Motherboard: California’s Hypothetical Plan to Start a Space Agency Is Legal and Feasible

In a scathing speech Wednesday in front of some of the most important climate scientists in the world, California Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to fight Donald Trump’s anti-environmental policies every step of the way. One audacious promise particularly stood out: Brown said that if Trump turns off NASA’s climate-monitoring satellites, the state “is going to launch its own damn satellites.” [...]

The legal issues will of course depend on the specifics of California’s program—if the state pursued a public-private partnership, it could simply buy data from a commercial satellite company that secures launch permits from the federal government. But let’s presume for a moment that California wants to start its own honest-to-goodness space agency, or, at the very least, wants to handle the launch and monitoring of its satellites. There are two main questions: Would such a plan be feasible? And can the state legally do so? [...]

Depending on the capabilities California would want, it could launch a satellite for much cheaper. Startup Skybox Imaging, which was rebranded as Terra Bella after Google purchased it, launched its first imaging cubesat for less than $50 million. For context, California’s government spends in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year. It is currently $400 billion in debt, but has a balanced budget and has begun the slow process of paying off those debts.

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The Guardian: The neo-Nazi murder trial revealing Germany's darkest secrets

In the beginning, they were known as die Dönermorde – the kebab murders. The victims had little in common, apart from immigrant backgrounds and the modest businesses they ran. The first to die was Enver Şimşek, a 38-year-old Turkish-German man who ran a flower-import company in the southern German town of Nuremberg. On 9 September 2000, he was shot inside his van by two gunmen, and died in hospital two days later. [...]

The killings occurred in seven different cities across Germany, and were often separated by months or years. This made it difficult to connect them, though no one expected it to take until 2006 for the authorities to grasp how they were related. [...]

From the very start, the investigation was riddled with basic errors and faulty assumptions. First, at least two of the murders took place at locations close to police stations, which should have made them unattractive sites for mafia executions. Then there was the problem of the two “Eastern-European-looking men” on bicycles whom eyewitnesses described leaving several of the crime scenes. More baffling still was a fact that surfaced during the investigation of Halit Yozgat’s killing: a German intelligence agent had been inside the cafe when the murder took place – something he later neglected to report. [...]

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, to become a neo-Nazi in East Germany was a form of youthful rebellion against the state. What better way to antagonise communist elites than to parade around as their old enemy? After 1989 and the fall of the wall, neo-Nazism became a conduit for rage against the pieties – and the perceived humiliations and betrayals – of the newly unified Federal Republic of Germany. West Germany’s identity had long been bound up with its productivity and wealth in comparison to East Germany. Meanwhile, its politicians and intellectuals embraced what the country’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, called “Constitutional patriotism”. It would be an identity based on a shared commitment to ideas rather than one founded on blood. [...]

Still, despite its slow-moving procedures and its limited scope, the proceedings have provided a succession of strange revelations about the workings of the German state intelligence agency, known as the BfV, which have led to allegations that elements within the agency either turned a blind eye to the NSU murders or supported the group’s aims. [...]

The BfV has long been regarded as right-leaning: it was founded after the second world war by the Americans, who welcomed Nazis and former Gestapo members into its ranks. Its mission was to spy on and root out the KPD, as the German communist party was known, as well as members of the Social Democratic party. The first head of the organisation, Otto John, defected to East Germany in 1954, citing the overwhelming number of Nazis in the organisation. His successor was Hubert Schrübbers, a former member of the SS. Under Schrübbers’ supervision, the German communist party was finally banned in 1956, based on allegedly incriminating materials turned up by the BfV. Major German political parties – such as the Left party and the Greens – have long called for the abolition of the BfV.

