#but we were like 2 mins from [redacteds] house when it came up so I couldn't get the whole story

[randomgirltalking]

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave

.... When first we practice to deceive.

This #JussieSmollett saga has got me doing what I rarely do... reading mainstream media news 😛. I’m sure many of you have heard the story by now... random actor from a TV show they don’t play here has the munchies in the middle of the night (who hasn’t?!) and bundles up to make a trek to Subway for a late night snack. Along the way he gets attacked by two men who yell homophobic and racist slurs against him, telling him that this is “MAGA country” (apparently MAGA is the new racial slur ... like it literally stands for Make America Great Again, but okay...) and pour bleach over him. Oh and let’s not forget the noose around his neck.

When this story broke, an outpouring of anger and disbelief was felt around America. Love and grief was poured upon poor Jussie. Celebrities hashtagged, reposted, condemned and sobbed that “love trumps hate”. My favourite white guilted social justice warrior, Matt McGory urged non POC (that’s people of colour for folks that don’t know) to check their white privilege.

Yes, this story was terrible. In this day and age, incidents like this are shocking to read about. The anger and sadness was completely justified.....

If it was true.

A few people that I follow on Insta started being quite vocal about the fact that this story did not add up. I mean, this was literally the day after it happened not two weeks later when a ripple of doubt was starting to appear around Jussie’s story.

1. Going out in subzero temperatures Mmmmkay I can understand being so hungry that you leave the warmth of your house to grab a quick feed. Actually, I don’t understand cos I’m lazy as fuck and would rather deal with hunger pains then leave my comfy house in the middle of the night. I also would have realized that it’s 2019 and UberEats exists.

2. Two white men are stalking the streets of Chicago(One of Obama’s stronghold cities) in freezing temperatures with bleach and a noose, presumably looking for a black person. And they happened to come across and recognize Jussie Smollet (who I’m assuming was bundled up against the freezing night). They also knew that he plays a gay character on a predominantly black cast show as Jussie claims that they yelled out “Empire n****r.”

3. He didn’t immediately call the police and he left the noose on I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and assume that he didn’t want to be left alone and vulnerable on the cold street. He left the noose on to preserve evidence. Okay yes, I can understand this. I mean, I would personally be horrified to come out of an attack to find rope around my neck and believe you me that shit would be yanked off and thrown the fuck away from me ASAP. But, other people react to things differently. I can see a level headed, calm person keeping that shit on as proof. Except... okay did anyone see that GMA interview he did with Robin? I’ll delve into ripping the piss out of it soon but he clearly told a visibly cynical Robin that he was not initially planning on involving the police and that it was his friend who he was with that called the cops. Why would he keep that shit on him if he had no plans to report it? I mean, apart from his pride as a gay man that kept him from calling the police, as he tried to convince us in the interview 😒

4. He did not want to hand over his phone So, Jussie was on the phone to his manager when he was jumped so there’s a clear timeline of events. His manager even heard the perpetrators say “this is MAGA country!” So great, he has proof that this crime was committed. I’m not going to mention that Jussie told Robyn that after he was attacked he took his phone out of his pocket, where his manager was miraculously still on the line. He somehow managed to have a quick window of opportunity to slide his phone in his pocket before he was attacked. Oh, look, I did mention it. Anyway, we all read that Jussie refused to hand over his phone. In his interview he claims that he did not want to hand over his personal information/data to someone he didn’t know. And you know what, I actually understand this part. I too would be reluctant to hand over sensitive information (especially if I was somewhat famous) to the police. Sorry, I’m just a big believer in privacy. Anyway, police speak states that when he did hand it over it was “heavily redacted”. This could mean it was edited, forged, deleted etc so I’m not going to speculate for sure what that PR heavy phrase means.

Okay, can we now talk about that farce of an interview with Robin for Good Morning America? A lot of people claimed that it was an Oscar worthy performance but is it really great acting when we can tell that he’s acting? I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a pin in his pocket that he was using to stab himself with to conjure up the trickle of tears he squeezed out. I’m sure it would have created worse wounds than the chicken scratches that were on his face after two grown as men punched and kicked him.

Another thing I noticed about his interview was the amount of unnecessary information he gave. I love true crime docos. I remember watching one where they described how they knew that certain criminals were lying. There was one story about a man who had sadly murdered his step-granddaughter. The police said that on the day of the crime, the murderer described his day in great detail. What time he woke. What he ate for breakfast. That he vacuumed his house because his dog shed, what he fed his dog etc... yet he couldn’t remember exactly what time his step-granddaughter left the house or what their exact words were to each other. The investigator stated that the guilty party would do this to deflect from the finer details which might catch them out aka trying too hard to be innocent. I couldn’t help but think of this example when I listened to Jussie explain that he went to the fridge, found it empty, decided to go to Walgreens for food and a smoke, found it closed, went across the road to Subway for a sandwich and salad, texted his friend to ask if he wanted anything, then texted his manager, then his manager called... “Too much information!” I remember thinking. It wasn’t until the next day that I read an article by a behavioral therapist stating that he was surprised by the amount of unnecessary information Jussie gave. Called it!

