Let there be light: the Webb

The New Neo Posted on by

According to the Big Bang theory, in the beginning of the universe there was darkness. The Webb telescope is shedding some light on how light came to be:

According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.

“This discovery unveils the crucial role played by ultra-faint galaxies in the early Universe’s evolution,” says astrophysicist Iryna Chemerynska of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.

“They produce ionizing photons that transform neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma during cosmic reionization. It highlights the importance of understanding low-mass galaxies in shaping the Universe’s history.”

More at the link.

More here:

The EIGER Project, led by Simon Lilly (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), just published a series of three papers in The Astrophysical Journal, in which they used the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) alongside ground-based observations from the Very Large Telescope, Magellan, and Keck Telescopes to observe one of the brightest, most distant quasars known, SDSS J0100+2802.

This quasar’s gas-guzzling supermassive black hole generates a brilliant beacon of light that illuminates the gas all along the line of sight between us and it. Astronomers can thus use the quasar to probe the state of gas around intervening galaxies — especially faraway galaxies that might be associated with reionization.

“We had the perfect complementarity of the world’s best ground-based telescopes, giving us the quasar spectrum,” Lilly says, “and the beautiful Webb, which was able to get spectroscopic data on a large number of galaxies at this very interesting epoch.”

I don’t pretend to actually understand this and how it was done. But I get a glimmer …

Laurence Tribe on yesterday’s SCOTUS decision

The New Neo Posted on by

Laurence Tribe is a law professor at Harvard specializing in the US Constitution. But leftism and partisan Trump-hatred so blinds Tribe that he sounds incredibly stupid here.

Maybe he really is incredibly stupid, but I doubt it – at least, not in the intellectual sense. But this is what he says:

So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court, saying there is ample evidence here in a trial which was fully fair and applied constitutionally appropriate standards, ample evidence to disqualify this oath breaking insurrectionist.”

He added, “In other words, they could’ve gone in either of two directions and there’s only one possible region reason for going in the direction they did. That was that they were doing a favor to oath breaking insurrectionists, in particular, one Donald J. Trump. That is not the way a court should behave. Yes, in a 100 years from now, that is still going to be a lesson in how court should not decide cases. It will be a lesson in how a court by a 5-to-4 decision can fundamentally destroy the Constitution’s deliberate protection against office holding by oath breaking insurrectionists.”

This was not a 5-4 decision, and it is purposely misleading to say it was. The judgment was 9-0. Four justices concurred with the other five, writing two separate concurring opinions as to their reasons.

But there is also a fundamental problem with other parts of Tribe’s assertion, such as this: “So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court …”

How does giving a single state court the power to do that have the result of preventing other states from doing it, or preventing some states from banning Trump and others from banning Biden? As far as I can see, what he writes there is nonsensical. And that’s even before you consider other issues such as who does have the power to declare a person an insurrectionist and what criteria should be used. What did the 14th Amendment intend?

And yet, as I said, I don’t think Tribe is stupid. I think he is blinded by his hatred of Trump, so blinded that he convinces himself of nonsensical things. He is not alone, either. He lives in a bubble in which there is plenty of ideological agreement with him and he is lauded for his views.

Tribe has had a lot of practice, too:

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'”

“Queers for Palestine”

The New Neo Posted on by

The existence of a group called “Queers for Palestine” is one of the more ironic and absurd emblems of our time:

A 2021 report on LGBT acceptance by UCLA’s Williams Institute rated Israel 44th out of the 175 countries/territories they examined. Palestine came in at number 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in company with most of the countries in that region. Amnesty International’s 2020 report on human rights highlights the fact that, in Gaza, male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and points out the conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment. This lack of civil rights has led hundreds of gay and bisexual Palestinians to flee to Israel to escape persecution. One such refugee, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was living under asylum in Israel when, in 2022, he was kidnapped and beheaded in the West Bank city of Hebron. His murderers uploaded footage of the killing to social media.

