February 2015 archive

En Español-

Los Indignados to Podemos: The Making of a Party (1/2)

Los Indignados to Podemos, The Making of a Party (2/2)

Loretta Lynch faces delayed vote over confirmation

By Seung Min Kim, Politico

2/12/15 12:20 PM EST

“There’s so many similarities between the Lynch nomination and the Carter nomination,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of Lynch’s biggest boosters. “And to move Carter so quickly and to slow down Lynch is very troublesome, and I think they ought to move her ASAP.”

One reason for the lag on Lynch is that after Obama nominated her in November, Senate Democrats agreed to postpone her confirmation into the new Republican-led chamber at the GOP’s request. Democrats meant it as a gesture of goodwill, and they also believed Lynch would be confirmed in either a Democratic- or GOP-controlled Senate.

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Under the committee’s rules, any senator can ask for business, such as consideration of a nominee, to be held over for one week – a practice that doesn’t have to be deployed but has become routine. Lynch is officially on the agenda for Thursday, but Republicans have already said she’ll be held over, which means a vote will be delayed until after the recess. So the next opportunity for a committee vote will be Feb. 26.

Loretta Lynch is Condoleeza Rice With A Law Degree

by Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report

Wed, 02/11/2015 – 16:13

Media and political elites singled out Dr. Martin Luther King as the favored face of what they called the civil rights movement before his 30th birthday. They awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 36, but shunned and denounced him in the final year of his life when he condemned not just racism, but economic injustice at home and imperial war abroad. King’s death at only 39 enabled the US elite to construct their own useful tool, the Dreamer, who is the Martin Luther King we mostly hear about today.

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Lynch did her undergrad and law school at Harvard. She went from there to the prestigious NY firm Cahill Gordon & Rendall, the folks who represent Bank of America, Merril Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and the like.

Lynch served her first term at the Justice Department co-chairing something called the White Collar Crime Subcommittee. But you won’t hear Lynch bragging about how many white collar criminals, fraudulent bankster, predatory speculators and greedy CEOs she’s locked up. Departments of Justice under both Democrats and Republicans simply don’t much go in for that kind of thing. It seems the only thing that qualified Lynch for a “White Collar Crime Subcommittee” was her expertise in advising and defending the few white collar criminals who got close to seeing the inside of a courtroom.

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At the beginning of the Obama administration there was an urgent need for Lynch’s unique talents. Greedy speculators, banksters and hedge fund sharpies had crashed the US economy in 2007, leading to millions of foreclosures and the most catastrophic loss of black family wealth since the US began measuring it. But banking, insurance and finance had been the incoming administration’s biggest contributors. So Loretta, the “white collar crime specialist” answered the call to protect the pillagers and perps who made her career, and the Obama administration possible.

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That’s her specialty, that’s who and what she is. Loretta Lynch is the lawyer who writes the fine print on the “get out of jail free” cards the Justice Department hands out to banksters, speculators and too-big-to-jail CEOs. She’s the vicious federal DA who prosecuted thousands of poor defendants on petty drug charges eacn month, but ignored the official crimes of NYPD excepting a single case that put tens of thousands of New Yorkers in the street. Lynch sees nothing wrong with the NSA harvesting everyone’s email, phone and other communications, she has no problem with the president ordering the drone murder of US citizens or foreigners, whoever, and is not interested in lowering the prison population, curbing asset forfeitures, or restraining and demilitarizing the police.

Those who imagine that there’s some virtue in having black faces in high legal places need to ask why black lawyers who file suits against corporate polluters, who defend the victims of police torture and abuse, who represent the evicted and afflicted, who expose the abuses and war crimes of the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon are never considered for leading roles at the Department of Justice. In his day, Thurgood Marshall defended scores of people accused of capital crimes. This alone would disqualify him from the federal bench nowadays. Like Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch has never represented anyone facing eviction or dispossession. She has never sued a polluter or a violator of human and civil rights. She’s pro-death penalty, anti-marijuana legalization, and as far as we know, has never defended a poor person accused of a crime.

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But those with eyes open know who Loretta Lynch is. She’s Condoleezza Rice with a law degree. She’s a corporate fixer and enabler. She’s a vicious prosecutor and a soulless corporate operative. She’s a black woman, and likely the next US Attorney General.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: When would an anti-war activist back arms sales? When he’s secretary of state

Secretary of State John Kerry has to be the worst anti-war activist in recorded history. Is there a military action – save one – that he hasn’t supported since he came to national prominence as an anti-war activist in the early 1970s? In the the past decade and a half alone, he’s voted for the war in Iraq, strongly defended drone strikes, was the chief advocate for the bombing of Syria in 2013, and was by far the most hyperbolic cabinet member calling for a years-long, multi-country war against ISIS.

