, antisemitic, and antigovernment groups who targeted LGBTQ+ people and events for intimidation and violent campaigns designed to drive LGBTQ+ people from public life.” He also suggests that any criticism of drag’s hyper-sexualized interpretation of femininity is rooted in knuckle-dragging misogyny. “By upending the notion that women are inherently feminine and men are inherently masculine, for example, drag challenges long-held sexist notions that women are a ‘weaker sex’ who should be subservient to men because they are only valuable for procreation,” Cravens writes. Cravens claims the SPLC tracked “195 incidents of right-wing protesters targeting drag events across the country” in 2023, suggesting these protests were violent. He mentions isolated incidents of real violence unconnected to any of the mainstream organizations the SPLC brands “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.” The SPLC again kept many mainstream conservative Christian groups on the list of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” most notably the law firm Alliance Defending Freedom and the think tank Family Research Council. Alliance Defending Freedom has won numerous cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, including free speech and religious freedom cases like 303 Creative v. Elenis and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Even Alliance Defending Freedom’s ideological opponents, such as former American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen, have condemned the SPLC’s smear against the law firm. Both Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council have repeatedly debunked the SPLC’s accusations against them, yet the SPLC continues to repeat its claims. In 2012, the Family Research Council suffered a terrorist attack from a man who used the SPLC “hate map” to target the organization. While the SPLC condemned the attack, it has kept the Family Research Council on the map. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups—including Moms for Liberty—to the “hate map,” in part because they oppose transgender lessons in school. The SPLC has suffered many scandals. It paid more than $3 million to settle a defamation lawsuit from a Muslim reformer the SPLC had branded an “anti-Muslim extremist” in 2018. It fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019. Even so, many legacy media outlets, Democrats, and companies use the SPLC as an arbiter of what is considered “hate.” The Biden administration has repeatedly worked with the SPLC, with a Justice Department division listening to an SPLC briefing on the “hate map.” The SPLC owes its bread and butter to demonizing conservatives, and no one should take its claims at face value. The post SPLC Adds Gays Against Groomers, Doctors Who Oppose ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ to Hate Map With Klan Chapters appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Australian eSafety commissioner’s pursuit of legal action to compel Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, to censor posts about a church stabbing in Sydney is being abandoned. Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant announced the decision following several setbacks in court and the expiration of a temporary order to conceal the footage. Inman-Grant emphasized that the choice to drop the case was made after considering multiple factors, including ongoing litigation in other matters. She asserted, “Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community and I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made.” The case had been a pivotal moment in Australia’s efforts to impose its censorship not only on users in Australia, but on users around the world. X’s government affairs arm welcomed the news, stating, “This case has raised important questions on how legal powers can be used to threaten global censorship of speech, and we are heartened to see that freedom of speech has prevailed.” Initially, X resisted the eSafety notice to remove the videos, which were later classified as an act of terror. Despite a Federal Court order to hide the footage temporarily, X defied the directive, questioning the validity of the initial takedown order. Last month, a court gave X its first win against the government’s censorship demands, ruling against a temporary block. Musk has openly criticized the controversial commissioner Inman-Grant, branding her as a global “censorship commissar.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australia Drops Bid to Censor X Platform After Free Speech Legal Challenge appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Massachusetts to Send 'CARE' Workers to Some 911 Calls, Not Police

The tallest mountain in the world is named after George Everest, a British geographer of India who has very little direct connection to the mountain. Some doubt whether he had even laid eyes on the towering landmass.Although no doubt honored, even he thought it was a bad idea to name the mountain after his surname because it was difficult to write in Hindi and many native speakers found it difficult to pronounce. However, it wasn’t just locals that struggled with the name. It turns out, that if you’ve ever uttered “Mount Everest,” you’ve probably been saying it incorrectly. George Everest pronounced his surname “EVE-rest,” with the first syllable rhyming with “sleeve” or “breathe,” as opposed to “EVER-est” or “EV-rest,” according to Mental Floss.Why was Mount Everest named after George Everest?The reason why Mount Everest was named after Sir George is a strange one as he had nothing to do with its first official survey in the colonial era, nor the calculation of its height.Sir George Everest was Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843 who played an important role in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, a mission to map the entire Indian subcontinent with scientific precision. As a vast and diverse land, filled with huge features including parts of the Himalaya mountain range, this is no small feat and the project took almost 70 years to complete.When Everest was at the helm of this survey, the skyscraping mountain was simply known as “Gamma,” then “Peak B” and later “Peak XV” – not exactly iconic. It was Sir George’s successor, Andrew Scott Waugh, who was leading the project when the height of Peak XV was calculated by Radhanath Sikdar, an Indian mathematician, revealing it as the highest mountain in the world (by many metrics). Upon realizing its record-breaking credentials, the powers that be felt it was time for a name change. In 1856, Waugh wrote to Henry Thuillier suggesting the grand mountain should be named after his predecessor and beloved mentor, George Everest.