Every time these disparities are mentioned, critics are quick to lob accusations of “pinkwashing”—a concept invented to frame any discussion of Israel’s progressive stance on LGBT issues as a distraction from their mistreatment of Palestinians. But the fact remains that these “Queers for Palestine” could march in Pride parades in Israel if they wanted to. In Palestine, they’d be killed.

This article is from a month ago:

LGBTQ+ Palestinians in danger due to their sexual orientation can request asylum in Israel, the Tel Aviv District Court for Administrative Affairs ruled on Sunday, according to KAN news.

Judge Michal Agmon-Gonen approved the appeal of a Palestinian from the West Bank who had been rejected by the Population Authority due to his being Palestinian. The Population Authority’s position is that all Palestinians are not subject to the UN’s Refugee Convention, and, therefore, Israel is not obligated to provide asylum to any Palestinians.

The Palestinian who filed the appeal has been living in Israel since 2015 and claims that his life is at risk in the Palestinian territories due to his sexual identity. In the appeal, the Palestinian described how he was pushed into coming out to his parents after he refused to marry the woman they had chosen for him and how his father responded by attacking him and calling for additional relatives to assault him as well.

After realizing his life was in danger, the Palestinian ran from his home and got into Israel. After hiding in Israel for a while, the Palestinian contacted the Civil Authority through an organization that helps LGBTQ+ Arabs to request a residency permit. The request was refused at first but after further proceedings, he received a temporary permit.

It is identity politics that dictates to gay people on the left that it is necessary and desirable to support groups designated as “brown” and “oppressed” over any other groups. The facts (that Israelis and Palestinians are both mostly Caucasian groups, and that there are more black Israelis than black Palestinians as well) don’t matter and actual oppression (of gay people or Christians or anyone else) doesn’t matter either. Identity politics are not just destructive, they are often based on lies.

Some examples of MSM and Democrat reactions to today’s SCOTUS decision on Colorado

The New Neo Posted on by

Raskin’s move is just political theater. He is well aware such a move would never get enough votes, but he’s throwing a little bit of fish to his base.

ADDENDUM:

More examples from Andrea Widburg. My favorite:

Israel/Palestine news roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The IDF captured 80 terrorists trying to escape Khan Yunis as part of the civilian evacuation. I have little doubt that others were successful in escaping; this is the cost of giving advance notice and allowing civilians to leave.

(2) Even the UN – at least, in a recent report – is now saying that many rapes were committed by Gazans on October 7:

A team of United Nations experts reports that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Hamas terrorists perpetrated sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, at several locations during the terror group’s October 7 onslaught on southern Israeli communities.

It also says it found clear and convincing information that Israeli hostages in Gaza have been subjected to sexual violence and that this may be continuing.

The team — led by UN special envoy for sexual violence in conflict Pramila Patten — visited Israel between January 29 and February 14 on a mission intended to gather, analyze, and verify information on sexual violence linked to the October 7 attacks.

Too little, too tepid, too late.

(3) It is well known that the population of Israel that was attacked on October 7 was previously among the most leftist and dovish in that country. The aftermath has been political change:

The fact that the Hamas terrorists who invaded her kibbutz on October 7 wanted to murder everyone there came as no surprise to Irit Lahav, a peace activist from Nir Oz, where one in four residents were killed or kidnapped.

Even before the massacre, Lahav had entertained no illusions about Hamas. …

Yet she had always believed that Hamas’s actions were distinct from and unrepresentative of the wishes of the silent majority of Palestinian civil society — ordinary and decent people whom she imagined were concerned primarily with providing for their children and improving their own lives under difficult circumstances.

That belief was shattered on October 7, by what she says were “hundreds of civilians, including women and children, who followed” behind the terrorists, invading Israeli communities to celebrate and join in the pillaging, vandalization and destruction of Israeli communities.

“This wasn’t something I had factored in,” said Lahav. …

“After October 7, I realized I was wrong. Just as the Israeli government represents Israelis, Hamas represents the people of Gaza.”