And now Kerry has been privately telling lawmakers that he supports the US entering into a proxy-war against Russia by sending lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian military, even though the Obama administration supposedly does not yet have an official position.

He’s hardly alone. The US conventional wisdom machine in the US government is now hurtling towards sending offensive weapons into another foreign conflict, without the slightest concern for the devastating consequences it might bring.

George Monbiot: The careless, astonishing cruelty of Barack Obama’s government

Let me introduce you to the world’s most powerful terrorist recruiting sergeant: a US federal agency called the office of the comptroller of the currency. Its decision to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest, most troubled places on Earth could resonate around the world for decades.

Last Friday, after the OCC had sent it a cease-and-desist order, the last bank in the United States still processing money transfers to Somalia closed its service. The agency, which reports to the US treasury, reasoned that some of this money might find its way into the hands of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. It’s true that some of it might, just as some resources in any nation will find their way into the hands of criminals (ask HSBC). So why don’t we shut down the phone networks to hamper terrorism? Why don’t we ban agriculture in case fertiliser is used to make explosives? Why don’t we stop all the clocks to prevent armed gangs from planning their next atrocity?

Ridiculous? In fact it’s not far off. Remittances from the Somalian diaspora amount to $1.2bn-$1.6bn a year, which is roughly 50% of the country’s gross national income, and on which 40% of the population relies for survival. Over the past 10 years the money known to have been transferred to suspected terrorists in Somalia amounts to a few thousand dollars. Cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage.

Hard for some people to wrap their minds around really (wait until we get to the quantum time machine simulator), but it is a fact that the Dark Side of the Moon gets exactly as much sunlight as the side facing Earth.

What prompts this musing is the new video from NASA showing the Dark Side-

Now no doubt you are familiar by this time with the ‘Big Squash’ theory of Lunar formation which contends that the Moon is the result of an oblique collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars sized planet.  Recent simulations suggest that two bodies formed out of that and their eventual consolidation is responsible for the difference in composition and appearance between the far and near side.

In other related news the next ‘Super Moon‘ (where the Moon is at its closest to Earth) will be Febuary 18th and be a ‘Black’ Moon, a New Moon (meaning all the light is hitting the far side) and the 3rd of 4 New Moons this winter.

Timey Whimey Stuff

On a quantum level there is no particular bias for time to proceed from cause to effect which makes some theoretical physicists (Stephen Hawkings) angry since it goes so much against our perceptions of reality on a macro scale and introduces paradoxes.  Scientists at the University of Queensland have recently simulated a quantum time machine and found that traveling backwards in time is indeed theoretically possible.

Much of their simulation revolved around investigating how Deutsch’s model deals with the “grandfather paradox,” a hypothetical scenario in which someone uses a CTC to travel back through time to murder her own grandfather, thus preventing her own later birth.

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Deutsch’s quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this:

Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle-the particle-back into the CTC; if the switch isn’t flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle’s emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch’s insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands-good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.

In their new simulation Ralph, Ringbauer and their colleagues studied Deutsch’s model using interactions between pairs of polarized photons within a quantum system that they argue is mathematically equivalent to a single photon traversing a CTC. “We encode their polarization so that the second one acts as kind of a past incarnation of the first,” Ringbauer says. So instead of sending a person through a time loop, they created a stunt double of the person and ran him through a time-loop simulator to see if the doppelganger emerging from a CTC exactly resembled the original person as he was in that moment in the past.

By measuring the polarization states of the second photon after its interaction with the first, across multiple trials the team successfully demonstrated Deutsch’s self-consistency in action. “The state we got at our output, the second photon at the simulated exit of the CTC, was the same as that of our input, the first encoded photon at the CTC entrance,” Ralph says. “Of course, we’re not really sending anything back in time but [the simulation] allows us to study weird evolutions normally not allowed in quantum mechanics.”

In essence the paradox is resolved by changing the future to fit the facts of the past.  Once the cat is dead (or alive) the only way forward is the probabilities based on the dead (or live) cat.  No return to a state of quantum uncertainty (in that respect) is possible so if you did indeed succeed in killing your grandfather the only future you could return to is one in which your grandfather is dead.

Nor would you disappear.  Your past self represents the resolution of quantum states that can no longer have any values other than the ones that have been measured.

Tricky eh?

