#in an institution like the navy the Ideal Man and the Ideal Officer are similar

[compacflt]

have you ever considered writing more about icemav's respective childhoods? i'm always thinking about val kilmer saying in his memoir and documentary that he had obsessive dreams about ice's father who made him feel he had to prove himself as The Absolute Ideal Man and that the interactions he dreamt about between ice and his dad surely "imbued ice with greater fury" and his obsession with perfection made him arrogant.

yeah i go into ice’s childhood a little in my slider one shot since they’re right out of high school when they meet. But val and I took it in two completely different directions. Val’s ice has daddy issues and a poor relationship with his father (extrapolating from excerpt above); my ice has lack-of-daddy-issues and NO relationship with his father. No dad = no man to model himself on = overcompensating. When I said, in mavericks POV (debriefing), that ice “clearly doesn’t know how to talk to other men,” I meant that with my whole chest.

i appreciate Val’s insight, and I’m not sure when his memoir was published, but i think TG86 Ice is complicated DEEPLY by his plot-necessary accession to COMPACFLT in TGM22. At least for me, his end rank of O-10 casts him in a totally different light. It implies that what he wants is not necessarily to be “The Ideal Man,” he wants to be The Ideal OFFICER. And there’s a lot of data to back up that claim in Top Gun 86, too: he’s so gentle with Maverick, even when he’s trying to intimidate him (take the intonation of “I heard that about you. You like to work alone,” for example—is that how you’d say that if you were trying to piss someone off?); and there’s also the fact that two of the five times Ice talks directly to Maverick are explicitly about his safety practices and how they affect the safety of the TEAM (“Who was covering Cougar while you were showboating with this MiG?” / “I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.”). I said in a post last week that I don’t think Ice is a team player—but a good OFFICER doesn’t have to be a team player to make sure that the rules are followed and everyone stays safe. I think if Ice were trying to be The Ideal Man, he’d look a lot more like super-cool bad-ass rule-breaker MAVERICK (the buff daredevil male protagonist of a pro-military propaganda movie), who is canonically overcompensating for HIS relationship with his father/his incredibly unhealthy toxic masculinity.

So, yeah. that’s just how i see it. Again, idk when Val’s memoir was published—the writers of TG and TGM treat Ice as a character very differently, and both characterizations necessarily reflect on the other. I did not get the sense that TGM Ice was “imbued with fury,” for instance. So I think Ice trying to be/feeling pressured to be the best OFFICER makes more sense in light of TGM than Ice trying to be/feeling pressured to be the best MAN.

I feel very shrug about mav’s childhood. Kinda seems like he got over that in TG86. He got to save his team the way his dad did, AND lived to tell the tale. Yay. His development’s pretty much done for the franchise.

[lastsonlost]

I’m not sure if people have completely wrapped their minds around this, but we have an entire political party that has converted into an authoritarian—albeit Americanized version—style of politics that cares nothing about U.S. democracy or anyone who is not white.

With the exception of a few dissenting Republican senators who aren’t up for reelection until 2024 or 2026 (only Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is on the ballot in 2022) or are retiring, the GOP not only acquitted Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection that he clearly incited, but they told Republican voters that the lies Trump told them were true: The election was stolen and you have a right to be angry about that.

And it’s working.

During the impeachment trial last week, his defense lawyers reinforced those lies, and Republicans basically sat by and said nothing to counter them. They, in effect, are a party of turncoats. What makes their behavior so terrifying is that Democrats, who hold control of the Senate by only Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, are left with no choice but to negotiate with the very people whose leading members encouraged the coup and instigated supporters to undermine American institutions.

Pam Keith, a U.S. Navy veteran who ran out of Florida’s 18th Congressional District as the Democratic nominee, told The Root that Democrats should give up on working with Republicans as if they are operating in good faith and have shown that they will be as corrupt and obstructionist as Trump.

“What they’re saying is we don’t care that he broke the law,” said Keith, who also hosts the politics show But What It Really Means. “He’s our guy and we’re with our guy and there’s nothing you can say to make us turn on our guy. He’s above the law. He’s above the Constitution. He is above the well-being of the United States because he’s our mechanism to retaining power. That is the absolute definition of totalitarian dictatorship. We don’t care what he does—especially if what he does hurts you,” she said.

“You cannot live in a diverse country when the paradigm is oppressed or be oppressed. That’s what’s going on in South Sudan right now. There’s only one way: bloody conflict. The only way a country like ours survives is through mutual agreement to set a standard. That’s what the Constitution is. That’s what the rule of law is. If you don’t have that, then there’s no incentive to peacefully allow the other sides to exercise power.”

Kyle Bibby, national campaign manager at Common Defense and a former Marine Corps Infantry officer, told The Root that had a foreign entity engaged in an attack similar to the Jan. 6 coup attempt or rallied the support of the main culprit thereafter, the U.S. military would have responded with an offensive strike or at the minimum stiff economic penalties. But he added that the militias and Trump supporters who were there are ultimately not so much the issue as is the Republican Party that empowers them.

When asked about the violent insurrectionists, Bibby said, “If they were in Afghanistan, we would’ve hit them. Either a raid, drop a bomb on them, whatever it is.” He continued, “But the organizations that are funding this and who are backing this that are creating the political movement behind this are organizations like Fox News, Breitbart, One America News Network, and the Republican Party. If these organizations existed in another country, we would be sanctioning them. We would be seizing their assets for inciting terroristic threats against an American ally or against U.S. interests.”

