There is no legal or scientific consensus on the definition of terrorism. Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon legally binding definition.
…

The United Nations General Assembly condemned terrorist acts by using the following political description of terrorism in December 1994 (GA Res. 49/60):

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.

While there is no agreed upon definition, the terms is broadly understood to be along the lines of “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.”

It should not be surprising that there is no agreed upon definition. Governments, including (and especially the US and Israel) have opposed creating a definition because they know that almost any definition would implicate them as terrorist states. By not having a clear definition, the word then becomes a pejorative to be used as a term of propaganda against one’s enemies while exempting oneself. If pressed, they will retreat to ‘intent’, that it is the motivation for the actions that matters. This is conveniently self-serving since one can always ascribe benign motives to ones own actions (even if the outcome was appalling) and malignant ones to one’s enemies.

Kyle Kulinski uses the right wing condemnation of some of Hasan Piker’s comments about US atrocities to argue that by any reasonable reasonable definition, especially the sheer numbers of innocent people killed by the actions of the US all over the world over a long period of time, it becomes clear that the US is the biggest perpetrator of terrorism in the world and he says that American people should face up to this brutal reality.

Do you know what your country actually does around the world? Donald Trump bombed an elementary school. They bombed it once, then they bombed it again to kill the survivors. One father got a call to say his daughter had survived the attack, then the U.S. fired another missile at the school and killed her. Little kids’ backpacks and body parts were scattered everywhere. Then they lied about it and pretended Iran had blown up its own kids. That’s your country. Your president did that. Pete Hegseth has made it clear he doesn’t believe in the laws of war and thinks Islam is our enemy. Why would he care if he blows up a school?

The other day, they bombed a wedding. It was a direct hit on a residential area. Reuters says “bloody shoes lay amid the rubble, and wedding decorations that are common in that part of Iran were strewn about.”
…

How about what they’re doing in Cuba? They’re deliberately letting kids with cancer die by strangling the country economically, then blaming it on “socialism.” The New York Times reports that medical supplies and food aren’t reaching the country because nobody will ship there due to the threat of sanctions. People are going hungry, they’re not getting surgery. The Times says people are having to use grocery bags as colostomy bags. Supplies being kept out of the country include “water treatment kits, antibiotics, contraceptives and pregnancy tests,” as well as cancer and tuberculosis treatments. The power grid just collapsed again because they won’t let fuel into the country. And they’re doing this on purpose. They say they’re killing Cubans in order to bring down their government, so they can seize Cuba’s assets and distribute them to their friends. When did al-Qaeda ever starve an entire country in order to plunder its resources? That’s next-level terrorism.

And what about the genocide in Gaza? That’s done by a U.S. proxy state, Israel, with American money and bombs. They’ve killed a minimum of 70,000 people. They’ve wiped out entire families. They’ve systematically wiped out whole neighborhoods. The mosques, the universities, even the graveyards. Israel doesn’t care. They destroy everything. They are doing it so that Gazans want to leave. They are terrorizing them in the hopes they can make Palestinians plead to be allowed to flee the broken remnants of their homeland. They say that’s what they’re doing, they admit that the plan is ethnic cleansing. This is terrorism, and Trump is sending them more 2,000-pound bombs to drop on apartment buildings and hospitals, which they will.

Kulinksi goes back in time to argue that this is not some recent development or that it is exclusively done by Republicans but shows that John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all enthusiastically participated in these kinds of terrorist activities.

Kulinski says that his characterization of the US as a major perpetrator of terrorism will predictably generate great umbrage among people who want to perpetuate the illusion that their country only acts out of noble motives, but notes that there is a curious omission in their response.

The thing you’ll notice is that none of the people who are outraged about Hasan Piker’s remark will provide a counterargument. They won’t say why it’s wrong. It just feels wrong to “American patriots.” But they won’t talk about all the literal, real-world, deadly terror this country inflicts on people we don’t care to think about.
…

The truth needs to matter. In defamation cases, truth is always a defense. The U.S. is the biggest, baddest bully on the block. We do not care about international law, human rights, the Constitution, or justice. How are we supposed to change anything for the better if we can’t acknowledge the most obvious things in the world?