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Watch physicist Brian Cox excitedly explain Higgs boson and the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of math’, by Eric W. Dolan, Raw Story
• Will Neil deGrasse Tyson’s mix of science and pop culture be enough to fill the Jon Stewart void?, Newsweek
• Google Threatens to Air Microsoft and Apple’s Dirty Code, by Chris Strohm and Jordan Robertson, Bloomberg News
• DNA Reveals How Darwin’s Finches Evolved, by Warren Cornwall, National Geographic
• Were dinosaurs tripping on the grass they ate?, by Michael Franco, CNet
• Scientists Weigh in on Plans to Hack the Weather and Cool the Earth, by Sarah Zhang, Gizmodo
• Scientists Have Figured Out a Way to Convert Solar Energy Into Liquid Fuel, by Sabrina Toppa, Time
• Comets Form Like Deep Fried Ice Cream Scoops, by Ian O’Neill, Discovery News
• Scientists now know how popcorn pops, AFP
• Sweet Science: Study Discovers How Many Licks It Takes to Reach the Center of a Tootsie Pop, By Kelli Bender, People

Three.

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 12 is the 43rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 322 days remaining until the end of the year (323 in leap years).

On this day in 1924, Rhapsody In Blue, by George Gershwin, performed for first time

Rhapsody in Blue premiered in an afternoon concert on February 12, 1924, held by Paul Whiteman and his band Palais Royal Orchestra, entitled An Experiment in Modern Music, which took place in Aeolian Hall in New York City. Many important and influential composers of the time such as John Phillip Sousa and Sergei Rachmaninoff were present. The event has since become historic specifically because of its premiere of the Rhapsody.

The purpose of the experiment, as told by Whiteman in a pre-concert lecture in front of many classical music critics and highbrows, was “to be purely educational.” It would “at least provide a stepping stone which will make it very simple for the masses to understand, and therefore, enjoy symphony and opera.” The program was long, including 26 separate musical movements, divided into 2 parts and 11 sections, bearing titles such as “True form of jazz” and “Contrast: legitimate scoring vs. jazzing”. Gershwin’s latest composition was the second to last piece (before Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1). Many of the numbers sounded similar and the ventilation system in the concert hall was broken. People in the audience were losing their patience, until the clarinet glissando that opened Rhapsody in Blue was heard. The piece was a huge success, and remains popular to this day.

The Rhapsody was performed by Whiteman’s band, with an added section of string players, and George Gershwin on piano. Gershwin decided to keep his options open as to when Whiteman would bring in the orchestra and he did not write out one of the pages for solo piano, with only the words “Wait for nod” scrawled by Grofe on the band score. Gershwin improvised some of what he was playing. As he did not write out the piano part until after the performance, we do not know exactly how the original Rhapsody sounded.

The opening clarinet glissando came into being during rehearsal when; “…as a joke on Gershwin, [Ross] Gorman (Whiteman’s virtuoso clarinettist) played the opening measure with a noticeable glissando, adding what he considered a humorous touch to the passage. Reacting favourably to Gorman’s whimsy, Gershwin asked him to perform the opening measure that way at the concert and to add as much of a ‘wail’ as possible.”

You know, in case you’ve forgotten how to sing.

Sigh.  It’s just too hard to process at the moment and as TMC says the reaction is still pouring in.  There are the tributes and arguments over what The Daily Show really means in the context of contemporary news and politics, there are the justified criticisms of Jon’s failure to really hold people to account and slipping off into the safe buffoonery of Faux Noise and penis jokes, and of course speculation about the future direction of the show and who will host it.

I’ll try to organize some of that material tomorrow or better yet Friday as a companion piece to what TMC has already written.  Tonight I’m still trying to integrate The Nightly Show into what I produce as is Larry Wilmore trying to find out what has worked and what hasn’t in his three weeks at the helm.

Now last night was actually pretty funny I thought-

The discussion I liked best was this one from the first episode-

The best comedy bit was from Mike Yard-

Larry sometimes seems like he’s going to go yard (hit a Home Run for you non-Baseball types) in his own ‘Keeping it 100’ but most often ends up ‘Weak Tea’ in part because of the lameness of the submissions (at least the ones the writers select).

‘Keeping it 100’ with the panel is rarely completely successful because he’s still including weasels on them, it works better with unique questions for each member than it does without because then it just seems like the writers are lazy or out of ideas.

Keeping it 100?

Umm… this is eventually going to get funnier, right?