“I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel George Everest, to assign to every geographical object its true local or national appellation. But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, whose native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal, and to approach close to this stupendous snow mass,” the letter reads.“In the meantime, the privilege, as well as the duty, devolves on me to assign this lofty pinnacle a name whereby it may be known among geographers, and become a household word. In testimony of my affectionate respect for a revered chief [...] and to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of accurate geographical research – I have determined to name this noble peak… Mount Everest.”The name stuck in some parts of the world and, for unclear reasons, a slight tweak to the pronunciation buried itself into the public consciousness.Renaming Mount EverestIt’s worth pointing out that many places have different names for the mountain. In Nepalese, Everest is known as Sagarmatha, which translates to "Forehead of the Sky," while Tibet calls it Chomolungma or Qomolangma, meaning "Mother Goddess of the Earth."To honor this, there have even been calls to officially rename the mountain, although it looks like those demands have gone mostly unheard. "It is time for the Western world to respect us Tibetans by recognizing the highest peak on Earth by its Tibetan name, Qomolangma,” Gelek, an esteemed Tibetan scholar at the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing, told Chinese media in 2002.“When Qomolangma becomes the only word for people all over the world to refer to the highest peak on Earth, I, as a Tibetan, will feel very contented," Gelek added.

While snapping photos of the surface of Mars in 2011, the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a very unusual feature.On Pavonis Mons – a large shield volcano in the Tharsis region of volcanic mountains – the camera saw a giant hole, appearing to lead into a large underground cavern. Further analysis showed that the hole's opening is around 35 meters (115 feet) in diameter, with the cavern beneath around 20 meters (66 feet) deep. Prior to the likely collapse and infilling, it was likely around 90 meters (295 feet) deep.             What caused the hole is a bit of a geological mystery. Caverns of this size or higher on Earth, of which there are few, are generally caused by water dissolving through limestone."Sinkholes are most common in what geologists call, 'karst terrain'," the US Geological Survey explains. "These are regions where the types of rock below the land surface can naturally be dissolved by groundwater circulating through them. Soluble rocks include salt beds and domes, gypsum, limestone and other carbonate rock."With the rock underneath dissolved away, underground caverns are left underneath the surface. When the weakened surface collapses into the cavern, it creates a sinkhole.But Mars – puzzlingly – has no sign of carbonate rocks such as limestone, and very little water. A more likely explanation is that the hole leads into a lava tube."Sometimes the tops of lava flows freeze on the surface even while the lava continues to move underground in a lava tube. If these tubes drain, then lava tube caves can be left behind. Sections of the roof may later collapse, creating roof openings, and these openings can be imaged from orbit," Shane Byrne, a Professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, explained in a blog post. "Could this be a view into a lava tube? If so, it would dwarf all lava tubes on the Earth! It's also possible that this collapse is above some more substantial part of the volcano's internal plumbing system and collapses deep with the mountain are allowing voids to open up near the surface."The hole has interest beyond being cool space geology. It's possible that as conditions on the surface of the planet changed, and it lost its protective magnetic field and atmosphere, any life may have shifted underground."Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life," NASA wrote of the cavern in 2020. "These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers."[H/T: Universe Today]

Going for a family hike might not be everyone's idea of a good time, but for three children in North Dakota, their outing led them to discover a juvenile T. rex skeleton, which is now on display at a museum. Jessin and Liam Fisher, their dad, Sam Fisher, and their cousin, Kaiden Madsen were walking in the North Dakota badlands in 2022 when they discovered the bones. All three children were already fossil enthusiasts who frequently went out looking for them. Coincidentally, Sam Fisher also went to school with Dr Tyler Lyson, the curator of paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who he contacted to identify the fossils. The highlighted blue parts show which parts were discovered; the team hopes more could still be found.Image credit: Scott HarmanThe following summer, the children returned to the site to help excavate the juvenile T. rex with Dr Lyson’s team of paleontologists. This process included wrapping the T. rex fossil in plaster and then using a helicopter to move the specimen onto a nearby trailer.Liam Fisher lies next to the tibia and femur of the T. rex discovery.Image credit: Sam FisherAnalysis revealed that the fossil preserves about 30 percent of the skeleton and has a tibia with a length of 82 centimeters (32 inches). An adult T. rex would have a tibia length of around 112 centimeters (44 inches), leading the paleontologists to believe this was a juvenile.                The discovery is all the more impressive since only a few juvenile T. rex skeletons have ever been found. "By going outside and embracing their passions and the thrill of discovery, these boys have made an incredible dinosaur discovery that advances science and deepens our understanding of the natural world,” said Dr Lyson in a statement. As well as going on display in an experience called "Discovering Teen Rex", a film about the finding will also be shown at the museum on June 21.