Kulinski thinks that Americans need to grow up and shed the fantasy that they are living in a country that only acts with good intentions and that any of the horrors that the US has committed in the past was due to errors or incompetence or a few rogue actors. They need to face the reality of what their nation is really like, saying “too many Americans are like the kid in the Sopranos who can’t believe his daddy is in the Mafia.”

much of the square footage of my neighborhood is trailer parks.  i wonder if classism is a factor.  also wacky, seems like every time we’ve had an outage, we could hear something exploding a few blocks away right as it happened.  a lil blustery.

–

It is astonishing that Tommy Tuberville, a current member of the US senate who is running the next governor of Alabama, seems to be obsessed with furries, and gave a nearly 20-minutes speech on the senate floor warning about the dangers of furries and the transgender community. You have to listen to the speech to realize how insane these ideas are.

That was not all. He later doubled down, going on a rant on Twitter/X about it.

With just weeks until the midterm elections, Senator Tommy Tuberville, who hopes to be Alabama’s next governor, is ignoring voter concerns to descend into a bizarre anti-furry frenzy.

In a series of social media posts Thursday, Tuberville refused to back down from his outrageous claims that many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of a community of adults who pretend to be animals that have sex with each other.

“I know the deranged Democrats don’t like the fact that I called out the insane FURRY CULTURE this week. But the truth is, there is an ALARMING number of these DERANGED people working in our airline industry,” the Alabama Republican wrote on X. “Don’t believe me? Just a few months ago, PILOTS were MEOWING and BARKING at each other over the radio at DCA.”

Tuberville included a link to an NBC report from April that featured audio of two pilots doing just that: meowing and barking. (The report indicates the pilots were just joking around.)

In another post, Tuberville complained about an “Aviation Furs Meet-up” at the Furry Migration convention in Minneapolis earlier this month. “Ask yourself … would you be comfortable with a MENTALLY ILL FURRY being your pilot?” he wrote on X.
…

The Alabama Republican falsely claimed there was a disturbing trend of violence on the left, specifically stemming from transgender people and furries—and mentioned Tyler Robinson and Thomas Crooks as examples (neither man is trans, nor have they given any indication of being a furry).

We are definitely witnessing seriously deranged behavior but it is not by furries or anyone in the transgender community. It seems to be with Tuberville and the members of his staff who are feeding him this rubbish.

I have no idea what the private lives are of the people whom I encounter in life, whether they be pilots, bus rivers or whatever. They may have all kinds of interests that they indulge in when off-duty. But why should I care? As long as they do their jobs properly, that is sufficient for me.

Naturally, Jimmy Kimmel had fun with this.

Tommy Tuberville gave a 20 minute speech in which he claimed that furries were sick psychos who were flying passenger planes, and that all transgender people should be locked up in mental institutions.

Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community, Tuberville said sternly. Lord help us.

It’s terrifying when you think about this, he continued. When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

I think all airlines have a dress code for their crews that involves wearing a uniform. He’s wrong and is lying.

I am not all concerned about someone, in their free time, choosing to wear clothing that makes them happy, even if it doesn’t conform to conventional social expectations. They are not insane.

I’m more concerned about the lunatics who drag their weird, unfalsifiable, untestable and authoritarian religious beliefs into the public square, where they try to use them to oppress other peoples’ freedoms.

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, and is doing well in the polls. I’m sorry, Alabamians, you are confirming all the offensive stereotypes about your state.

What are interest rates?

FYI, this is all stuff that you can learn about from more politically impartial sources, such as Wikipedia, or websites promoting financial literacy. I’m not saying anything new.

“Interest rates” is a generic term that describes how expensive it is to maintain debt, e.g. if you have a mortgage or credit card debt, you have to pay interest on that debt. But in this context, I’m referring to the Effective Federal Funds Rate (EFFR), which is a matter of US economic policy. The EFFR represents the interest rates that US banks pay on their debts to the US Federal Reserve. The EFFR is not identical to the interest rates that you pay on your own debts, but they’re strongly connected via market mechanisms.

Okay, but why are banks borrowing money?

