It’s a shame that Merwin K. Hart’s life has drifted into obscurity, because in his prime he was a real dazzler, one of the brightest stars from the Golden Age of American Paranoia.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Hart ran an organization called The National Economic Council. Neither a government agency nor a laboratory for research, the NEC served as a propaganda funnel for the anxieties of the postwar corporate elite. Men of fortune, like the du Ponts (chemical magnates) and the Pews (of Charitable Trust fanfare) would turn over large sums of money to Hart, who would in turn blast out warnings about the “three million” immigrants who had entered the country “illegally” at the close of World War II, causing a “housing shortage.” Or the “deceit” of international Jewry. Or the hidden subversive content in certain college textbooks.
Hart’s favorite freakout was socialism, and how terrifyingly close the United States was to a socialist dystopia. “Our country grew great through freedom,” he warned hundreds of university trustees in 1948. “Do we want the United States to drift into a Socialism like that of Britain ― which many of us feel is only a transitory stop on the road to State Absolutism such as that of Russia?” Once upon a time, England and the Soviet Union were considered comparable evils on the American right.
“Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s polemic about George W. Bush and the War on Terror, remains the highest-grossing documentary of all time. If the national mood was splintered when that movie opened in 2004, it’s nothing compared to what it is now, almost two years into Donald Trump’s presidency.
So, naturally, Moore is channeling his most famous film to explore that exact subject: “Fahrenheit 11/9” seeks to “bring Trump down” before November’s midterm elections.
HuffPost has an exclusive look at the first trailer for “Fahrenheit 11/9,” a reference to the day Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 election. It juxtaposes footage of Trump rallies and neo-Nazi protests with images of Moore using Flint water to hose down the Michigan governor’s gated driveway. Roger Stone, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Parkland massacre survivor Emma González and a host of others from both sides of the so-called aisle appear in the film.
Puerto Rico has conceded that Hurricane Maria killed more than 1,400 people on the island last year and not just the 64 in the official death toll.
The government acknowledged the higher death toll with no fanfare in a report submitted to Congress this week in which it detailed a $139 billion reconstruction plan for the island.
That quiet acknowledgement was first reported Thursday by The New York Times.
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AFP Contributor via Getty Images
A man wades on the water while pushing his bicycle through a flooded street in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Catano, Puerto Rico on September 22, 2017.
Rick Gates, the prosecution’s star witness in the federal fraud trial of Paul Manafort, testified Tuesday that he once had an extramarital affair that involved maintaining a London apartment.
The topic came up as Kevin Downing, Manafort’s attorney, tried to paint Gates as self-motived and untrustworthy by hammering away at his admitted practice of filing doctored expense reports.
Downing asked about “the secret life of Rick Gates,” inquiring whether Gates had kept an apartment in London and if he had engaged in an extramarital relationship there.
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Rick Gates, a former campaign aide to President Donald Trump, departs federal court in Washington in December 2017.Joshua Roberts / Reuters file
About 20,000 people have lost their homes and many moved to unaffected areas of the Indonesian island of Lombok after a powerful 6.9 magnitude earthquake left nearly 100 people dead.
Boats were sent to evacuate about 2,000 tourists from the nearby Gili islands.
Witnesses spoke of chaos and terror during Sunday’s quake, with thousands of buildings damaged, and power and communication lines cut.
Aid agencies said the priority was to provide shelter for residents.
Many are said to be too scared to return to their homes.
The agencies said the impact was far bigger than another quake that hit Lombok last week, killing 16 people.
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Image caption Moment the quake struck caught on camera
The Crozet islands is located halfway between the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica. One of the islands in the archipelago, named Île aux Cochons, is home to the largest colony of king penguins on earth. The king penguin is the second largest penguin species on earth after the emperor penguin. The last time scientists counted the population there was an estimated population of 2,000,000 of the 3 foot tall highly specialized birds. Reviewing satellite images and other photographic evidence, Antarctic scientists report that the colony has collapsed to a population of only 200,000. This is significant because the Île aux Cochons represents one third of the earth’s King Penguin population. These birds do not make a nest on the treeless island, instead they “lay one egg at a time and carry it around on their feet covered with a flap of abdominal skin, called a brood patch”.
The University of Vienna describes the conditions on which this particular penguin requires for survival. Hint, they are not flexible.
King penguins are in fact picky animals: in order to form a colony where they can mate, lay eggs and rear chicks over a year, they need tolerable temperature all year round, no winter sea ice around the island, and smooth beach of sand or pebbles. But, above all, they need an abundant and reliable source of food close by to feed their chicks. For millennia, this seabird has relied on the Antarctic Polar Front, an upwelling front in the Southern Ocean concentrating enormous amounts of fish on a relatively small area. Yet, due to climate change, this area is drifting south, away from the islands where most King penguins currently live. Parents are then forced to swim farther to find food, while their progeny is waiting, fasting longer and longer on the shore. This study predicts that, for most colonies, the length of the parents’ trips to get food will soon exceed the resistance to starvation of their offspring, leading to massive King penguin crashes in population size, or, hopefully, relocation.
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A huge colony of king penguins on the Île aux Cochons in 1982
The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.
The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.
The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.
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Our correspondent went to the deserts of Patagonia to examine how China secured its new base, a symbol of its growing clout in the region.
Spinning objects are hypnotic and fascinating, as last year’s fidget-spinner craze overwhelmingly demonstrated. But even the fastest fidget spinner trails the new reigning champion of fast-whirling objects: a tiny dumbbell that can rotate 60 billion times per minute.
It’s enough to make your head spin.
Spin doctors — er, researchers — recently created the nanoscale rotor and levitated it in a vacuum, blasting it with lasers to set it spinning. Their research, described in a new study, could help reveal how different substances respond under extreme conditions and how friction behaves in a vacuum, Tongcang Li, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, as well as electrical and computer engineering, at Purdue University, said in a statement.
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Researchers at Purdue University have levitated a nanoparticle in vacuum and driven it to rotate at high speed, bringing them one step closer to figuring out the properties of vacuum and quantum mechanics.Vincent Walter / Purdue University
Rachael Pomerleau, 40, had taken opioids before, having had procedures like wisdom teeth removal and gallbladder surgery.
But during the tumultuous two years that her children, now ages 7 and 8, were born, opioids took over her life, she told HuffPost. She was put on bed rest as a result of complications with the pregnancy of her daughter. A few months after her daughter’s birth, she became pregnant with her son. This time, her back and abdominal pain grew so severe that doctors prescribed Vicodin followed by Percocet during her pregnancy ― which wasn’t an unusual prescription for pregnant women at the time, prior to the onset of the opioid epidemic.
“It hurt so bad,” she said. “There were times when I could hardly walk without being in pain.”
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Erin Schumaker/HuffPost
Rachael Pomerleau, 40, was prescribed opioids in a medical setting. Her years of addiction have included homelessness, loss of custody of her children and struggles to get the resources she needs.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
‘Fahrenheit 11/9’
Our correspondent went to the deserts of Patagonia to examine how China secured its new base, a symbol of its growing clout in the region.
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James' World 2 