Lurking in the snow and frost of Greenland’s ice sheet, mysterious giant viruses has been discovered. They share the ice with an abundance of algae, which means this is the first time these viruses – about which we know relatively little – have been found in such a habitat. But it’s not bad news (unless you’re an alga): it is thought that by infecting microalgae, the giant viruses may act as some sort of secret weapon in minimizing melt.Just how giant are we talking? The viruses can’t be seen with the naked eye, but next to your regular viruses (which measure 20-200 nanometers) they’re comparatively massive. Giant viruses can grow to 2.5 micrometers – that’s 2,500 nanometers – making them up to 125 times bigger than normal viruses, and larger than most bacteria. They also have humongous genomes, containing around 2.5 million base pairs.Previously, giant viruses have been found lingering in all sorts of environments, including the sea, soil, and even in humans. However, this latest discovery marks the very first time they’ve been found on surface ice and snow that is teeming with microalgae.Here, the team behind the discovery believes, they could have an important role to play in regulating algal blooms and, consequently, in safeguarding the ice from accelerated melting. When Arctic algae flourish in the spring, it darkens large swathes of the ice sheet, limiting its ability to reflect sunlight, in turn heightening the melt. This is bad news for the environment, which is why the freshly discovered giant viruses would be such a boon for protecting the ice if they can act as a natural algae control as the researchers suspect. “We don’t know a lot about the viruses, but I think they could be useful as a way of alleviating ice melting caused by algal blooms,” first author Laura Perini from the Department of Environmental Science at Aarhus University said in a statement. “How specific they are and how efficient it would be, we do not know yet. But by exploring them further, we hope to answer some of those questions.”The team collected samples from a variety of snow and ice habitats in the Greenland ice sheet, including dark ice, ice cores, red and green snow, and melting holes (cryoconite), before analyzing them for DNA and searching for specific giant virus marker genes. In almost all samples, they found sequences matching known giant viruses.That's not dirty water, it's actually a sample teeming with microorganisms, including algae and giant viruses.Image credit: Laura PeriniTo make sure these had come from active viruses and not long-dead microbes, the researchers also extracted messenger RNA, or mRNA – a single-stranded molecule that contains the instructions from DNA that direct cells to make a protein – from the samples. “In the total mRNA sequenced from the samples, we found the same markers as in the total DNA, so we know they have been transcribed,” Perini explained. “It means that the viruses are living and active on the ice.”Your bog-standard viruses are not capable of transcribing double-stranded DNA into single-stranded mRNA. Instead, they have free-floating RNA strands in their cells that are activated when the virus infects its host and makes use of its machinery. But giant viruses are different. They are able to repair, replicate, transcribe, and translate DNA without the help of a host – although why that is, we’re not sure.When it comes to giant viruses, there are plenty of other unknowns. What do these mysterious microbes infect, for example?“Some of them may be infecting protists while others attack the snow algae. We simply can’t be sure yet,” added Perini.But with further research, she hopes, we may better understand these pathogens and their potential role in protecting the ice from algae-accelerated melt.The study is published in the journal Microbiome.