When you deposit money in a bank, they don’t hold all that money in a vault, they turn around and invest the money. But you still need to be able to withdraw money when you need it, so banks maintain a certain amount of money on hand (aka liquidity). In fact, banks are strictly required to maintain a minimum amount of liquidity. If banks ever have too little liquidity, they borrow money from other banks that have too much. Or, they borrow money from the US Federal Reserve Bank.

So by setting the EFFR, the US Federal Reserve is basically setting the price of liquidity. And that affects the entire financial system.

If interest rates are low, then liquidity is cheap. You can borrow money to buy a house at relatively low interest rates. You can borrow money to start a new business. You can even invest in businesses that produce relatively little value to society, such as cryptocurrency or Twitter.

If interest rates are high, then liquidity is expensive. Starting a business is harder. Investors demand companies produce immediate profit, even if that means enshittifying their product. Even the US national debt becomes more of a concern, because the government, too, pays a higher interest rate.

Depending on your financial position, you may stand to personally gain or lose from higher interest rates. For example, if you have a fixed interest mortgage, lucky you, you’re protected. But the purpose of adjusting interest rates is obviously not to benefit some individuals and punish others, it’s for the health of the entire economy.  In case of a recession or financial panic (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis), the Feds will lower interest rates to inject more money into the system. In case of supply shocks or inflationary spiral (e.g. recent years), the Feds will raise interest rates, basically discouraging spending and tamping down inflation.

The current hikes

So, here’s the EFFR over the last 10 years.

Source: FRED. The graph doesn’t reflect the latest increase in EFFR this month.

In 2020, the Feds suddenly cut rates in response to the pandemic, basically financial relief in the face of hard times. But it couldn’t last. In 2022, inflation started going up, attributed to pandemic stimulus checks, supply chain disruptions, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So the Feds responded by increasing interest rates. Under Biden, the economy was recovering and interest rates were slowly turning around. But Biden also took the blame, and this is probably the biggest reason why Democrats lost the election in 2024.

Trump put the brakes on economic recovery, as I’ve already discussed. He promised tariffs and immigration enforcement. So the Feds, conservative though they are, were concerned he’d make good on those promises, and slowed down interest rate cuts over the next few years.

The latest interest rate hike is pretty strongly related to another Trump policy: war with Iran. It turns out that if you take 20% of the world’s oil supply, and lock it behind the Strait of Hormuz, things get more expensive. Inflation goes up, and the Feds increase interest rates to tamp it down.

Trump, for his part, has been demanding that the Feds cut interest rates. He demanded it in 2025, and is demanding it today. He even installed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Open Markets Committee (which decides interest rates), in an effort to pressure interest rate cuts.  But the latest vote was unanimous, with even Warsh voting to raise interest rates.

Why has Trump been demanding interest rate cuts? It’s nonsensical. The interest rate hikes are easily attributable to his own damn policies.  He’s openly advocating a policy of runaway inflation.

I’ve wondered if maybe Trump stands to personally benefit from lower interest rates. For instance, if he personally holds variable-rate loans. I found a source saying that he did, as of 2019. So basically, he’s advocating a nonsensical policy because of personal corruption. Unforgivable.

But another source argues that he’s demanding interest rate cuts in order to deflect blame onto the Feds. Hard to tell who exactly this would fool, as it requires you to simultaneously understand federal interest rates, and not understand federal interest rates. In any case, also unforgivable.

This has been your periodic reminder that the Nazis do not make the trains run on time. They just blame immigrants when they themselves screw up the trains.

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

When we left off, Win Bear’s ignorance had indirectly caused the villains of TPB to blow themselves up. The Hamiltonian plot is foiled; no nuclear bombs or invading armies are coming through the portal; the North American Confederacy is saved. Happy ending, ticker-tape parade, et cetera.

But wait a minute. There’s a problem that L. Neil Smith glides right past.

As we read earlier in the book, if a Probability Broach closes when an object is partway through, you get a big explosion on both ends. The size of the explosion depends on the mass distribution of the object. Depending on how much mass there is, it could be into the megaton range.

Win and his friends were on the smaller side of the blast, so they escaped with only minor injuries:

The explosion in Auraria was a mild summer breeze compared to what had happened across the river. Clarissa and I were last out of the building, and escaped with mostly minor scrapes and flash burns. She lost the back half of her coveralls, and, sadly, a lot of her beautiful hair. Protecting her eyes, I got a little careless about my own, so I am now sporting a rakish eyepatch until they clone me a transplant.