We’re reminded of the threatening hate mail that Jussie received, laughabley worded in cut out magazine letters, making us wonder if we are in a Hollywood movie plot. Robin asks Jussie “why you?” As if these two men were loitering outside of Jussie’s place, hoping he’ll come outside into the cold at 2am. Jussie gives a proud smirk and says “I come really hard on 45.” (That’s not a gay fetish, that’s the number president Trump is) Yeah, no shit, Jussie. You and every other 10,000 people from Hollywood. When I went on his Insta I could have been on any liberal Hollywood celebrity page... all recycling the same rhetoric, all with the same hashtag, at the same rally/march, doing the same fist in the air sign....😴 He didn’t have anything profound, original or controversial to say and he definitely did not go “hard” on anything. And no offense, Jussie, but there are way more impactful celebrities that people care about. So, we still do not know “why you.”

When Robin rightly mentioned the reasons why people doubted his story... Jussie angrily interjects to promote the opening hours of Subway and to remind everyone that not only is he black in America but he is gay, too. He also wishes to let everyone know that as a gay man he is not weak (cos as a society people think that LGBTQ means weak) and that he fought the fuck back. So much so that he scared two muscle bound Nigerians away and came away virtually unscathed. Oh but he does not advocate violence, though. He wants you to fight back somehow, though. Especially if you’re a little gay boy (his words). He also wants you to remember that when somebody reports a crime long after the fact and no one believes them, to remember that he reported (reluctantly) straightaway (after 45 mins of considering it despite leaving the noose on) and no one believes him. He also wants you to see the truth, but you don’t want to see the truth but you know it’s the truth but you don’t want to.. see the truth? Also, he wants you to know that he was on Grindr when he was single, but this was not a Grindr date gone wrong.

Anyway, all joking aside, if Jussie’s story turns out to be true, I will delete this post and pretend nothing happened because, like Jussie, I too have pride.

Now, you may feel that there is no hero in this story, no hope. Well, that is where you would be wrong, my friends! The real hero in this story is the Subway sandwich artist who had prepared and wrapped Jussie’s sandwich so securely that it survived a beat down from two gym enthusiasts. Please Subway, do the right thing and give this hero without a cape a well deserved raise!

[biofunmy]

NASA Emails Show How A “Sneaky” Asteroid Escaped Detection

Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Wikimedia Commons

In late July, a record-setting asteroid hurtled just 40,400 miles over Earth, the largest space rock to come so close in a century. But perhaps more alarming than the flyby itself is how much it caught NASA by surprise, according to internal agency documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Spotted just 24 hours before a relatively narrow miss with Earth, the incident reveals holes in NASA’s surveillance network to observe incoming space rocks. The football-field-sized asteroid, dubbed “2019 OK,” is also drawing attention to decades of congressional failures to fix the problem, experts say.

“Because there may be media coverage tomorrow, I’m alerting you that in about 30 mins a 57-130 meter sized asteroid will pass Earth at only 0.19 lunar distances (~48,000 miles),” wrote Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, in a July 24 email alert sent to other space agency experts. “2019 OK was spotted about 24 hrs ago.”

Flying at nearly 55,000 miles per hour, the asteroid came lumbering by with little warning, first detected that day by a small observatory in Brazil. The flyby came five times closer to Earth than the distance to the moon — a close shave by astronomical standards.

“If 2019 OK had entered and disrupted in Earth’s atmosphere over land, the blast wave could have created localized devastation to an area roughly 50 miles across,” according to a news release sent out by the agency weeks after the flyby. Such an impact has been estimated to happen about once every 3,000 years.

“Our current asteroids search capabilities are not up to the level they should be.”

“This object slipped through a whole series of our capture nets,” Paul Chodas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in an email to his colleagues two days after the July 25 flyby, describing what he called the “sneaky” space rock. “I wonder how many times this situation has happened without the asteroid being discovered at all.”

The emails were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and provide a detailed, behind-the-scenes look as NASA officials scrambled to figure out why the asteroid wasn’t spotted until it was nearly whizzing past Earth. Other emails show internal agency scientists frustrated by a media response that called the event a “city killer” that “just missed the earth.”

“This one did sneak up on us and it is an interesting story on the limitations of our current survey network,” Johnson wrote in a July 26 email.

The near-miss of the incoming asteroid points to a long-running fight between NASA and Congress to build a reliable way to watch for “potentially hazardous” asteroids. Lawmakers ordered the space agency to detect 90% of hazardous asteroids in a 2005 law, but they haven’t funded telescopes and spacecraft that are large enough to do the job, the US National Academies of Sciences concluded in a June report.

“It’s no surprise an object like that would take us by surprise,” MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel told BuzzFeed News. “Our current asteroids search capabilities are not up to the level they should be.”

