Last Gasp: The Sunday Night Reader for 10/3/21
Footprints in the White Sands
Start and keep going
A 17-year-old student was targeted and murdered this week on one of the busiest streets in town. It was the 12th homicide of the year in Champaign and the 200th confirmed shooting incident. I don’t believe increased policing solves this problem; we already spend incredible amounts of money on various local, state, and federal law enforcement. This is where we are, this is where we have been for a long time, and we too often flirt with marshal law as it is. I don’t believe frontier justice solves this; childish “This property protected by Smith & Wesson” fantasies of guys protecting their kin and things are just that. Fantasies. I believe it’s their right to own those guns, but, statistically, they accidently kill their kin or intentionally kill themselves at much higher rates than they ever get to be a hero.
I believe that only massive, long-term investments in education, support, and infrastructure in historically marginalized communities solve this violence. It’s a difficult position to take — egg-headed, pigeon-holed as weak and, god forbid, unmasculine, and politically unpalatable.
The solution is multigenerational, and it’s stymied again and again. Most of us aren’t cut out to be president or even mayor or chief of police. We can’t move mountains.
In the face of that, what are we to do? We act in our own small ways. Pick something new and do it. Double down on out best professional and personal impulses. Maybe we can’t change human nature or American politics. But we can each change something right here in front of us. Start and keep going.
Footprints push back human arrival in Americas by thousands of years
I take real happiness in the fact that we know that a group of teenagers and kids 23,000 years ago was playing around a lake, just like they would today. And I take real hope in the fact that we’re smart enough to puzzle out something so distant. From Maya Wei-Haas’ article in National Geographic:
“The footprints look like they were left behind just moments ago by a barefoot visitor to New Mexico's White Sands National Park, the amblings of a slightly flat-footed teen, each toe and heel impression crisply defined by a fine ridge of sand…These prints are among the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas, marking the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that challenges when and how people first ventured into this unexplored land.
According to a paper published today in the journal Science, the footprints were pressed into the mud near an ancient lake at White Sands between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, a time when many scientists think that massive ice sheets walled off human passage into North America…
Pinning down exactly when the track-makers pressed their toes into the mud at White Sands, however, has proven challenging, says study author Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemouth University in England. The park’s surfaces are a palimpsest of crisscrossing trackways that could have been created in separate events thousands of years apart. To securely date a print, researchers must find layers of seeds that can be dated using radiocarbon analysis, below and above layers of footprints. This way scientists can determine the earliest and latest moments in time the horizon of prints were laid down. But season after season, their search for a site with both seeds and footprints was unsuccessful.
Then came the fateful day in September 2019 when Bustos and Bennett returned to a bluff in the park they had visited more than a dozen times before. They knew the site harbored ancient seed deposits, but they hadn't yet found human footprints. On this day, however, wind had uncovered a set of unmistakably human prints that ended in a mound of sand. Scraping off the upper sandy layer revealed the ghostly outlines of a buried track.
‘At that point, we said Bingo, we’ve got it,’ Bennett recalls.
A team of archaeologists, geologists, dating experts, a geophysicist, and a data scientist assembled to study the site, which spans an area roughly the size a half basketball court, with a battery of tests. Excavation revealed eight separate horizons of footprints, which contained 61 human tracks left by up to 16 people, mostly teens and children. Multiple track layers were bookended above and below by layers of sediment containing seeds from the Ruppia grass.” Read more.
The ‘big lie,’ loyalty to Trump – and the defense of democracy
Don’t wait for people to come to their senses, because they aren’t. By Peter Grier and Dwight Weingarten in the Christian Science Monitor:
“For Republican political candidates across the country, subscribing to aspects of Mr. Trump’s false stolen-election claim has become an important litmus test. Many grassroots GOP voters demand it. A recent CNN poll found that 78% of Republicans do not believe that Mr. Biden won the election. And 54% believe there is solid evidence of this, though no such evidence exists. Some 59% of GOP voters say that believing the election was stolen is an important part of their own partisan identity…
[T]he United States is experiencing is a crisis of governance, an attempt to turn previously accepted methods for determining who runs America into new battlegrounds, said speakers at a conference on election subversion held last week by the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California Irvine School of Law. Partisan ‘audits,’ spurious fraud charges, frivolous lawsuits — they all layer a new politicized process over normal methods of counting votes and certifying elections, said Bob Bauer, a New York University law professor and former Obama campaign general counsel…
Overall, the U.S. is facing perhaps a 30% chance that the country will experience a breakdown of democracy by 2024, said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of ‘Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.’
‘The imperative is the defense of democracy over all else,’ Professor Diamond said.” Read more.
Say it plain…