Mind you, Republicans lead a meaningless investigation into the Benghazi attack, accusing Democrats of being soft on terrorism. They forced Susan Rice to withdraw her name from consideration for Obama’s secretary of state because of their unfounded claims that she did not react appropriately to the 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Libya. They drilled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in very bad faith, for hours over her management of the tragedy during a hearing in 2015. Meanwhile, when it comes to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republican Congress members called for the nation to move on and acquitted the man responsible for inciting it.

“The bottom line is that this kind of white nationalist violence was never taken seriously,” Pam Campos-Palma, director of Peace & Security at the Working Families Party, told The Root, “because it is inherent to the GOP, policing and national security institutions.”

In addition to terrorism against their fellow citizens and authoritarian behavior, Republicans also traffic in conspiracy theories. Newly sworn member of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) has become Trump’s loudest disseminator of conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election, according to CNN:

Greene also peddled in 2017 the debunked “Clinton Kill List” or “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy, which alleges the Clintons have assassinated their associates. She spread false conspiracies the Clintons were involved in sextrafficking and peddled the cruel conspiracy that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was not killed during an attempted robbery but murdered by Democratic actors.

CNN’s KFile previously reported that Greene in 2017 peddled the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, a debunked conspiracy alleging that Clinton and other Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, DC. In a blog post, she suggested that the White supremacist rally held in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, that killed one woman was an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.” Greene also endorsed 9/11 trutherism conspiracies and falsely claimed there was no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon, according to reporting from Media Matters.

She was stripped of her committee assignments, but the GOP leadership still supported her.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is blaming wind turbines and the Green New Deal for power outages across his state—which are lies. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes spent more than seven minutes debunking right-wing media lies about the outages, but Republicans in Congress aren’t doing much to quell them. In fact, they are spreading them. Much of why they are doing this is because they feel their power is being threatened and the only way to galvanize support for their causes is through lying and scaring people so intensely that they will see lies as truth. Those people are the ideal type of supporters Republicans can groom into ill-informed and lethal insurrectionists and white supremacists who will help you maintain power—even if it destroys the country, so long as enough of the “enemy”—Black folks and people of color—suffer and/or die as a result.

Malcolm Nance, a national security expert and author of the upcoming book, They Want to Kill Americans: The Armed Militias, The Fanatical Terrorists, and The Deranged Ideology of the Coming Trump Insurgency, told The Root that not only is the Republican Party behaving like a terror group, he predicted soon after the Charlottesville, Va., attacks in 2017 that Trump’s use of insurrectionist language—“stand down and stand by”—essentially would become a white supremacist call to arms akin to kind of terrorist extremism he saw as a military intelligence officer.

“If Trump wins, these unofficial paramilitaries, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the state militias, all these other groups, are essentially going to become semi-official Brownshirts [the original paramilitary of Germany’s Nazi Party] of the Trump campaign,” he said. “If Trump loses, these people are going to become the Iraq insurgents. They’re going to go underground. They’re going to be furious and, over time, with the Trump campaign leading as the political wing of this insurgency. With a president in exile, those people will resort to armed violence, political standoffs, and terrorism.”

He said the reason why these threats aren’t taken seriously is because white people do not take white terrorism seriously. He brought up a post-election appearance on Bill Maher where he was a guest with an expert from George Washington University who said his analysis was over the top.

“She’s all, ‘Tone it down. Kumbaya,’ and I’m telling her what I’ve seen for the last six months, which is, the alt-right has transformed itself into the paramilitary arm of the Trump campaign,” he said. “Now that Trump has lost that election, they are going to be the Iraq insurgents. The Republican Party will view themselves as Sinn Fein and the Republican base will view themselves as the white Catholics who think they’ve got to support the IRA.”

Nance added: “Black evidence is never believed until a white person confirms it.”

Democrats introduced a resolution calling for an investigation into white supremacy earlier this month. This week, the NAACP, civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) are suing Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and two white nationalist groups over the coup. While these are promising steps, Democrats have few options to get to the heart of white terrorism because their Republican colleagues in Congress benefit from it politically. We have to view the GOP as enemy combatants because, for years, they have proven that Democrats are theirs.

As far as Keith is concerned, Democrats have to go hard. That means going as far as pressuring any Democrat who supports the filibuster into changing their mind or face a primary challenge. The days of compromise are dead. Obama should have taught us that much. The GOP went to war with him for eight years and Democrats, along with much of America, suffered.

We don’t want to be as gangsta as they are,” Keith said of Democrats in Congress. “We still have this delusion of bipartisanship. There’s no fucking bipartisanship. Get off that ship. It does not work. It’s sinking. It’s done. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. It’s the fucking Titanic. It’s down in the water. Let it go.”

Update: 2/19/2012, 5:23 p.m. ET: A quote by Kyle Bibby was clarified to reflect that he meant that the insurrectionists would be bombed not the GOP.

[aion-rsa]

The Boys Season 2: What Is The Church of the Collective?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

The following contains spoilers for The Boys season 2 episode 7.

The ongoing presence and practice of politics within democratic societies should represent the pinnacle of human achievement: the fair and equitable ordering of communities, city states and nations; the voluntary outflow of power from the people to their chosen representatives. 

In reality, however, the true power rests not in the hands of the people, but in the gloved fists of major institutions: including corporations and religions, the balance of power between those two behemoths varying from country to country, all around the world, western or otherwise. Certainly in the U.S., no man or woman can ascend to the presidency without the backing of at least one of them, and Amazon Prime’s superb superhero satire The Boys understands this bleak state of affairs perfectly. While the show is at heart a reaction against the implausibly virtuous world of the comic-book superhero, it’s also a searing indictment of the intersecting worlds of corporate power, consumerism, and celebrity culture. 