At least Lucy says it’s rakish.

But if the explosion on the other side was much bigger, what happened to the innocent people who were living next to the Hamiltonians’ hideout? Does Win feel any guilt about that?

Fortunately for his protagonist, Smith has an answer to this:

The Saint Charles Town explosion left a crater a hundred yards across. Of Madison and his people, we never found so much as a shirt button. Their hideout was an isolated building in the middle of an abandoned buffalo feedlot. I was grateful for that, although neighbors who had to shovel themselves out from under several kilotons of bison flops weren’t quite so happy.

This convenient coincidence spares Win from having innocent deaths on his conscience. However, we can infer he wouldn’t have been too bothered either way. He holds the misanthropic attitude common to libertarians, as we see when he speculates about what would have happened if the Hamiltonians had made contact with his world and the explosion had taken place there instead:

It could have been worse. The coextant point in Denver is a densely populated area, the four-hundred block of East Eighth Avenue. Thousands might have died, even some who didn’t deserve to.

With these lines, Smith figures he’s disposed of the problem. But he didn’t. There’s a loose end he’s forgotten to tie up.

Even if no innocents were killed in the explosion, Madison and his confederates certainly were. Are there any legal ramifications for that? There must have been an investigation into what caused it. Does Win have to face criminal charges or answer to a tribunal?

Smith’s implicit assumption is that the Hamiltonians were bad guys and no one mourns them, so no one would care that Win effectively murdered them by sabotaging their technology. But that’s not true. People have rights in the North American Confederacy, remember?

In fact, they take those rights so seriously that the entire Continental Congress voted to disband in the face of a looming invasion, because thwarting the plot would require violating individual rights and they don’t do that no matter the stakes. If the Congress was unable to take action against Madison for that reason, why doesn’t Win get in trouble for doing the thing they refused to do?

Perhaps most people don’t like the Hamiltonians, but Madison should have had some next of kin. Even if he had no relatives, he must have had other ideological allies in the world who would care that he was dead. In the very last resort, one of those professional civil liberties groups that represent people with no other representation should have looked into it. There should have been someone to lay charges against Win.

As Smith said in an earlier chapter, the NAC’s law requires criminals to make restitution to their victims. If you commit an “irrevocable crime, like murder” for which restitution is impossible, then you get ostracized from civilization and either accept lifelong exile to the asteroid mines or else face death by starvation.

So, why doesn’t Win face any punishment? True, he didn’t cause the explosion singlehandedly, but he definitely played a part in it (the legal system calls this comparative fault). If it’s not murder, it’s manslaughter at the very least. Why isn’t he being sent to the asteroids?

It would be one thing if Smith wrote that there was an investigation and Win was acquitted. But he doesn’t. Just as in the earlier scene where Win tortured a prisoner—and, again, should have faced punishment for that under the NAC’s laws, but didn’t—the author takes it for granted that his protagonists are exempt from consequences.

I doubt that Smith noticed this inconsistency, which is a telling piece of evidence for what he really cares about. His overriding belief, like many other conservatives, is that laws should only apply to the outgroup, not to people like him and to those he cares about. He proves it in his own novel, going to great effort to describe a society where everyone’s rights have ironclad protection, then showing people flagrantly violating those rights but facing no consequences for doing so. This dangerous hypocrisy is an object lesson in why people with this ideology should never get to exercise power in the real world.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach

No, a person can’t be swallowed by a sperm whale (strike #1) and no, a person is not going to survive for an hour in the whale’s guts (strike #2). A very large sperm whale is the only whale with a gullet wide enough to swallow an object the size of a person, but not one wearing all the gear involved in scuba diving, and especially not since the whale is adapted to consume soft squishy prey. Furthermore, the gut isn’t just a passive volume — the victim is going to be mashed and squished by the muscular walls.

ScienceNews tries to break the news gently.

But no one has ever observed this process in sperm whales. And researchers aren’t sure sperm whales actually swallow prey whole. When these elusive giants do surface with squid, it’s either with “literal chunks hanging out of their mouths or chunks floating behind them,” Gero says.

