I agree with Governor Cuomo that we do not have to choose between safety of children and opening the schools. We can achieve both if done properly and competently. The President is giving the nation a false choice between opening the schools and safety just as he did in opening businesses prematurely and it achieved neither. There is still enough time to take preventive measures which will help to open the schools safely in September. The measures start with the President himself. Start wearing mask yourself and mandate it for the nation. Stop and discourage rallies and gatherings which are source of close contacts and spread of virus. Actively promote, not undermine, mask wearing, hand washing, and social distancing. Make it mandatory for all your personnel and lead by example. This should be followed and promoted by all states and have one message for the nation to follow.

By September, it will create an environment which is much safer for the schools to open with original CDC guidelines (not watered down). During the months of July and August, White House and Congress should provide help to schools to prepare for the schools to open in September.

Blustering and threats to withhold aid will backfire and nation will pay a heavy price.

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

(Great searing article filled with raw emotions on confederate monuments. On the same subject, Lincoln Project is airing an advertisement, ” Treason” which depicts the confederate leaders and generals as traitors which took arms against USA and lost. They don’t deserve monuments.)

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

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posted by f.sheikh

( Shared by Dr. Shoeb Amin)

Earth has proven unique in its ability to host life in the universe so far, leading us to question if we’re truly alone.Maybe we’re not.Scientists have calculated that there could be a minimum of 36 active, communicating intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy, according to a new study. However, due to time and distance, we may never actually know if they exist or ever existed.The study published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal. Previous calculations along these lines have been based on the Drake equation, which was written by astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1961.

“Drake developed an equation which in principle can be used to calculate how many Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations there may be in the Galaxy,” the authors wrote in their study. “However, many of its terms are unknowable and other methods must be used to calculate the likely number of communicating civilizations.”So scientists at the University of Nottingham developed their own approach.”The key difference between our calculation and previous ones based on the Drake equation is that we make very simple assumptions about how life developed,” said study coauthor Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, in an email to CNN.”One of them is that life forms in a scientific way — that is if the right conditions are met then life will form. This avoids impossible to answer questions such as ‘what fraction of planets in a habitable zone of a star will form life?’ and ‘what fraction of life will evolve into intelligent life?’ as these are not answerable until we actually detect life, which we have not yet done.”

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posted by f.sheikh