Vought International – the business-suited big bads who keep the show’s superheroes in their pocket in order to fatten their own – is savagely adept at using its corporate power to flatter, curtail and manipulate both the populace and its own employees. It’s hard to keep God-like beings in check, but Vought management is smart and cynical enough to understand that even potentially planet-ending supes aren’t immune to the allure of celebrity. 

The Boys season 2 introduces the yang to U.S. corporatocracy’s yin with The Church of the Collective, a none-so-subtle parody of the Church of Scientology. The Deep (Chace Crawford) has been pulled slowly in by the tentacled embrace of the church to the point where we find him, in the penultimate episode of the second season, brainwashed into following its codes, without really understanding its purpose, aims or reach. We, the audience, are similarly in the dark, though the parallels to The Church of the Collective’s real-world counterpart, plus the narrative hints we’ve already been given, can help us imagine what this mysterious cult might have in store for the supes, ‘the boys’, and the world at large.

Cultish Context  – Scientology

The Church of Scientology was founded in 1953 by the pulp sci-fi writer and former Naval Officer L. Ron Hubbard. Throughout the early 1950s Hubbard popularized a branch of pseudoscience called Dianetics, which slowly evolved into the core tenets of his new religion, coincidentally not long after the therapeutic applications of Dianetics were uniformly rubbished by academics and psychologists. This became something of a trend with Hubbard. Don’t like my contribution to the field of modern psychology? Fine. I’ll use it to start my own religion. Don’t want me in the Navy? Fine. I’ll start my own navy (which he essentially did with Scientology’s naval-based fraternal order “Sea Org”). 

Scientology gets its hooks into prospective church members – usually the needy, the narcissistic, the unfulfilled, or the damaged – by promising them enlightenment through auditing. This process – part talk-therapy, part spiritual confession, part future blackmail – works by breaking down and analyzing a subject’s life (and past lives) in order to purge them of those traumatic, or unhelpful, memories (engrams) that may be negatively influencing their behavior in the present. While Scientology needs a large rank and file to sustain itself it’s also shrewd enough to target celebrities – it has a whole department dedicated to their pursuit – whose presence in the church guarantees money, media attention, and free, recruitment-based marketing. Scientology knows that it’s celebs and profits, not saints and prophets, who will rally crowds of the spiritually empty to their doors.     

The Church of the Collective uses similar strategies, both of which converge on The Deep at the start of the second season, being that he’s both a celebrity, and a damaged vessel. Things have never looked worse for the disgraced submariner: cast aside from The Seven; isolated; reviled; drunk; full of doubt and recrimination. He’s also the #metoo poster boy. 

Simply put: he’s easy prey. 

The Church offers him a way back into The Seven via a journey of self-and-bodily acceptance, ostensibly a combination of talk-therapy, interrogation and mind-altering drugs. The Deep is quickly broken down then built back up again. The Church even stage-manages him a wife (an allusion, perhaps, to a certain fighter-jet-flying, cocktail-mixing actor who’s long been Scientology’s most famous recruit) to repair the PR already done.

The Deep is recruited by Eagle the Archer (Langston Kerman), a washed-up, Travolta-esque supe who dangles the story of his own success and redemption before him like a hypnotic carrot. The Deep, in turn, brings A-Train (Jesse T. Usher) to the Collective, although A-Train’s entry into the fold is a little less wide-eyed and willing. He can see past the bullshit, and wants no part of it, but nevertheless is ensnared by the Church’s smooth-toned, immaculately-groomed leader, Alastair Adana (Goran Visnjic), who knows all about A-Train’s spiraling debt, drug abuse and heart condition, and implies that such knowledge could only be kept private for a price.

“The church knows all kinds of things,” he tells a suddenly cognizant A-Train, “But don’t worry. We also know how to be discreet… especially for our members.”

Adana is a thinly-veiled approximation of David Miscavige – Scientology’s current leader – in that he’s a man who projects a smiling, sophisticated veneer to the world, beneath which lies barely concealed torrents of ruthless cruelty and rage. Allegedly.  

When Eagle the Archer refuses the Church’s request to break off contact with his mother, the organization releases a damning and embarrassing sex tape to the media. Adana declares Eagle a toxic person (Scientology labels its enemies “suppressive persons” or “SPs”) with whom no-one in the Church should associate. The Deep doesn’t hesitate to cut his new friend out of his life, showing that even supes are susceptible to the power of suggestion and a little psychological surgery. A-Train observes all of this with quiet but troubled detachment, doubtless wondering how high a price he’ll have to pay for his past… and for how long.

What Is The Collective Up To?

So far it seems that the Church has been biding its time, waiting for an opportunity to infiltrate Vought, or The Seven. Each time a smaller fish has been sent to catch a bigger fish. There’s little reason to assume that this chain will stop with A-Train. Who’s next? The CEOs and head honchos of Vought itself? Black Noir – leveraged into the fold with the threat of revealing his crippling tree nut allergy to the general public? Maeve – if the Church gets its hands on the footage that was filmed onboard a certain doomed civilian airliner? And who, or what, is its ultimate target? 

Homelander?    

While the loony, laser-eyed lout regularly expresses a desire to unleash his unrestrained fury upon the helpless world, adoration and popularity really are important to him, which is probably the only reason he’s held himself back from going full superhero postal. Vought, however, can only fluff Homelander’s vanity insofar as it doesn’t upset the shareholders, whereas the Church of the Collective can offer him the one thing he truly craves: uncritical, unquestionable, unending Godhood and adulation. 