Swallowing people is also not in sperm whales’ nature, Reidenberg says. It makes for a thrilling movie night, but “these whales are very gentle when they’re around people who are not bothering them.” So while physiologically possible, their behavior and taste for deep-sea creatures make the events “very, very unlikely.”

You’re also not likely to get hoovered up by a sperm whale by accident. These whales can dive more than two kilometers deep in search of a meal — far deeper than human divers can reach, Gero says.

Popular Science consulted the same whale biologist

.

“More than likely, the human drowns the second they get smashed into the mouth of the whale, whether they were drawn in by a squid or accidentally brought into the mouth of a whale,” he says. “My guess is the person dies the second they enter the mouth.”

Gero raises another interesting possibility. Sperm whales usually prey on boneless squid, so consuming a scuba-outfitted human could be a choking hazard, and could choke to death.

This would certainly make for a shorter movie, but Gero notes that the whale’s body could also have a more lively response to an unwanted foreign object in its mouth.

“When I swallow something that I shouldn’t have, it’s like a non-controllable response — your body just starts moving its mouth and coughing,” Gero says. “In that sort of movement, or freakout, it probably is going to do a lot of physical damage to the human.”

Although Gero acknowledges that he is not a whale anatomist, he still believes that it would be highly unlikely for any living creature to make it into the stomach of a sperm whale, let alone set up camp there.

“There are acids and gases,” he says. “The digestive tract of any mammal is not meant to be a livable place for any prey that ends up there.”

So, yeah, it’s a ridiculous movie with a bad premise.

But you know who is thrilled by it? Ken Ham.

Could Jonah have survived three days and three nights inside the belly of a great fish?

Well, I think more people will be asking that question next month after a new survival thriller movie, Whalefall, hits the box office. This movie is based off a 2023 novel of the same name by author Daniel Kraus, and the premise is basically this: A young man diving in the Pacific Ocean is accidentally swallowed by a hunting sperm whale. He only has one hour’s worth of oxygen left and must find a way to escape the belly of the beast.

Of course, such a story immediately reminds viewers of the biblical account of Jonah—and the author apparently intended that. In an interview he said,

The impetus for the book was that I wanted to treat the Biblical Jonah story with scientific and biological accuracy. I talked with whale experts as I developed the plot, and they would listen to my ideas and say, “You know, that is theoretically possible.” So, that’s why it’s believable: We got the science right.

No, he didn’t get the science right. He talked to experts and cherry-picked the most charitable, tentative statements they made, and scurried off to write a stupid story that would sell, being especially attractive to brain-dead Christians, like Ken Ham. And now we’re going to have to deal with apologists who will claim it’s possible because they saw it in a movie.

Ham did say one honest, revealing thing.

Just as there is no fully naturalistic explanation for how Jonah could have survived such an ordeal, there’s no naturalistic explanation for how Jesus could be crucified, die, be buried in a tomb, and then three days later walk out of that tomb alive. It was a miraculous event that was only possible because God is omnipotent and nothing is impossible for Him.

The story makes no sense, there is no naturalistic explanation, but he’s going to believe it because god said so, and it was a miracle. Who needs a reasonable, factual explanation when you’ve got the whims of a god to back you up?

It’s a great place. I miss the opportunity to visit it.

But now I learn that it was bought up by Drexel University. This was part of an ugly consolidation of academic institutions that distorted higher learning in the the region — they also bought up the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and Salus University, as part of a pattern of expansion. They slapped their name on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (I will never call it that.) And now, on September 1, they abruptly announced that they were closing the Academy as of September 30. That’s rather short notice for a collection that has been growing since 1812.

At the time I lived there, Drexel had a great reputation as an engineering and computer science school, but apparently they’ve now become a massive do-everything school with a focus on making lots of money, and screw science and history. Drexel has become the bad guy in this story.

Keep up with the news at the Save the Museum page, and sign the petition. What the hell happened to Drexel?