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Dazed: Unravelling porn’s obsession with faux lesbian sex

Money, power and sex are the three pillars of modern life, so it’s no surprise that the porn industry and society at large plays on this relationship like a dog with a bone. The adult industry’s explosion after a fractured sexual revolution in the late 70s and early 80s gave rise to big businesses with even bigger wallets, and a core audience was identified: the straight male who will pay hard cash to get his jollies. “During the 80s the porn industry became institutionalised and big production companies were cashing in on female sexuality,” Dian explains. “Unrealistic standards for women became the norm and it became the bloated industry it is today.” Porn and erotica helps assist a fantasy, so the more you want to be the man with his head in two girls’ crotches, the more money you’ll pay (at least before the internet that is). [...]

The commander of the gaze is unequivocally male even if there’s no man in sight. For Dian, faux lesbian sex is straight male fantasy without the phallic panic of couple-led porn. “Men will explain it to you in different ways,” she says. “Some don’t want another man there because it’s competition, and others will tell you it’s the idea that these women are so sexually excited they will do it with each other and if he walked into the room they would just leap on him. I don’t think they’re really seeing them as lesbian girls but as opportunistic and sexually liberal women who will do anything.”

According to Dian, studies have shown that men aren’t really interested in real, loving sex acts between lesbian-identified women, therefore the power lies within ambiguity. On top of this, woman-on-woman porn is also one of the most popular genres for straight females, perhaps because this elusion of adventure is scrambled up with conflicting social scripts. A distortion of constructed sexual binaries creates a meta-narrative about identity politics in a larger sense; sex becomes so muddled that we’re not sure exactly what or who gets us wet (or hard). “It’s all a manipulation of desire,” adds Dian, “and there is a lot of power in this.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Make Mars Great Again

The concept of terraforming—making a barren world suitable for widespread life—is well developed in science fiction. The term was first used in a science-fiction story published in 1942. It implies the creation of a copy of Earth, which need not be the goal, but the word caught on. (It is definitely more euphonious than the suggested alternatives of “ecopoiesis” or “planetary ecosynthesis.”) In the ’90s the award-winning science-fiction trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars centered on the science and ethics of terraforming. But terraforming is no longer just science fiction. [...]

From what we can tell, Mars has the key materials to construct a biosphere: water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Missions over the past decade have established that the high latitudes are rich in water ice, and the Curiosity rover recently detected nitrate in the soil (about 0.03 percent by mass). Carbon dioxide is the main wildcard. Mars may have vast layers of carbonate minerals, but this form of carbon dioxide is not easily released as gas. The success of terraforming would hinge on the south polar cap and the polar soil. They may contain enough carbon dioxide to bulk up the atmosphere only slightly, or they could store enough to create a pressure on Mars equal to the sea-level pressure on Earth.

In the latter case, studies of the climate of Mars indicate that it has two points of stability. Its current climate, with a thin atmosphere, a thick polar cap, and an average surface temperature of –60 degrees Celsius, is stable. But Mars has a second stable climate state, with a thick atmosphere, a thin polar cap, and temperatures of 15 degrees Celsius. That is what makes terraforming Mars feasible. If we could push its climate from the first state to the second, the clement conditions would be self-sustaining.

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My Modern Met: Photographer Captures Stunning Symmetry of Berlin’s Interior Architecture

Self-taught photographer Thibaud Poirier points and shoots his camera at the interiors of Berlin’s most stunning buildings in his new series, Berlin Interiors. Each photograph in the series is perfectly framed to exaggerate the interior architecture’s symmetry to great effect. The result is a collection that can be interpreted as an ode to lines, cubes, and curves, as much as highlighting beautiful interiors.

Poirier is Parisian, but has called Buenos Aires, Houston, Montreal, and Tokyo home, making him a man of the world. Exposure to different city dynamics certainly informs his work. “Growing up in these vastly different landscapes and cultures, early on I developed a love and fascination for architecture and urban environments,” he shares. “As a self taught photographer my focus is to capture the beauty and energy of these places as I see them.”

His unique vision of Berlin’s interiors will have you seeing space in a different way. Every frame takes a peek into the heart of these buildings, leaving the viewer mesmerized.

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