This wouldn’t be Homelander’s first religion rodeo. In season 1 Homelander bent Christianity to his, and Vought’s, will, claiming that superheroes like him – living miracles – had been chosen by God to carry out His plan for America: so why shouldn’t they join the War on Terror? The discovery that supes were created by Compound V rather than God destroyed that useful illusion, but perhaps The Church of the Collective represents a second chance to co-opt a religion. A marriage made in heaven this time.    

Stormfront is the only snag here, given that she already has her claws into Homelander and there’s bad blood between her and the Church. Once a member, she rejected it on the grounds that its inclusive membership criteria was an affront to her deeply cherished Nazi ideals of racial purity. If she was declared a toxic person by the Church, though, what was her punishment? Why is she allowed to operate with impunity? Is it possible that she’s secretly working for the Church – or at their command – to recruit Homelander, and the whole eugenics angle is part of their true and hidden design for the planet? 

Unlikely. It’s more likely we’re about to see The Church of the Collective try to take down their fallen angel. Or take over Vought. Or both.  Corporate might versus religious zealotry, with supes on both sides, and the boys trapped – as always – somewhere in the middle.

And if that’s the case, who should we put our money on?    

The Church of the Collective, like its real-life counterparts Scientology and NXIVM, apes the marketing methods, structure and language of the modern corporation, projecting the power and seriousness of the boardroom rather than the prattling of the pulpit. While these quasi-religious entities need money to survive and grow, and indeed mercilessly pursue it, money is but an adjunct to the real prize of power, which makes them at once more deadly and much harder to defeat (that isn’t to say that The Church of the Collective isn’t set on getting what The Church of Scientology already has: tax exempt status). 

You can bring down a business; it’s a little harder to snuff out faith, especially at its most zealous and jealously guarded. It’s the reason The Sparrows were able to take over Kings’ Landing in Game of Thrones. It’s the reason you’d rather meet a Ferengi in battle than a Klingon. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Whatever chaos the Collective is about to unleash on the world of The Boys, you can guarantee that it’s going to be messy. And a whole load of fun.    

The post The Boys Season 2: What Is The Church of the Collective? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[tajagnayouthclub-blog]

Hyper loop - Advanced mode of Transportation

Hyperloop brings airplane speeds to ground level, safely. Passengers and cargo capsules will hover through a network of low-pressure tubes between cities and transforming travel time from hours to minutes. What is Hyper loop? The Hyperloop concept as it is widely known was proposed by billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, CEO of the aerospace firm SpaceX and the guy behind Tesla (as well as, in the last year, a number of public gaffes). It’s a reaction to the California High-Speed Rail System currently under development, a bullet train Musk feels is lackluster (and which, it is alleged, will be one of the most expensive and slow-moving in the world). A one way trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the Hyperloop could take about 35 minutes. Musk’s Hyperloop consists of two massive tubes extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Pods carrying passengers would travel through the tubes at speeds topping out over 700 mph. Imagine the pneumatic tubes people in The Jetsons use to move around buildings, but on a much bigger scale. For propulsion, magnetic accelerators will be planted along the length of the tube, propelling the pods forward.  The tubes would house a low pressure environment, surrounding the pod with a cushion of air that permits the pod to move safely at such high speeds, like a puck gliding over an air hockey table. Given the tight quarters in the tube, pressure buildup in front of the pod could be a problem. The tube needs a system to keep air from building up in this way. Musk’s design recommends an air compressor on the front of the pod that will move air from the front to the tail, keeping it aloft and preventing pressure building up due to air displacement. A one way trip on the Hyperloop is projected to take about 35 minutes (for comparison, traveling the same distance by car takes roughly six hours). The Hyperloop concept operates by sending specially designed "capsules" or "pods" through a steel tube maintained at a partial vacuum. In Musk's original concept, each capsule floats on a 0.02–0.05 in (0.5–1.3 mm) layer of air provided under pressure to air-caster "skis", similar to how pucks are levitated above an air hockey table, while still allowing faster speeds than wheels can sustain. Hyperloop One's technology uses passive maglev for the same purpose. Linear induction motors located along the tube would accelerate and decelerate the capsule to the appropriate speed for each section of the tube route. With rolling resistance eliminated and air resistance greatly reduced, the capsules can glide for the bulk of the journey. In Musk's original Hyperloop concept, an electrically driven inlet fan and axial compressor would be placed at the nose of the capsule to "actively transfer high-pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel", resolving the problem of air pressure building in front of the vehicle, slowing it down. A fraction of the air is shunted to the skis for additional pressure, augmenting that gain passively from lift due to their shape. Hyperloop One's system does away with the compressor. In the alpha-level concept, passenger-only pods are to be 7 ft 4 in (2.23 m) in diameter and projected to reach a top speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h) to maintain aerodynamic efficiency.  The design proposes passengers experience a maximum inertial acceleration of 0.5 g, about 2 or 3 times that of a commercial airliner on takeoff and landing.

