“The dream of traveling through time is both ancient and universal. But where did humanity's fascination with time travel begin, and why is the idea so appealing? … Perhaps because of this connection between space and time, the possibility that time can be experienced in different ways and traveled through has surprisingly early roots. One of the first known examples of time travel appears in the Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science. In the Mahabharata is a story about King Kakudmi, who lived millions of years ago and sought a suitable husband for his beautiful and accomplished daughter, Revati. The two travel to the home of the creator god Brahma to ask for advice. But while in Brahma's plane of existence, they must wait as the god listens to a 20-minute song, after which Brahma explains that time moves differently in the heavens than on Earth. It turned out that ‘27 chatur-yugas’ had passed, or more than 116 million years, according to an online summary, and so everyone Kakudmi and Revati had ever known, including family members and potential suitors, was dead. After this shock, the story closes on a somewhat happy ending in that Revati is betrothed to Balarama, twin brother of the deity Krishna. To Yaszek, the tale provides an example of what we now call time dilation, in which different observers measure different lengths of time based on their relative frames of reference, a part of Einstein's theory of relativity.Such time-slip stories are widespread throughout the world, Yaszek said, citing a Middle Eastern tale from the first century BCE about a Jewish miracle worker who sleeps beneath a newly-planted carob tree and wakes up 70 years later to find it has now matured and borne fruit (carob trees are notorious for how long they take to produce their first harvest). Another instance can be found in an eighth-century Japanese fable about a fisherman named Urashima Tarō who travels to an undersea palace and falls in love with a princess. Tarō finds that, when he returns home, 100 years have passed, according to a translation of the tale published online by the University of South Florida. In the early-modern era of the 1700 and 1800s, the sleep-story version of time travel grew more popular, Yaszek said. Examples include the classic tale of Rip Van Winkle, as well as books like Edward Belamy's utopian 1888 novel ‘Looking Backwards,’ in which a man wakes up in the year 2000, and the H.G. Wells 1899 novel ‘The Sleeper Awakes,’ about a man who slumbers for centuries and wakes to a completely transformed London. In other stories from this period, people also start to be able to move backward in time.” (Adam Mann/LiveScience)
“A recently published study has revealed evidence that early humans took refuge in Laos’ Tam Pà Ling Cave some time between 68,000 and 86,000 years ago. This discovery not only shapes our understanding of how and when early humans dispersed from Africa and into Southeast Asia, but also rewrites our understanding of how certain fossils found their way into the Tam Pà Ling Cave in the first place. Perhaps most interestingly, the proverbial ‘smoking gun’ evidence confirming that early humans had stayed there—rather than the fossilized human remains that had been found there more than a decade earlier—was recently discovered remnants of charcoal. In 2009, fossilized human bones were found within the Tam Pà Ling Cave. ‘However,’ IFLScience explained, ‘the walls of the cave are steep enough to be hard to scale without modern climbing equipment. Paleontologists suspected the fossils had been washed in during floods, rather than the people dying or being buried in the cave.’ In the absence of any primitive tools amidst the fossils, ‘this suspicion became accepted wisdom during coverage of the previous discovery.’ But now, a team of researchers—including the study’s lead author, Vito Hernandez from Flinders University—has rewritten that accepted narrative. ‘Using a technique known as microstratigraphy at the Flinders Microarchaeology Laboratory,’ Hernandez wrote in a statement, ‘we were able to reconstruct the cave conditions in the past and identify traces of human activities in and around Tam Pà Ling.’” (Michael Natale/Popular Mechanics)
“As Elon Musk’s rabid pro-Trump mania makes clear, billionaires are wielding their financial might in this year’s presidential election far more than in any previous campaign—and far more openly, too. More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy. There’s no denying that billionaires are trying to bend society to their will. America’s 800-plus billionaires hold over $6 trillion in wealth, more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households. The super wealthy own a greater share of the nation’s wealth today than they did during the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. And they will do whatever they have to do to keep things that way. Timothy Mellon, the billionaire heir to a Gilded Age fortune, has given an astounding amount—$125 million—to a pro-Trump super PAC. That’s more than the combined donations of 3 million typical Americans giving $40 each. Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, has contributed $100 million to, among other things, help finance a flood of pro-Trump ad buys in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. (Trump has reportedly pressed her to cough up $250 million on his behalf.) Rupert Murdoch, a billionaire immigrant from Australia, has helped Trump day after day by turning Fox News into a truth-bending, immigrant-bashing, pro-Trump propaganda machine. Dick Uihlein, an Illinois billionaire who runs a cardboard and paper-goods empire, gave $49 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he runs. Ike Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, and his wife contributed $25 million to another pro-Trump super PAC, Right for America. Jeff Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company, and his wife have given $70 million to conservative causes this election cycle, including $25 million to the Club for Growth, a free-market group that is backing Trump. (Trump reversed his position on banning TikTok earlier this year, not long after he held a meeting with Yass.) Billionaires are also flexing their muscle in Senate and House races.” (Steven Greenhouse/Slate)