Continuity

I can’t not play this-

Sigh.  I’m not going anywhere tomorrow.  For one thing it’s supposed to snow.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Colin Firth will be on to promote Kingsmen which looks like a rolicking good yarn if you’re not the type who snooted The Avengers remake, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or The Lone Ranger.  You know, movies don’t always have to have a message, sometimes they can be just for fun.

Fortunately David Axelrod didn’t get extended beyond his two show segments so I don’t have to pimp him again.  The real news below.

Last Saturday night, Cleetus and I took Dan to see Baboo in his play. Baboo had a supporting role, and I was a little worried, as Dan has been known to get a tad restless during a play, even when Baboo had a lead. This time was different, Dan was actually looking forward to it, he said. Baboo had come to see him play Lorenzo the previous spring in his school’s production of Pinnochio, and he now understood the allure of the stage. I told him that this would be pretty cool then, because it’s a big stage, and we had front row seats.

This time was different for me too, because for the first time since they were born, I was going to attend a performance with no headache. That’s right, no pain in my head. No turning a grimace into a smile, no wincing through any sound system glitches, nothing. Just a tiny bit of nervous waiting for the other shoe to drop…but it never did. I enjoyed the play. But wait, it gets better.

Not only did I enjoy the play, Dan enjoyed it immensely!As we sat in our padded theater seats he kept asking, how long until they turn the lights out? I told him that when I was in shows they would blink the lights, then he would know that it would be about five minutes until the lights went down, that I was pretty sure they would do that, and that the crowd would get quiet. Sure enough, just as I finished speaking, the lights flashed, and he grinned up at me. As the lights went down, he rubbed his hands together like a cartoon villian and said, “Oh, boy, here we go!”

Now, the play was Annie Jr, which is just like Annie, but a truncated version, perfect length for Dan. Baboo was playing the small, but key part of FDR, which doesn’t come in until twenty minutes before the end. This being middle school, there aren’t a lot of boys, so we played spot Baboo throughout the first hour of the play as he made appearances as a New Yorker and a Servant, and did a voice over as a radio announcer. When we saw him, Dan and I would nudge each other. But I needn’t have worried that Dan would get fidgety not seeing his brother on stage.

From the opening number he was in heaven, and I have to say those kids did a pretty good job up there. Dan was leaning over to tell me, “This is awesome!” He pointed out what he liked in the scenery, he was was moving his legs along with the dance moves, doing a few chorus line kicks–good thing I got front row, huh? And in the scene where Miss Hanigan screams? Dan turned to me and quite audibly asked, “What the hell was that?” Cleetus and I cracked up, thankfully so did the surrounding audience. I was not only able to enjoy the show, I was enjoying Dan enjoying the show.

Sitting there in that dark theater my eyes filled, thinking about how this was the first time I had ever been able to fully experience something like this. I’ve been to performances, ceremonies, IEP meetings, but always, always, part of me was fighting pain, and until this moment, I didn’t realize how much that took away. It was just the way it was. Even when I have pain pills to get me through, it’s not the same as no pain. Because the headache is still there when I take the pain pills, it’s just not as bad. So, I feel like I don’t have adequate words to describe what it was like, it’s been over 25 years since I’ve had a pain free day.

After the play we took the boys home and got Chinese take out for a late supper. Cleetus bought Baboo roses and we gave them to him then. We ate and read our fortunes and let the kids stay up too late and all in all had a fabulous evening. Throughout the whole night I just remember looking around at my little family and feeling happy, and intensely grateful.

So far the headaches are down by about a third. The only bad thing I can think of is that when they come ripping back after a pain free day they do so with an intensity that is nauseating, and I had had that pretty much under control, but so what. It’s so worth it. No, I might not be completely pain free for every event or occasion, but to have that experience for any, to see one boy perform and the other enjoy it?

To me, was priceless.

After 16 years hosting Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” Jon Stewart announced that he will be leaving the show this year. It has left many of us stunned and saddened. That news, and the news that NBC’s Brian Williams, host of “The Nightly New,” had been suspended for 6 months without pay, dominated the nightly cable shows, especially MSNBC. It was very apparent that Jon’s departure was more important than anything else.

After announcing Williams suspension, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow devoted the next two segments of her show to Jon’s retirement and the impact that his style of humor has had on the news and the news media for a generation:

The tributes are still pouring in:

Jon Stewart: comedian, satirist, newsman

By Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian

He insists he’s a comedian, but the outgoing Daily Show host has treated us to more than a decade of influential, and often devastating, political speeches

He’s been called the “most trusted news source in America” – but Jon Stewart has repeatedly insisted that he is a comedian first, and has played down the influence of The Daily Show on American political life.