History The general idea of trains or other transportation traveling through evacuated tubes dates back more than a century, although the atmospheric railway was never a commercial success. Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about a concept for a "fifth mode of transport", calling it the Hyperloop, in July 2012 at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California. This hypothetical high-speed mode of transportation would have the following characteristics: immunity to weather, collision free, twice the speed of a plane, low power consumption, and energy storage for 24-hour operations. The name Hyperloop was chosen because it would go in a loop. Musk envisions the more advanced versions will be able to go at hypersonic speed. In May 2013, Musk likened the Hyperloop to a "cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table". From late 2012 until August 2013, a group of engineers from both Tesla and SpaceX worked on the conceptual modeling of Hyperloop. An early system design was published in the Tesla and SpaceX blogs which describes one potential design, function, pathway, and cost of a hyperloop system. According to the alpha design, pods would accelerate to cruising speed gradually using a linear electric motor and glide above their track on air bearings through tubes above ground on columns or below ground in tunnels to avoid the dangers of grade crossings. An ideal hyperloop system will be more energy-efficient, quiet, and autonomous than existing modes of mass transit. Musk has also invited feedback to "see if the people can find ways to improve it". The Hyperloop Alpha was released as an open source design. The word mark "HYPERLOOP", applicable to "high-speed transportation of goods in tubes" was issued to SpaceX on April 4, 2017. In June 2015, SpaceX announced that it would build a 1-mile-long (1.6 km) test track to be located next to SpaceX's Hawthorne facility. The track would be used to test pod designs supplied by third parties in the competition. By November 2015, with several commercial companies and dozens of student teams pursuing the development of Hyperloop technologies, the Wall Street Journal asserted that "The Hyperloop Movement", as some of its unaffiliated members refer to themselves, is officially bigger than the man who started it." The MIT Hyperloop team developed the first Hyperloop pod prototype, which they unveiled at the MIT Museum on May 13, 2016. Their design uses electrodynamic suspension for levitating and eddy current braking. On January 29, 2017, approximately one year after phase one of the Hyperloop pod competition, the MIT Hyperloop pod demonstrated the first ever low-pressure Hyperloop run in the world. Within this first competition the Delft University team from the Netherlands achieved the highest overall competition score. The awards for the "fastest pod" and the "best performance in flight" were won by the team TUM Hyperloop (formerly known as WARR Hyperloop) from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) placed third overall in the competition, judged by SpaceX engineers. The second Hyperloop pod competition took place from August 25–27, 2017. The only judging criteria being top speed provided it is followed by successful deceleration. TUM Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich won the competition by reaching a top speed of 324 km/h (201 mph) and therefore breaking the previous record of 310 km/h for hyperloop prototypes set by Hyperloop One.   Hyper loop and India The Indian State of Maharashtra announced their intent to build a hyperloop route between Mumbai and Pune, beginning with an operational demonstration track. THE MUMBAI-PUNE PROJECT MOVES FORWARD Working with our public and private partners, Virgin Hyperloop One is on track to complete the feasibility study for the Phase I demonstration track of the Mumbai-Pune project. The full project is proposing to link Central Pune, the Navi Mumbai International Airport and Central Mumbai – with a potential commute time of 25 minutes. Based on our ongoing analysis, the Mumbai-Pune route is proving to be the strongest economic case that we have seen to-date.

Building upon this progress, VHO welcomed the Chief Minister of Maharashtra Fadnavis, and representatives from the State Government including key members of the Chief Minister’s Office and Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA) chief Kiran Gitte, project lead on the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop project, at our DevLoop test site to inspect our technology. The Chief Minister and other esteemed guests were able to witness a full-scale hyperloop in action for a live demonstration test. It was an honor to host the Chief Minister, demonstrating a vote of confidence as we advance into the second half of our ongoing feasibility study and progress in accordance with the Framework Agreement signed in February. Speaking with our Chairman Richard Branson, the Chief Minister confirmed, “This was a very fruitful discussion and we should be able to start moving on this project very fast.”

( Image source : Virgin hyper loop one ) HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY WITHIN INDIA’S TRANSPORT ECOSYSTEM Progress on the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop project is indicative of a larger trend – a wave of visionary policy leadership when it comes to supporting new technologies and innovation in India’s transport ecosystem. NITI Aayog’s Tech Vision 2022 document, the work of the government technology think tank Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), and the Centres of Excellence at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have been very supportive of new technologies. In addition, the Railways Ministry ‘Mission 350 Plus’ plan as well as work on maglev technologies and the HSR Diamond Quadrilateral project are indicative of how the central government is embracing new rail technologies. At a state level, Maharashtra’s push for a Mumbai-Pune hyperloop system is a clear endorsement for innovation at a regional level, with accompanying interest from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as well. India has multiple factors that make it an ideal country for a hyperloop system: infrastructure needs due to rising demand, superior engineering talent, low-cost manufacturing base, and strong political support and favourable regulatory environment. These factors ensure that the hyperloop, when built and tested commercially, will be affordable (for riders), scalable and low-cost (to build and operate). The hyperloop system’s appeal for India comes from its complementarity with existing transport technologies. Hyperloop systems, with its point-to-point transport proposition, can be built to inter-connect with existing High-Speed Rail (HSR) or Metro projects. There is a conscious effort to build such adjacencies into the design of the first inter-city hyperloop system in India, and this is reflected in the location of the proposed stations and the track alignment. Come 2025, a student from Ahmedabad should be able to reach Pune, by taking the Ahmedabad-Mumbai Bullet Train and then switch over to the 25-minute hyperloop ride to Pune, just as present metro commuters switch from one metro line to another in a city. Such a multi-modal transport system between India’s bustling cities will have significant productivity implications for the country. This system becomes yet more powerful when replicated across different regional clusters in other parts of India, or linked seamlessly with the Modi Government’s HSR Diamond Quadrilateral Project – and one can see the emergence of Indian mega-economic regions in a manner that rivals China’s super-city clusters plan. Once proven for commercial viability, the hyperloop system can be scaled to different city-pairs in India. Earlier estimates of five viable routes between different Indian cities had evaluated a 55 minutes commute for a Delhi-Jaipur-Indore-Mumbai system, 50 minutes for a Mumbai-Bangalore-Chennai commute, 41 minutes for a Bangalore-Thiruvananthapuram commute and 20 minutes for a Bangalore-Chennai commute on the hyperloop system. View this from a multi-modal transport perspective and the real benefits of a system like this come through – hyperloop technology adoption is a real enabler for India to leap-frog to a higher trajectory of growth, akin to the role that mobile phones have played earlier in terms of technology adoption as well as economic growth. Hyper loop explained   How Virgin hyper loop one's system becomes reality ?   Read the full article

[writing-creative-fiction]

Two ‘expeditions’ of my own in recent weeks have taken me out of the unbearabe heat of an unusually searing summer sun into the cool, air-conditioned enclaves of, first London’s National Portrait Gallery and secondly, Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum.