Luis Elizondo for Medium: A career’s worth of intelligence work for the U.S. Government has taught me one key lesson: national security is a lot like playing a game of chess. You have to anticipate your opponent’s every move in order to remain one step ahead. Disclosing your strategy will be used against you. But if you recognize certain opportunities, you can win the match. When I headed the government’s highly sensitive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), I worked with a team to assess whether a particular chess piece — in this case in the form of an unfamiliar aerial technology — was a threat to our side of the chess board. If it was, we had to know how to counter it. Since the Government views Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) as a potential national security issue, they’re secretive by necessity. They don’t want to reveal any information to a potential enemy. But there are risks to keeping that information classified. Say the person who first learned how to harness fire never shared it with the next generation, or the person who invented the telescope threw it away when he was done using it. What if the creator of the wheel decided it was too labor intensive for others to build and decided, “Forget it”? The US Pentagon has released video of an orb-shaped UAP flying over Iraq. As a species, we’re meant to evolve. And we needed those advancements to get to where we are today. Reports of strange crafts with seemingly inexplicable properties have been circulating within the U.S. Government for at least 70 years, which suggests it isn’t going away. There is “something out there.” Declassifying certain information about UAP and sharing it with the public could lead to new technological discoveries, new forms of medical research, and a broader view of how humanity understands reality. Here’s why: a government must assume anything is a threat until it has been proven otherwise. When determining whether an unknown entity is friend or foe, the U.S. Government looks at factors including capabilities, intentions, vulnerabilities, and exploitability. A close look at these factors reveals just how little UAPs are understood. Advancements in our understanding of physics at the quantum level have helped shed faint light on the potential science behind UAPs. But these advancements have also shown us that UAPs have superior technical knowledge as well. If these capabilities fell into the hands of a foreign adversary, it would be a decisive game-changer. Likewise, the intentions of UAPs haven’t been made clear to us at this point. There could be a number of reasons for their presence, ranging from peaceful curiosity to a probe for battlespace preparation. The possibilities are numerous. UAP vulnerabilities, however, remain a complete mystery. Some have hypothesized that there’s a correlation between UAPs and our nuclear capabilities, while others have suggested that nuclear-generated electromagnetic pulses are a potential weakness. Luis Elizondo Credit: To the Stars Regardless, we still don’t really know what vulnerabilities UAPs might have short of speculation. Right now, it’s anyone’s guess. From a national security perspective, exploitation is the holy grail of endeavors. It’s critical to determine whether UAP technology could be reverse-engineered and used to our benefit, but we can’t exploit such technology unless we first understand it. When it comes to UAPs, the U.S. knows less than it should, and perhaps much less than our adversaries. The potential rewards outweigh the risks There is always a risk involved when it comes to communicating national security issues to the public. But it’s subjective. The significance of that risk depends on who you ask. If you ask a military leader, for example, they would say government secrecy about advanced aerospace phenomena is crucial because you want to avoid broadcasting your capabilities and intentions to your potential enemy. A politician would view UAPs completely differently. They may ask, “Is this something potential voters need to know, or will concealing it cause my constituents to lose faith in me? How does this discussion affect the voters and my ability to represent them?” A religious figure, on the other hand, would likely be more concerned with the religious and philosophical implications UAPs might have on his or her faith. There are countless examples throughout history of individuals challenging the prevailing systems of power with radical scientific ideas. When Galileo told the church hundreds of years ago that Earth was not the center of the solar system, for example, they nearly killed him for it. As someone without a political or religious agenda, I’m free to say the rewards outweigh the risks in this situation. For example, in December 2017 our team at To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science helped release U.S. military footage of UAPs. No government imploded, no religion dissolved. Like Galileo, our mission is simple. Collect and disseminate the truth about the unknown. As long as the risks don’t compromise national security, the rewards can benefit all. Scientific truths help push society forward At this point, there’s no question about whether UAPs are out there — they are. People can choose to either continue to live with their heads buried in the sand, or they can take a proactive approach to the phenomenon. Centuries ago, when mankind first stood on the shores of a beach and contemplated sailing across the horizon, the chorus shouted, “You’re crazy! You’re going to fall off the Earth! There are sea monsters!” But now, in the 21st century, people travel across oceans every day. What our ancestors thought were sea monsters are great white sharks, blue whales, and giant squid. It turns out that they’re just another part of our natural environment. Once people committed to discovering the truth for themselves, it was no longer mystical, it was just nature. But because government processes demand secrecy when it comes to classified information, false knowledge about UAPs spreads rapidly. Secrecy empowers people selling their snake oil and YouTubers profit from peddling their ill-informed narratives about UFOs. Soon people start believing Elvis lives on the mothership — just as they once believed you could fall off the edge of the Earth. The more knowledge people have, the better they will be able to master their own destinies, and not be held hostage to the monsters of their imaginations. Author: Luis Elizondo, former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, source Medium The post Why UAP are a national security risk and also an opportunity for progress appeared first on Anomalien.com.