His work has toed the line of political action, and has sometimes abandoned comedy altogether to provide the serious, though short, dose of reality absent from almost all American broadcast journalism.

A Dear Jon Letter: A TV Writer’s TV Marriage Suddenly Ends

By David S. Simon, The Huffington Post

I got dumped last night.

A 17-year relationship ended just like that and I have no idea how I will go on. Okay, it was with a married man and I knew that sooner or later that son of a bitch would go back to his family. But the thing is I just cannot imagine life without my TV life partner Jon Stewart.

Here’s the thing. Like most relationships the most significant, intimate part of our life together is at bedtime. During the day he went his way and I went mine, but at the end of the day we were there together in the bed zone to discuss not only the day’s events but the state of our lives on a level that would be incomprehensible with anyone else.

Jon Stewart Leaving His Fake News Desk Is A Loss To Real News

By Frazier Moore, The Huffington Post

Jon Stewart’s fans were gobsmacked by the sad news he delivered on Tuesday’s edition of “The Daily Show”: He’s leaving his phony anchor desk and ending his reign as phony newsman, and the loss is to real news.

“This show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host and neither do you,” he told his audience. He said he might depart in July, September or maybe December. He didn’t say what he means to do next.

To appreciate the impact of his 16-year Comedy Central reign, and the loss his impending exit represents, the distraught viewer need only consider Monday’s broadcast. [..]

Stewart didn’t invent satire, but he modernized it and tailored it for an information age ruled by TV and the Internet. In compact “Daily Show” segments, he struck a blow against the flabby boundlessness of cable-news and talk-network fare.

No wonder political leaders, authors, scholars and others with useful things to say flocked to his show right along with celebs who came to pitch their latest projects. Stewart, playing his designated role as court jester, goaded them with humor to get them to say what they meant in ways “serious” interviewers can’t or won’t. In the process, he usually displayed them to their best advantage.

And on those rare occasions when the news was too awful to abide the usual sassiness and Stewart’s passion burned through, viewers knew to take special note. On “The Daily Show,” unlike so many “real” news dispensers, everything that happens ISN’T “Breaking News.”

This was Jon very first appearance as host of “The Daily Show”

Below the fold are the videos from “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” which devoted the majority of the show to Jon Stewart. Lawrence O’Donnell was joined by Rachel Maddow, Hunter Walker, Kevin Avery, Beth Fouhy, Lizz Winstead and Harry Enten.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: An Arms Race Won’t Help Ukraine

Nearly 70 years ago, a group of Manhattan Project scientists, having seen the power of nuclear destruction, created what they called the “Doomsday Clock.” It was a mechanism designed to warn the world of how imminent the threat of global catastrophe was becoming – the closer the clock moved to midnight, the closer we were to doomsday. Last month, the group of Nobel laureates charged with maintaining the clock changed its time to 11:57 p.m., denoting the closest we’ve been to doomsday in more than 30 years. Their reasoning is based not just on the world’s inaction on issues like climate change, but its provocative march toward a new Cold War.

Indeed, as catastrophe engulfs eastern Ukraine, the United States continues to stoke tensions with Russia, most recently by considering providing lethal weapons assistance to the government in Kiev. [..]

But arming the Ukrainian military is not in the best interest of the United States, nor is it in the best interest of Ukraine. It will only worsen a bloody crisis that has already claimed thousands of victims. As I have argued in the past, there is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one; and a new supply of U.S. arms will provide ammunition for Russian leaders who believe, fairly or not, that America is attempting to turn Ukraine into a military base near Russia’s borders. Indeed, as Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution writes, “If U.S.-provided weapons fail to induce a Russian retreat in Ukraine and instead cause an escalation of the war” – which they almost certainly will – “the net result will not be peace and compromise.”

Zoë Carpenter : Scientists: We Cannot Geoengineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the volcano shot 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Those particles reflected enough sunlight to cool the earth by about one degree Fahrenheight-a temporary phenomenon, but one whose implications are still very much debated. Why not, some scientists have asked in the decades since, counter climate change by reproducing the effects of Mount Pinatubo-for example, by flying a plane into the stratosphere and spraying enough sulfate aerosols to turn down the sun?

That question was held up for scrutiny on Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences, which released a study (funded, in part, by the CIA) of two ideas for staving off the worst effects of climate change via technological manipulation of the climate: to remove carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it elsewhere, or to reflect sunlight away from the planet by what’s known as albedo modification, à la Mount Pinatubo. The unequivocal message from the committee was that the world cannot expect to geoengineer its way out of the climate crisis