The United States is undergoing a version of the “economic shock therapy” that has been used to privatise economies and establish authoritarian capitalist/oligarchic rule in a number of countries that went too far to the left. If you want an in-depth understanding of the subject, Naomi Klein’s definitive work on the subject is still free in audiobook form on youtube. Basically, the strategy is to force through a whole bunch of changes all at once, with the most important being the transfer of public institutions and resources into private hands:

Shock therapy proponents Sachs and Lipton argued in 1990: “The great conundrum is how to privatize a vast array of firms in a manner that is equitable, swift, politically viable, and likely to create an effective structure of corporate control.”^[2]: 4 They recommended that the pace “must be rapid, but not reckless”, and should “probably be carried out by many means”.^[2]: 4 In the view of shock therapy proponents, trade liberalization requires domestic price liberalization first; thus a “big bang” in price liberalization underlying both privatization and trade liberalization forms the “shock” in the moniker “shock therapy”.^[2]: 4

In practice, the rapid application of shock therapy proved generally disastrous in the post-Soviet states.^[2]: 4–6

It’s something that may result in investment and growth, simply because they want control over those public resources and and the power that brings. In many ways, it is simply the looting of a country, and the establishment or reinforcement of the kind of inequality that capitalists and their acolytes demand. It’s done quickly, as smash-and-grab thefts tend to be, and because so much is being done all at once, it’s difficult for the opposition to organize in time to stop it. Even if one project is blocked, others will get by.

People outside the US, and those within the country who are not themselves politically active, often seem to think that because the regime is still in power, and still doing colossal harm, USians aren’t doing anything about it. The reality is that while more needs to be done people are working in opposition. It’s just that the corporate media mostly isn’t covering it, and none of it looks like a revolutionary army marching on the capitol. It’s also not necessarily directed at the problems that are biggest in the headlines. There’s no easy way to remove a fascist regime, once it gets in.

One of my bigger worries for the future is that a lot of the “smashing” being done is designed to make it harder for the US to recover from this nightmare, and harder for USians to see, understand, and oppose current and future efforts at progress. The war on science and education have both been going on for decades, but as with everything else happening right now, it has escalated to an absurd degree, which brings me to the

Call to Action!

The Academy of Natural Sciences is one of the oldest institutions in the United States, and it houses a vast collection of unique and irreplaceable specimens, some collected before it was founded 214 years ago. It is important historically, and it is important to ongoing research and to the ongoing education of the public.

So naturally, it is scheduled to be destroyed.

On September 1st, 2026, Drexel University and the Board of the Academy of Natural Sciences announced the closure of the public museum on the Parkway. The last day is scheduled to be Sunday, September 27, 2026. This is two years shy of the 200th anniversary of the 214-year-old institution’s doors opening to the public. We do not accept closure. The story is not over yet, and you can help change the ending.

It’s hard to overstate what a bad idea this is, and I’d be hard-pressed to really do the topic justice. Thankfully, I don’t have to. The excellent YouTube historian Miniminuteman has a breakdown on what’s happening, as well as a detailed walkthrough of what you, yes YOU can do about it:

For those who cannot watch or listen to the video, for whatever reason, I’m going to copy and paste the steps for saving America’s oldest natural history museum:

HOW TO SAVE THE ACADEMY: Step 1: Go to this link https://save-the-academy.org/ Step 2: Sign this petition https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/p… Step 3: Email Drexel University’s president Merlo’s office: president@drexel.edu In this email CC dew39@drexel.edu and hyb23@drexel.edu (Drexel’s Community Relations Department and Financial Officer & Treasurer) BE PROFESSIONAL AND RESPECTFUL! Pick one of these topics:

• The danger to the collections
• A specific artifact that stood out to you
• Concern over the lack of public engagement
• Think of the children
• Or anything else about this situation that stood out to you

Write a little bit about it in your own words and add it to this email:

To whom it may concern, I am writing to express my opposition to the closure of the oldest natural history museum in the Americas, The Academy of Natural Sciences. The museum and its collections represent an irreplaceable part of our history, as a nation and as a continent, and the decision to close it is misguided and against the will of the people who the museum exists to serve.

This decision was made without consulting the people or attempting to find a reasonable path forward to keep The Academy open. Beyond the obvious damage to the priceless artifacts within The Academy, this decision is also guaranteed to become an enormous stain on the reputation of Drexel that the people on whom your institution relies will not soon forget.

I stand with the thousands of others who advise you to overturn the decision to close The Academy at the end of the month, provide more transparency about your motivation for closing it and work with the people, community, institutions and city of Philadelphia to find a path forward to keep The Academy open for generations of curious minds to come. Do the right thing,

Send to president@drexel.edu, dew39@drexel.edu and hyb23@drexel.edu

Step 4: submit a written comment to the mayors office
You can use this one (but change it up a bit):
I want to write to express my concern over Drexels’ decision to close the Academy of Natural Sciences. I believe that this decision will do immense harm to our national heritage and community. Myself and many others implore you to fight to preserve this irreplaceable institution so it may continue to serve the community for years to come.

Do the right thing,

Step 5: express your support to the city council members fighting to save the Academy: https://phlcouncil.com/council-members/ Or contact your stat rep: https://www.palegis.us/find-my-legisl…

Step 6 (if you are brave): Call Drexel University’s president Merlo’s office to express your concerns BE PROFESSIONAL AND RESPECTFUL! +1-215-895-2100

I would also recommend you check out Miniminuteman’s work, because he makes great stuff.

It’s hard to know exactly what will happen to the contents of the museum if this goes through. There’s no question that some would be destroyed. It’s also likely that some will be sold off to private collectors, because that’s more or less what’s happening to all the public resources of the United States right now.

Do what you can, and do it as soon as you’re able, because we only have till the end of September.

The thrill that riders experience comes from the rapid changes in velocity, that results in the so-called g-forces they experience when their velocity undergoes changes in magnitude or direction over a short time interval. In the latter case, the greater the speed and the smaller the circle in which they turn, the higher the g-value. But sudden changes in the acceleration (like a sudden drop to almost free-fall) can also produce the kind of disorienting effects that riders seem to enjoy

But the human brain is not a rigid object in the skull. It floats in a protective liquid and sudden movements of the head results in a lag between the motion of the skull and the brain inside that causes the brain to hit the inside of the skull, just like a passenger in a car that hits an object and comes to a sudden halt gets thrown against the windshield, unless they are tightly belted and there are airbags so that the rate of change in the passenger’s speed is greatly reduced and the impact is spread over a much wider area. It is these rapid changes that cause brain damage such as concussions. These impacts are the source of the CTE injuries increasingly reported by football players due to the repeated collisions they experience, and is of increasing concern to rugby and soccer players as well.

But the basic laws of physics and the nature of brain structure may be signaling that we have reached, and perhaps exceeded, the threshold at which these rides can be taken safely. An amusement park is now being sued for designing a ride that is causing serious injury and even death.

California’s Six Flags Magic Mountain is facing lawsuits from three people who alleged they suffered “catastrophic brain damage” after riding the X2 rollercoaster.

More than 100 other people also claimed that they experienced traumatic brain injuries from the attraction at the Valencia amusement park, according to the law firm representing the plaintiffs.
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The ride has faced increased scrutiny in recent months amid reports of riders becoming gravely injured.

In July, two women experienced brain hemorrhages and had to undergo emergency surgery after going on the X2 – one of whom, 25-year-old Naomi Greer-Wilkinson, remains hospitalized. Attorneys say that doctors attributed the injuries to a “rapid acceleration-deceleration event” they experienced on the X2.

An August CNN investigation found that over nearly 20 years there have been more than a dozen reports of serious injuries, including two deaths, associated with the X2 coaster.
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The park describes the X2 as a “fifth-dimension wing roller coaster [that] will have even the most hardened thrill seeker screaming” and that is “downright scary”. It features seats that rotate 360 degrees and flip as the ride reaches speeds of up to 76mph, racing through half loops that suddenly become “sheer drops”.

More than 300 people contacted Dordick’s firm to report injuries, he said. Attorney Christopher Bulone said that experts have said the ride was built to be more dangerous than others, and it has more variables and forces.

“It’s the design of this ride that makes it inherently dangerous and makes it dangerous in a way that no reasonable rider would expect,” he said. “Time after time innocent people are coming off the ride with permanent brain damage.”

Companies must really be compelled to limit the dangers that riders experience. We simply cannot trust in the good sense of people, especially young people, to avoid rides that have such risks. As long as such rides exist, very often peer pressure, the desire to prove to one’s friends that one is not afraid, may persuade people to go on the rides even if they personally have misgivings.