The NASA-supported ATLAS telescopes did pick up the asteroid on July 21, days ahead of its close approach, but it was then too obscured by clouds to be identified as a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) by the space agency. The NASA-funded Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii did see the asteroid even earlier, on June 28 and July 7, but it was then too faint and far away to trigger an alert.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Chodas said 2019 OK never posed a threat of impacting Earth.

“The automated systems that calculate trajectories and the chance of impact … worked as designed,” he said. “The issue with 2019 OK was not with [NASA] or the [Minor Planet Center],” but the surveys’ algorithms for identifying dangerous space rocks.

Still, Chodas noted the late discovery was “a surprise to the planetary defense community” and that the event warrants further investigation.

On July 25, NASA officials were prompted to dig deeper for answers after a flurry of alarming news reports surfaced that characterized the asteroid as a “city killer” that “just missed the earth.” The city killer classification rankled NASA officials who traced it back to the Sydney Morning Herald, according to the emails.

The Herald report “quotes the two Australian astronomers – anybody know them? If so, it might be helpful to ask them to think before they speak” of things like “nuclear explosions,” says a July 27 email sent to Chodas and Johnson, the planetary defense officer (the sender’s name was redacted). “I don’t know whether the Sydney reporter reached out to them or whether they reached out to him. All the rest – including WaPo — is simply repetition … This story also says to me that we have to keep up our good work of calming down asteroid rhetoric – city-killers, nukes, etc. I will reach out as well.”

The email evoked a blunt reply from Lindley.

“What makes this especially galling is that the Australian are doing essentially nothing to support Planetary Defense,” he said.

More than half of the emails turned over to BuzzFeed News contain other detailed complaints from NASA officials about news coverage of the “near miss,” with particular scorn directed at Epoch Times, The Washington Post, and The Hill over their “lazy journalism.” The emails include two harshly critical letters to the Post and Hill about its coverage and the importance of reaching out directly to NASA experts for accurate information instead of interviewing a “random astronomer or, worse, Voldemort.”

“An asteroid can’t be a ‘city killer’ when it flies by Earth at 70,000 km, and if and when an asteroid impact might occur, it would not release any nuclear radiation. (- no wonder you went ballistic when you saw this ….),” says the July 27 email from the unnamed NASA official.

Other emails suggest that some within the space agency saw the flyby as clear evidence of the need for better detection. An email sent to Lindley and Kelly Fast, the Near-Earth Object Observation Program Manager in NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, said “a spectacularly important lesson here” is that the ATLAS telescope and the PAN- STARRS observatory “need to detect slower objects.”

“The raison d’etre for ATLAS is detecting imminent impactors,” says the email, whose sender NASA redacted before sending to BuzzFeed News. “It looks like some impactors are too slow to be found easily. It is fairly disturbing to me that this object was undetectably slow for nearly 2 weeks!”

Binzel and other outside experts suggest the real lesson of 2019 OK is that Congress should fund a dedicated surveillance satellite, now awaiting $40 million to go ahead with its design, equipped with an infrared telescope to spot incoming asteroids without facing the hassles of weather, the moon, or peering through the obscuring atmosphere like telescopes on the ground.

“It is fairly disturbing to me that this object was undetectably slow for nearly 2 weeks!”

“Infrared surveying from space sounds good to me in order to keep our world safe — or at least to worry legitimately when killer asteroids approach with such short notice that there is nothing we can do,” Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff told BuzzFeed News. Ideally, he added, such a spacecraft would detect dangerous asteroids decades ahead of time so they could be deflected.

The House Science Committee, which learned about the asteroid from news reports, is still developing the law that could authorize NASA to build an asteroid-spotting satellite, a majority staffer, who would only discuss the issue on background, told BuzzFeed News.

“What the bill will include on the topic of NEOs is still to be determined,” the staffer said, noting that the committee has taken a number of steps since 1990, including drafting policy, “that led to NASA’s surveys to detect, track, catalog, and characterize NEOs and the potential threat they pose, as well as potential options for protecting Earth from hazardous NEOs.”

Last year, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy unveiled an NEO action plan, a set of guidelines that federal government agencies are supposed to follow to confront the threat posed by near-Earth objects over the next 10 years. But the report does not explain how the agencies can successfully execute its mission, nor does the report call on Congress to earmark additional funding to support the effort.

A recent poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that near-Earth objects have captured the attention of the public, who are far more interested in seeing NASA focus on potential impacts than sending astronauts to the moon or Mars.

Despite NASA officials’ attempts to calm the public and rein in the media’s fearmongering of the asteroid, according to the emails, some of the scientists were excited when they discovered how significant 2019 OK was.

“BTW, all, just for context, it appears that 2019 OK is by far the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in the last century!” Lindley, the NASA planetary defense officer, wrote in a July 28 email to Chodas, Fast, and other NASA officials under the subject line “Unhappy about Washington Post story.”

“Nothing this big is predicted to pass this close again until Apophis on 2029,” he said. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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