Bone and Sinew

The Sunday Night Reader for 9/4/22

Sep 04, 2022

Bone and Sinew

Here’s what Senator Robert Wagner — who wrote the National Labor Relations Act and helped push the Social Security Act through — wrote in 1937:

“[T]he struggle for a voice in industry through the processes of collective bargaining is at the heart of the struggle for the preservation of political as well as economic democracy in America. Let men become the servile pawns of their masters in the factories of the land and there will be destroyed the bone and sinew of resistance to political dictatorship.

Fascism begins in industry, not in government. Let men know the dignity of freedom and self-expression in their daily lives, and they will never bow to tyranny in any quarter of their national life.”

Someone back in the day demanded your rights for you. Someone put their life on the line, went months without pay, or risked their livelihood. My dad was UMWA, my mom AFT, one grandpa was UMWA, and the other was grandpa IBEW. My great grandpa started sorting rock at nine years old and helped organize the UMWA in Southern Illinois 100 years ago.

I get to sit and write all day because they worked dangerous, under-appreciated jobs that required constant battles for safety, fair treatment, and respect. The very least I can do is fight for everyone else who doesn’t yet have the same.

Always Read the Obits

It’s amazing the history we (or at least I) forget, even though I was around to watch it happen. Take this bit from the New York Times’ obituary for Mikhail Gorbachev.

“On Sunday, Aug. 18, 1991, Mr. Gorbachev was on vacation in Foros, a Black Sea resort area on the Crimean Peninsula. He was putting the finishing touches on a major speech about a new union treaty that would transfer considerable power from the Kremlin to the nation’s 15 republics, which were to begin signing the document on Tuesday. Then, without warning, a delegation of Kremlin hard-liners from the military and the K.G.B. arrived at the door of his dacha, having cut off his phones. They demanded that he declare a state of emergency and resign.

What unfolded was a chain of events that some called the three days that shook the world. At 6 a.m. Monday, the official news agency Tass announced that Mr. Gorbachev had been ousted, citing his ‘inability for health reasons’ to perform his duties. Vice President Gennadi I. Yanayev took power under a new entity, the State Emergency Committee.

An hour later, an emergency decree was announced suspending political parties and closing the opposition press. Mr. Gorbachev’s whereabouts was unknown. Boris N. Yeltsin, president of what was now called the Russian federated republic, called the takeover a coup d’état.

Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin had often been at odds, but now Mr. Yeltsin had become his most important — and most visible — ally. By 11 a.m. Soviet troops and tanks had surrounded the government building known as the White House, and by early afternoon hundreds of demonstrators had surrounded the tanks.

Mr. Yeltsin joined them. Climbing atop a T-72 tank, megaphone in hand, he called for a general strike. Alongside him was Gen. Konstantin Kobets, defense minister of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, who ordered the armed forces to stand down…The next day Mr. Yeltsin demanded to see Mr. Gorbachev and insisted that foreign doctors examine him, and crowds outside the Russian Parliament grew to 150,000.

On Wednesday, with the tide turning against the hard-liners, Soviet troops withdrew from the center of Moscow, and the coup leaders fled. On Thursday, Mr. Gorbachev returned to Moscow to reassert control.” Read more.

Tiger Team RAMA

Sticking with the Times, here’s an interesting story on “NASA Tiger Team RAMA,” which is tasked with figuring out how to build a cleanroom clean enough to keep returned Martian rocks from contaminating Earth and to keep us from contaminating the rocks.

“Cleanrooms require positive air pressure, which means the pressure inside is higher than that outside. Air always flows, then, from the inside to the outside — from higher pressure to lower pressure. It’s just what air does, because physics. Particles are forced out, but do not force their way in.

High-containment labs, though, work the opposite way. They maintain negative air pressure, with lower pressure inside their walls than outside. Particles can waft in, but they cannot sneak out.

NASA needs both positive-pressure space to keep the samples clean and negative-pressure space to keep the samples contained. It is hard to integrate those conditions into the same physical space. It may require creative, concentric structures and sophisticated ventilation systems. No lab on Earth has done it at the scale Mars Sample Return requires because no lab has ever needed to. ‘We’re not surprised that this doesn’t exist,’ Dr. [Andrea Harrington, the Mars sample curator for NASA,] said.

The best Tiger Team RAMA could do was to see how clean and contained facilities had kept themselves that way and to hope to determine how to best combine them.” Read more.