“In his closing arguments to the American people, Donald Trump is calling his opponent — the Vice President of the United States — ‘a shit vice president,’ and sharing observations about the size of late pro golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. It is on brand for Trump to bolster his flimsy case for another term as president by comparing his female opponent to excrement and talking about Big Dicks. We are now a nation more divided by gender than race and naked misogyny is on the ballot. For years, political pundits — a male-dominated profession — ignored the signs, or outright denied, that it was possible for women to be a bloc and move elections. This year, women very well could decide the outcome. Women outnumber men among recent voters: In 2020, women accounted for 54.7 percent of the electorate while men accounted for just 44 percent. Trump desperately needs his bros to come out bigly. But he still needs a few women too. Trump’s legacy is to have unchained the drooling junkyard dogs of toxic masculinity. His rise coincided with the success of manosphere god Jordan Peterson and odious accused rapist Andrew Tate. Meanwhile, his fanboys include the Silicon Valley pronatalists — revered by younger tech bros — like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The tech bros are in the process of reducing women to bio-trackable baby-making machines. (Remember that Silicon Valley itself, the site of the greatest economic shift since the industrial revolution, has mostly shut out women, creating vast boys club fortunes controlled by men. or occasionally, their widows and ex-wives — plus ça change.)” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“It makes no difference to financial markets who wins the US presidential election, according to Larry Fink, chief executive and co-founder of BlackRock, the largest money management firm in the world. ‘I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime,’ Fink said. ‘The reality is over time it doesn’t matter.’ I beg to differ. Even on Fink’s own turf — growth and return on investment — the difference between the two outcomes is large. November 5 is not a Coke versus Pepsi choice, as we might characterise the race between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole in 1996, or even Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney in 2012. Each of those elections offered moderately diverging visions of the status quo. The gap in possible futures between Kamala Harris or Donald Trump winning is a sharp fork in the road. Swampians will be unsurprised to hear that I see 2024 as more of a choice between kale juice cleanse and methylated spirits. That is not because I view Harris as a transformative prospect who would inject vitamins into America’s lifeblood. It is simply because Harris is not Trump. By default she is better for our health. What Fink must know is that Trump has radically market-relevant plans in his sights. Robert Lighthizer, his senior trade guru, has made it plain that Trump would embark on his tariff war in the first 100 days and does not require congressional approval. The effect of a 20 per cent duty on all imports and 60 per cent levies on China’s would be, um, non-trivial. IMF geeks will know better, but I don’t recall a time when the Fund offered two sets of forecasts for world growth depending on who won the US presidential election, as it did this week. On the Fund’s ‘baseline’ scenario, the world economy would grow by 3.2 per cent next year and the US would grow by 2.8 per cent. On their Trump tariff war scenario, global growth would fall by a quarter in 2025 and by almost double that in 2026. The US would lose a full percentage point of its 2025 growth.” (Ed Luce/FT)
“In the 2017 book ‘On Tyranny,’ historian Timothy Snyder wrote that ‘most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.’ ‘In times like these,’ Snyder observed, ‘individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked,’ for example by self-censoring. Snyder urged readers: do not ‘obey in advance.’ This concept, known as ‘anticipatory obedience,’ is getting more and more attention in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign. Media critics who double as Donald Trump critics say they are seeing it happen now – in big and little ways – in news coverage and corporate decision-making. As NPR's David Folkenflik wrote on Thursday, ‘recent episodes involving major U.S. news organizations have stoked fears that outlets are preemptively self-censoring coverage that could offend former President Donald Trump.’ Folkenflik quoted Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy, who said outlets like the Los Angeles Times are ‘pulling back from their obligation to tell the truth in order to placate the tyrant so he doesn’t come after them.’ The reality is that it's borderline impossible to get into the brains of media bigwigs. What looks to one person like ‘caving to Trump’ looks to another person like balanced news coverage. But Mark Jacobs, who writes the Stop the Presses newsletter, recently asserted that ‘there's no reason to be confident about how any mainstream media would react to coercion from Trump.’ This line of argument from the left is not going away. Nor is it limited to the left. Avowed conservative Amanda Carpenter, a Never-Trump-type Republican, wrote earlier this year that modern autocrats typically ‘win democratically-run elections,’ then use ‘salami tactics’ to ‘slice away at democratic institutions.’ She cited Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who Trump frequently praises, and who has ‘ruthlessly used state power to coerce most media outlets and private enterprises into serving his political goals.’” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“In the fall of 2018, during the convulsive, unformed days after Christine Blasey Ford went public to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, one report in particular rankled Usha Vance. She had clerked for then-Judge Kavanaugh only three years earlier, a role that was often a stepping stone to a clerkship on the Supreme Court, as it was for Usha. When Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh for a promotion to the high court that summer, Republicans presented him as a champion of women, the better to blunt his expected impact. A laudatory letter from 18 of Kavanaugh’s female clerks was submitted to the Senate in July. Usha was by then working for Chief Justice Roberts and barred from this type of political comment. But her husband, J.D., and his mentor and Yale law professor Amy Chua each contributed enthusiastic Wall Street Journal op-eds to the cause … It was on September 16 that Blasey Ford alleged to the Washington Post that Kavanaugh had drunkenly assaulted her when the two were in high school. The same week, The Guardian reported that Chua had told her female students a year earlier that it was ‘not an accident’ that the female clerks Kavanaugh selected ‘looked like models.’ (Chua denied the story but years later conceded to Slate, ‘I did stupidly comment that then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s clerks one year were nice looking — a comment I regret and would never say today.’) By then, Usha was done at the Supreme Court and free to speak her mind. She chose to do so to a private listserv of her former law-school classmates … n the week since Blasey Ford’s accusation, some of Kavanaugh’s former clerks had raced to declare their former boss incapable of assault. But Usha’s remarks, for years, were apparently limited to this: a private and very narrow admonition, commenting only on a rumor that had direct bearing on her own professional accomplishments. Years later, when she did speak publicly, it was to express her sympathy for Kavanaugh and his wife as public figures under pressure. Usha’s professional and personal trajectory has been marked by similarly careful discretion and self-interest. As her husband’s arc in public life has been distinguished by his willingness to say absolutely anything, at great length and often eloquently, to get ahead, Usha has seemed to intentionally say as little as she can get away with.” (Irin Carmon/NYMag)
“In a presidential election so tight that no single poll can possibly be predictive—or comforting—experience is a premium. Stuart Stevens, the campaign cowboy who famously left the GOP to turn his fire on Trump as a member of the Lincoln Project, is nothing if not experienced. I first met Stevens 20 years ago when he was a media consultant on George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, responsible for helping make the GOP convention film featuring footage of Bush throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium after 9/11 that recast the flailing wartime president as a sure-handed Nolan Ryan against a strikeout John Kerry (while fellow Bush adviser Chris LaCivita, now a manager of Trump’s campaign, smeared Kerry with the notorious ‘swift boat’ ads). Later, Stevens ran Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 bid, itself a harbinger of Trumpian things to come, and one of the things that precipitated Stevens’s exit from the party … Stevens: ‘(A)ll of these polls that show Harris getting under 90% of the Black vote are wrong. Nineteen sixty-four, Barry Goldwater got 7% of the Black vote; 2020, Trump got 8%. That’s one point every 56 years. It’s not going to change. I can’t tell you how many times I sat at Republican campaigns with very good pollsters showing us getting 15 to 20% of the Black vote. But I can tell you how many times it happened: Never. Trump yesterday is the best day Trump’s going to have. Today, he’s worse. Tomorrow, he’ll be worse. He’s a guy who is in a physical and mental decline and he clearly is not enjoying himself. He saw that article where Chris LaCivita is making $22 million. He’s surrounded by people who just backed up the truck. They don’t care about Trump. Same thing happened last time with Brad Parscale. Trump gets taken to the cleaners by consultants. The entire Trump campaign has been a large criminal enterprise since inception.” (Joe Hagan/Vanity fair)
“In the past 24 hours, the US administration has verified that North Korea is deploying troops to Russia, with the possibility of them fighting in their war against Ukraine. Ukrainian and South Korean government sources have previously reported that at least 1500 North Korean troops, and possibly up to 10,000, are part of this initial deployment. The mission of the North Koreans remains a mystery. They could be used in occupation duties behind the front lines in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Alternatively, the North Koreans could be used as front-line troops in the eastern offensive by Russian ground forces, or part of Russia’s campaign to push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk. Given the recently signed Russia-North Korea defence pact, Kursk seems like a logical destination for the North Koreans. They are likely to be a logistical burden for the Russians and there will be cultural, doctrinal and tactical challenges with the integration of the North Koreans into Russian ground formations. Given the size of the North Korean contingent, they are unlikely to have a decisive impact on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. Russia is currently suffering around 1200 casualties a day in Ukraine. The North Koreans represent about a week’s human expenditure by Russia.” (Futura Doctrina)
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told Semafor’s Burgess Everett Friday that a Wall Street Journal report about calls between SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘should be investigated’ … The Journal reported Thursday that Musk has been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022, citing former US, European, and Russian officials. The two men allegedly discussed both personal topics as well as others related to business and geopolitical tensions. Musk’s business ties with US intelligence and military agencies has given him ‘unique visibility into some of America’s most sensitive space programs,’ the Journal wrote, and he has access to certain classified information. Musk has not responded to the allegations …” (Diego Mendoza/semafor)