The Portraits

In the Victorian Gallery of the Portrait Gallery, among many representations of  influential men and women of that era, I discovered the following remarkably similar portraits by Stephen Pearce (1819-1904): the one on the left is of Sir Robert McClure R.N. (1807-1873); the one on the right is of Sir Francis Leopold McClintock R.N. (1819-1907).

McClure

McClintock

McClure joined the Royal Navy in 1824, made his first Arctic voyage in 1836-37, and played a prominent role in the search for the lost Franklin expedition of 1845. He was rewarded by Parliament for being the first to traverse the elusive and much sort after North West Passage – albeit he did so partly on foot – in 1854, and survived a Court Martial for abandoning his ships to serve in China and ultimately be promoted to Vice-Admiral in 1873.

McClintock joined the Royal Navy in 1831 and made his first Arctic voyage in 1848, just as concerns for the fate of the 1845 expedition were beginning to be raised. He commanded the 1857-59 expedition that discovered the Victory Point Record, among other relics and artefacts, that eventually proved the loss of Franklin and his entire crew of 129 men. Knighted in 1860, McClintock continued to command Royal Navy voyages until his retirement in 1884.

Also of interest in relation to this project, are these plaster medallions – created by Bernard Smith (1820-1885) – of (on the left) Sir John Richardson R.N. (1787-1865) and (on the right) Sir James Clark Ross R.N. (1800-1862).

Richardson had accompanied Sir John Franklin on two Arctic voyages, in 1819 and 1825, and in 1847 he led the first of the expeditions sent in search of the misssing 1845 expedition. Richardson also wrote a magnificent biographical entry on Franklin for the eighth volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in February 1856, and it was reading this tribute that inspired Charles Dickens to say (in a letter to John Forster, dated March 1856)

I think Richardson’s manly friendship and love of Franklin, one of the noblest things I ever knew in my life. It makes ones heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy.

(Dickens (vol 8), 1993, p. 66)

Dickens drew on this ‘manly friendship and love’ to develop the characters of Richard Wardour and Frank Aldersley when working with Wilkie Collins on their Arctic drama The Frozen Deep (see Brannon, 1966) and subsequently when creating the character of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.

But I digress onto a pet subject! Sir James Clark Ross R.N.  – represented by the right-hand medallion above – is credited with discovering Magnetic North in 1831, commanded an expedition to the Antarctic in 1839-43, and led an Arctic expedition in search of Franklin in 1848-49. His uncle, John Ross, was also an Arctic explorer but fell out of favour with the Admiralty after turning-back on an expedition because he had seen a ‘mountain range’ that it later transpired was an hallucination caused by weather conditions.

This portrait of Sir Edwin Landseer also caught my eye, especially as I had just had lunch in Trafalgar Square watching a group of young Italian tourists clambering all over the finished lions. Here they are shown alongside their designer and creator in his workshop. Landseer, of course, was renowned from an early age for his represenations of wildlife and animals, among which is his only Arctic painting ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, which I featured in my first blog post in November 2017.

The Songs

At the National Maritime Museum, at an event organised in partnership with another of my favourite institutions The English Folk Dance and Song Society, I discovered a little of the history and lyrics of songs associated with Dr. John Rae, the Orkney-born Arctic explorer and Hudson’s Bay Company Factor who caused outrage in mid-century Victorian England by implying that the men of the lost Franklin expedition may have resorted to cannibalism. He had strong evidence to prove this, and science has more recently confirmed his findings, but he was derided and disbelieved in his own time and denied the honours and recognition that he deserved – again I digress to a favourite pet subject, and shall post more about this I suspect during, and/or following, my visit to Rae’s homeland in October this year.

As for the songs, there was one I was already familiar with as it is still sung regularly in Folk Clubs and at other traditional music sessions around the UK today. Called Lady Franklin’s Lament it has, like most songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, many different versions of varying length.  Waltz and Engle, writing in 2015, state that “Broadside versions [of this ballad] probably date from the period 1850-1853”.

The version we learnt at the workshop was entitled Lady Franklin’s Lament for her Husband.  Longer than the commonly sung, more recent, versions it was sourced through both the Glasgow and Edinburgh Broadside Ballad Collections by the workshop’s co-ordinator, Orkney folk singer Aimee Leonard. In common with all versions, however, it tells the tale of a sailor dreaming that he’s heard “a female” who “can take no rest” weeping aloud that

Ten thousand pounds would I freely give, To say on earth that my husband do live.

The female is, of course, Franklin’s wife, Jane, who did offer rewards of £2000 and £3000 in March 1848 and March 1849 respectively, but not of as much as £10,000; maybe there is some poetic licence here. Nevertheless, Lady Franklin’s rewards were no doubt an incentive that preyed on the mind of many a poor sailor searching the Arctic seas for the lost expedition, and their exaggeration of the amount – or their conflation of it with larger rewards offered by the Government – is understandable.