Lahav, a travel agent who used to belong to a group of volunteers who would drive Palestinians in need of medical treatment from Gaza to hospitals in Israel, now believes that “all of the people of Gaza, all of them, hate us to a degree where they would murder babies and pillage our property with zero compunction.”

That’s a very extreme shift, and it’s not atypical. It’s profound. While I would say it’s not all the people of Gaza, I agree that it’s the vast majority. This is a very sorrowful realization, but it really is hard to deny at this point.

(4) On the Palestinian skill at propaganda:

(5) Hamas doesn’t know how many hostages are still alive. And although I think they know a great deal more than they’re saying, I actually do believe they don’t know about all of them. Here’s what they’re saying at the moment:

“Technically and practically, it is now impossible to know exactly who is still alive and who has been killed,” Naim stated, citing the impact of Israeli bombardments and the blockade on Gaza. …

Naim emphasized that the hostages are dispersed across various locations and groups, making it challenging to gather accurate information. He reiterated Hamas’s call for a ceasefire to facilitate the collection of data regarding the hostages.

Of course; it’s Israel’s fault that Hamas doesn’t know for sure about all of them. And of course Hamas would love to get this information and only needs a ceasefire so it can learn. What horse manure.

However, I do think they’re not sure where all the hostages are, and haven’t been sure from the start, because some of the kidnappers are freelancers.

In a 9-0 decision, SCOTUS does the right thing in the anti-Trump Colorado ballot case

The New Neo Posted on by

You can read the details of the SCOTUS decision here and here. From the latter:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states cannot disqualify former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the justices held that only Congress – and not the states – can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to disqualify individuals from holding office who had previously served in the federal or state government before the war but then supported the Confederacy, against candidates for federal offices.

All nine justices agreed that Colorado cannot remove Trump from the ballot. But four justices – Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a separate opinion and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a joint opinion – argued that their colleagues should have stopped there and not decided anything more.

The court’s decision comes just one day before Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory will hold their primary elections. Trump currently holds an overwhelming lead in the race for the Republican nomination.

That’s the gist of it. All nine justices ruled that Colorado was wrong to do this, and the only disagreement among the justices was on how far the Court needed to go in the ruling to decide under exactly what circumstances such a thing might be done. The majority stated only Congress could remove a candidate from a ballot pursuant to that part of the 14th amendment, which provides for doing so by a 2/3 vote.

This means a number of things. The first is that SCOTUS is not yet so far gone as many other courts in the United States are; the latter group includes the highest courts in the states of Colorado, Illinois, and Maine. All three states tried to do what is now forbidden by the Supreme Court. This demonstrates in bold fashion that many judges on the left are more than willing to overstep (they might say “fortify”) the law in an egregious fashion to obtain political ends. What’s more, I have little doubt there are quite a few other judges in other states who would be willing to do the same.

But why did judges in Colorado and the others do what they did, knowing SCOTUS would probably rule against them (although perhaps not unanimously)? Why hand Trump this victory? I have a theory, which goes like this: the judges and activists in Colorado, Illinois, and Maine didn’t bargain for a 9-0 SCOTUS decision. They thought the three liberal justices would rule in their favor. That wouldn’t constitute a majority, of course. But the split decision could be used in the campaign to argue that SCOTUS is awful as presently constituted and that a Democrat president and Democrat Senate in 2024 are needed to fix it by appointing and approving more leftist justices as some of the old ones retire.

And why did the three Democrat-appointed SCOTUS justices rule against Colorado, anyway? Legal principles might well be involved, although that’s not always in evidence with judges, to say the least. But I definitely think they realized that such an act by states, if allowed to stand, represents a future danger to candidates of both parties.

And what of the legal “experts” around the country who said it would be perfectly okay to do what Colorado and the others tried to do? Will they be discredited in the future? No.

The main value of the various lawfare cases against Trump is to show very clearly how dangerous the left has become, how willing to “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil” – the Devil in this case being Trump. The three liberal justices are saying – in this case anyway – that they believe that cutting down the law in such a way would mean that neither side could “stand upright in the winds that would blow” as a result.

NOTE: Here are some of Trump’s remarks: