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Klan race thought mirrored the principles of eugenics, accepted in the 1920s as state-of-the-art science. Resting on Lamarck’s mistaken genetics, eugenical theory assumed that socially acquired characteristics could be inherited. From this pseudo-science it logically followed that those of northern European ancestry ruled because they were superior and deserved to rule.

WHAT ALL THESE FOUNDERS SHARED was respectability; however much they exaggerated or lied, they passed as honorable citizens, and that was key to the Klan’s success

The involvement of lower caste Hindus in RSS movements has always fascinated me, because inherently RSS stands for all those values which could damage their very existence. I guess the reward is the same here: being an insider, belonging to a community, expressing and acting on resentments (this is huge and I guess RSS is banking on this effectively), participating in drama, feeling religiously and morally righteous.

"I consider the Ku Klux Klan’s methods of recruitment, the satisfactions it brought to its members, and the deep structures of its ideology. Its allures were manifold: they included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and morally righteous, of turning a profit."

"As a student of social movements, I am less interested in condemnation than in explanation. Explaining requires that the historian avoid cheap shots and try to understand why perfectly reasonable people supported the Klan."
Interestingly I am trying to understand why perfectly reasonable people support the RSS.

First Ku Klux Klan, established after the Civil War as a secret fraternity with the aim of reimposing servitude on African Americans after the end of slavery.Its tools were lynchings, torture, and other forms of terrorism designed to inhibit any challenge to white supremacy. It had never entirely disappeared but faded somewhat after achieving its goal: electoral disfranchisement & economic subjugation of black people

Everything we are made of also moves through the depths of the Earth, in the geological cycles associated with continental drift. That deep-Earth cycle, as well as the use of fossil fuels, connects the materials that build us to extinct mammoths and dinosaurs, and even to the first life on Earth.

A smaller fraction of all the carbon around and inside us was manmade, resulting from atmospheric nuclear tests just a few decades ago. Other atoms started out on the Moon, on Mars, in asteroids and comets, or elsewhere in the solar system, and fell to the Earth sometime between the birth of the planet and days ago.

A little of the carbon in everything we eat was formed within only thousands of years, created somewhere in the Earth’s stratosphere when shards of atoms from far away, having bounced around the Galaxy for millions of years following an initial kick from a stellar explosion, finally ran into our planet.

The most common element in our bodies, hydrogen, is as old as the universe. Other elements were formed generally over 5 billion years ago, in the interior of stars. Some atoms were formed later, as radioactive stardust within the Earth, which decayed to create, for example, some of the calcium in our bones.

When we trace the pathways of our impermanence, we realize that the components of our bodies connect us to the plants and animals around us, bacteria within us, to volcanism, comets, cosmic rays, and to the Sun’s light, all the way to the birth and death throes of stars throughout the Galaxy and to the beginning of the universe itself.

Some of our brain cells do survive for long times, even if the materials out of which they are made are replaced, but it appears that we have to acknowledge that it is more likely that even memories are patterns that are exchanged rather than particular fixed atomic clusters that remain with us from the moment they are formed to the moment we forget, or die.

Planetary systems originate from ancient clouds of interstellar gas. If there is enough mass in a cloud for its gravitational pull to overcome the outward gas pressure, it begins to collapse toward what becomes its central star.

Once every few millennia, an object with a diameter of some 50 m collides with the Earth. One such collision happened in 1908, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Russia. That “Tunguska event” had an estimated strength of several tens of millions of tons of TNT. The explosion is estimated to have knocked over approximately 80 million trees in the central Siberian region and would have killed all life in its path.

Exactly when and where a planet forms relative to the time when hydrogen and helium are blown out of the area of the disk likely determines whether the planet becomes a gas giant (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune) or a rocky “terrestrial” planet (like Mercury, Venus, the Earth, or Mars).

Brown dwarfs do have some limited nuclear fusion going in their interior, but that involves deuterium rather than pure hydrogen. There is but little deuterium in stars, however, so the energy that is released by its fusion is limited. If no nuclear fusion occurs at all, which is the case when the object has a mass of less than approximately one-eightieth of that of the Sun, it is formally designated a planet.

Consequently, the Church did not take official action against the book until 1616, when it was taken out of circulation pending modifications that would make it acceptable (after which the Church did not take it off the index of forbidden books in its original form until 1758).

When, in the year of his death, in 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Spheres of Heaven suggesting that not the Earth, but the Sun was at the center of the planetary system, this created some stir. Copernicus, anticipating trouble, had made it a highly technical book, in which he advocated his model as something of practical use but not necessarily as the physical truth.

When ejected solar magnetic field interacts with that of the Earth, atoms are accelerated that, on impact with the Earth’s atmosphere, cause oxygen and nitrogen to glow in our skies, thus forming the auroras.

When ejected solar magnetic field interacts with that of the Earth, atoms are accelerated that, on impact with the Earth’s atmosphere, cause oxygen and nitrogen to glow in our skies, thus forming the auroras.

Electric currents heat the solar atmosphere to millions of degrees. This causes gas to evaporate off the Sun, forming the solar wind, which drags parts of the Sun’s magnetic field with it.

During a total solar eclipse we see coronal rays projecting into interplanetary space, which are shaped by the Sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind.

A more recent complication in carbon-14 dating was caused by hundreds of nuclear explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans conducted from 1945 through 1980. These explosions have added considerably to the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere: by 1964, the carbon-|4 concentration in atmospheric carbon dioxide had nearly doubled because of the nuclear explosions conducted most frequently by the US and the Russia.

Despite the Earth’s weak global magnetic field during the Laschamp period, a rather patchy remnant field still shielded the Earth fairly well from cosmic rays, so that the carbon-14 count in humans has likely always been within a factor of approximately two of the present value.

at a time when people—modern Homo sapiens, with Neanderthals recently having become extinct—had slowly spread across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, but with few traces of human presence found in Europe, and none having been seen in the Americas.

That was a time when the Earth’s dipole field weakened for several centuries to only one-twentieth of the current strength: compass navigation would have been impossible in those days. But then, traveling was neither easy nor common anyway: that period was deep within the last ice age,

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look
What happens With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

At a globally mean human age of about 35 years, this implies that, on average, each cell in a person’s body has a few tens of thousands of carbon atoms in it that were not on the Earth when that individual was born, including some that fell to Earth perhaps only weeks ago.

The result is that the gas being blown out of the comet forms into a straight tail which points close to directly away from the Sun.

The collision of the solar wind particles with the atoms in the comet coma results in ionization of the gas, and the ions are subsequently dragged away from the coma. For comets within the part of the solar system where the planets are, the movement of the comet’s nucleus relative to the Sun is much slower than that of the outflowing solar wind almost everywhere.