The second song, Lament for Francis Crozier, was written in 2001 by Irish singer, mountaineer and polar explorer Frank Nugent whilst sailing near King William Island in a ship called the Northabout.  Francis Crozier had met, and fallen in love with, Franklin’s wife’s niece, Sophia Cracroft, when his ships called at Van Diemen’s Land (VDL; renamed Tasmania in 1856) during a voyage to Antarctica in the 1830s. Franklin was then Governer of VDL and entertained the Officers of the ships on which Crozier was serving – coincidentally, these were the same two ships, The Erebus and The Terror, on which Franklin sailed to the Arctic in 1845 with Crozier as his second-in-command. Crozier saw this voyage as his great chance to impress Sophia and thus win her heart, and her hand in marriage.  Sadly, as we know, this was not to be, and indeed it is likely that it never could have been.  Instead, Crozier was forced to take command of the expedition when Franklin died in 1847 (we know this because of the Victory Point Record I mentioned earlier) and he himself perished, we know not how, along with all the men under his command. As the song concludes:

Oh, what hardship and pain, did your poor seamen suffer … … you starved on the banks of Back’s Great Fish River The [North West] Passage it led you to heaven’s green shore.

Song 3 came from a collection of Songs of the North printed on board HMS Assistance during her 1850-51 expedition in search of Franklin. One of the ways in which crews entertained themselves during long lingering months stuck amid Arctic ice was to put on theatre shows and HMS Assistance was, at this time, home to The Royal Arctic Theatre – just as their compatriots aboard HMS Resolute in 1850-51 were home to the periodical newspaper The Illustrated Arctic News, a parody of London’s Illustrated London News, established in 1842.

Song 3, then, was sung at the closing of The Royal Arctic Theatre on 4th March 1851 by Lieutenant R.D.Aldrich R.N. and it opens with a plea to:

Come cheer up my lads! the season draws near When all wish to strive, nor care where they steer, …

whilst its chorus avows that:

Our hearts are all stout, and our motto shall be, Ready! aye ready! Ready! aye ready! To rescue our comrades from dire misery.

Dire misery indeed! But admirable sentiments with which to reinvigorate cold, hungry men suffering a multitude of minor ailments after a winter stuck in Arctic ice that was now abating and allowing their ships to move on.

Conclusions

These songs and portraits tell us much of the character and spirit of the men who ventured, literally, to the ends of the earth in order to advance geographic and scientific knowledge. They represent in words and pictures the images that their subjects and masters wanted the public to hear and see; images of men who could conquer the bleak wilderness of the Arctic and remain true to the gentlemanly ideals of the British establishment; images a nation’s ability to withstand everything the world could throw at it; images, ultimately, of arrogance and intransigence in the face of all circumstance.

  Works Cited

Brannan, Robert Louis, Under the Management of Mr Charles Dickens: His production of The Frozen Deep. New York: Cornell University Press, 1966

Dickens (vol 8), Charles, The Letters of Charles Dickens; Volume 8. 1856-1858, Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Waltz, R. B., & Engle, D. G. (2015). Lady Franklin’s Lament (The Sailor’s Dream) [Laws K9] – part 01. Retrieved May 28, 2016, from http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/ballads/LK09.html

    Songs and Portraits Two 'expeditions' of my own in recent weeks have taken me out of the unbearabe heat of an unusually searing summer sun into the cool, air-conditioned enclaves of, first London's…

[alli-howard]

My Thoughts on Kaepernick’s Protest

I want to start by saying that I am one of the worst people to write a blog post about Colin Kaepernick’s protest. I am a white woman with no immediate family members in the police force or military. Please forgive my ignorance if I miss something that is immediately apparent to you as a result of your ties to a minority group, the police, or the armed forces.

I was, however, raised with a deep appreciation for the military and police. When I was growing up, my dad worked with the police frequently, took me to the 60th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor and D-Day, and I often woke up on a Saturday morning to the sound of gunfire as yet another WWII movie was playing in the living room. As far as race is concerned, I only became aware of the role that race plays in my life and in society about five years ago. So again, please forgive my ignorance – I am new to this.

From what I have observed, there are three factors affecting racial tension in America today: explicit racism, unconscious bias, and systemic racism. Explicit racism, as we saw in Charlottesville, appears to be shunned by most reasonable people. If you’re interested, you can read my thoughts about it here. Unconscious bias is the idea that our brains react unintentionally to groups of people differently, regardless of our values. The implications of these biases are less pressing for me, as you might expect, than for a police officer. You can assess your own biases here or read my thoughts on the topic here. It seems to me that the focus of Kaepernick’s protest is in response to the third category. If you are not already familiar with the term, systemic racism is the existence of institutional policies, practices, and structures that place minority groups at a disadvantage. While explicit racism is easy to spot and unconscious bias is statistically proven, many Americans do not believe that systemic racism occurs at all. So my first question for all of you is: “Does systemic racism exist?” We’ll come back to this.

As you probably know, last year Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem and said that it was in silent protest of the oppression of African Americans in the US, specifically relating to police brutality. This protest was interesting to me, and caused me to ask a lot of questions. 

First of all, why do some perceive the National Anthem to be offensive? What I learned was that the third line in the National Anthem reads: "No refuge could save the hireling and the slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave." I recently learned that Jackie Robinson, who is now glorified, wrote in his autobiography: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.”

Secondly, I rhetorically asked myself, is this the best means of protest? Refusing to stand for the National Anthem and honor the American flag is, clearly, a bold and provocative statement. As I mulled over that question, a Facebook friend posted something similar to this:

*Black people riot against oppression* White reaction: No, be more peaceful. *Black people march in the streets* White reaction: No, like, quiet peaceful. *Black people don't stand for the pledge* White reaction: This is still not peaceful enough; we meant just stop talking about it.

Obviously, this is a generalization but it effectively captures much of what I have observed. Furthermore, it would be an appropriate response if systemic racism does not exist.

Ironically, that second question led me to another question. If this is not an appropriate way to protest, what would be? Our freedom to kneel during the National Anthem is one of the things that differentiates us from countries like North Korea or Nazi Germany. In my opinion, we would not be better off with a country full of people forced to share homogeneous ideas.

James Baldwin once stated: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Progress is always hard-fought, and I believe that criticizing a societal ill is one of the most patriotic things a person can do. Again, this is only relevant if systemic racism exists.

Third, I wondered, what would a man who makes millions of dollars a year know about oppression? What I learned was that money cannot isolate a person from experiencing systemic racism. While money does provide additional opportunities and privileges, it is not an inoculant. Systemic racism (if it exists) affects education, employment, housing, and criminal justice, among other things. Making millions of dollars will inevitably shelter a person from some, but certainly not all of these things.

What I love about America is that Kaepernick is as free to kneel as I am to write and Tomi Lahren is to voice her opinions. However, I agree with Ray Dalio when he says, "The greatest tragedy of mankind comes from the inability of people to have thoughtful disagreements to find out what is true." Regardless of how you feel about Kaepernick’s protest, it clearly did get us talking. I hope that it also causes us to listen more.

My understanding is that this protest was intended to be a way to use a platform to protest social injustice. The athletes who were protesting clearly stated that they did not intend to disrespect veterans or the military. With that being said, I like to believe that American military personnel serve their country out of concern for American lives more than symbols of American ideals. But on the flip side, intent isn’t what matters most in public discourse – action is. The platform that was chosen has proven to be incendiary and offensive to many.

While preparing for this post, I reached out to people to learn their perspectives and a few ideas resurfaced repeatedly. Here is what I heard:

This protest has caused more division than unity. This is true. The point of a protest is to disrupt our daily lives enough to bring our attention to an issue.

Are these players doing this work off the field, or is this merely symbolism? I can’t answer for every person who has kneeled, but it does appear that Kaepernick has stepped up his community engagement efforts through his foundation. It is worth noting, though, that these men are athletes – not social justice professionals. Using their platform to advance these issues is already (clearly) making an impact.

Kneeling is disrespectful. This is actually not true. There is a reason that men kneel when they propose to their girlfriends, and many people still kneel when they pray (who could forget Tim Tebow kneeling on the football field, just a few years ago?). Kneeling is associated with reverence. Additionally, Kaepernick initially sat for the National Anthem, but after discussing the issue with a Navy Seal he decided that kneeling would be more respectful.

Sports are meant to be a diversion. This is a point that resonates with me. Sometimes life is hard and we just want an outlet to relax and enjoy ourselves. For me, football and basketball often provide that. However, athletes are just as human as we are and their personal and professional lives intersect and overlap. I am not surprised that an athlete might choose the platform afforded to them by their professional life to express a conflict that they face in their personal life.

We shouldn’t listen to Kaepernick because he wore pig socks and a Castro shirt. I agree that these actions were irresponsible and appear to discredit him, but the work that he has started off the field through his foundation makes me think that he has a sincere desire to learn, refine his message, and improve.

The NFL shouldn’t allow this kind of protest. Sure, the NFL doesn’t have to tolerate actions that are inconsistent with their values and they could fire every player who chooses not to stand for the National Anthem if they wanted to. However, I think it is laughable to suddenly pretend that the NFL has a moral compass. Time and time again we have seen that the NFL’s motivating factor in decision-making is money, as evidenced by the NFL’s (later reversed) decision to accept over $700,000 from the government in displays of “paid patriotism.”

It’s their right to protest, but there are better ways to get their message across. I think this is probably true. I haven’t, though, thought of any better ways yet – nor is it really my place to tell someone how to express their opinion. However, I am concerned that if each one of us keeps voicing our own opinions into echo chambers without considering another side’s perspective, progress will be unlikely. A collaborative and collective effort is usually necessary for societal improvement.

With all of that being said, none of this matters at all if systemic racism does not exist. So does it? Unfortunately, a conclusive answer to that question is outside the scope of this post, but I would like to challenge you to seek out an answer to that question that lies outside of your personal experience. My opinion, based on observation, anecdotal evidence from friends, listening to social justice professionals, and reading on the topic is that it does. If you’re interested, Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow are great resources to help you learn more about this topic.

As a side note, I would like to take a moment to address my Christian readers. Paul says in Philippians that our citizenship is in Heaven. Jesus says that the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind. The second is to love our neighbors as ourselves. As a result, I think that it is inconsistent with Biblical values to place more worth on a flag or anthem than our neighbors (though I understand that the flag is extremely significant for service men and women and their families). If a majority of a minority group of our neighbors is telling us that there is a problem, I think it is only right that we listen to them with empathy and compassion rather than insisting that there is not a problem based on our own experience. Additionally, the Bible never calls us to be patriotic, but rather to live as aliens and strangers in the world knowing that Heaven is our true home.

Lastly, James 1:19 says that we are to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. I can honestly say that this blog post represents my genuine attempt to do all of those things. I hope that it is received with the sincerity that I intended, and that if you chose to respond you will keep that verse in mind. Thank you for reading.

Side note: For the sake of this post, I was only able to address Kaepernick’s initial protest. I wish I could have also touched on the President’s remarks and the reaction that they caused, but that was outside of the scope of this post. 

Thank you to the following people for contributing resources and/or opinions as I wrote this blog: Josh, Austin, Stephanie, Erin, Ben, Kimberly, George, Darren, Ryan, Nicki, Oscar, Jake, Susan, Katie, Jake, Jourdan, Mitchell, Jeffrey, Adina, Bryn, Kenny, Roberto, Carrie, and Julie.