The Advocate - Issue 1 - October 2, 2020

Volume 55, Issue 1 October 2,2020 advocate-online.net

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Determination of fate in 2020 election PAGE 2

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RBG LEAVES A STRONG LEGACY

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New discoveries on Venus

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OPINION | COLUMN

Chris Barney The Advocate

A D V O C AT E-O N L I N E.N E T

“DETERMINATION OF FATE” DUE IN NOVEMBER Biden, and then declaring him senile and unfit for office. He would thus be removed and Harris would step up.

In the history of U.S. presidential elections there has always been some level of aggressive competition. Each candidate is striving for victory, each candidate trying to best their opponents. Usually there is some level of decorum about the process, regardless about how each party feels about the other.

This year isn’t like that, at all. It is so vastly different that I would hardly call it an “election.”

Rather, I would call it a “determination of fate.”

Web Graphic.

This issue isn’t just about this year’s candidates, though.

The other overriding conflict that makes this a “determination of fate” are the ongoing street protests, such as those seen for months now in Portland. On one level it seems to be a battle about whether the police are good or bad – whether major reforms are needed. However, these confrontations have moved beyond that. Though the clashes are, in theory, between Black Lives Matter allies and the counterprotesters, often a group known as Patriots (not to be confused with the NFL team), they have www.advocate-online.net reached a point where it is basically a proBiden protest versus a pro-Trump protest.

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Before I explain what I mean by “determination of fate,” let me set the stage. The recent political climate has been quite hostile. There have been many attempts to remove various elected officials from their positions, there is much public conflict regarding the police, and some parts of the country have become like a war zone. One of the biggest factors affecting all of this is the suspense around who will be in the White House for the next four years.

This is where the phrase I suggested comes into play.

I coined this upcoming election as a determination of fate because it seems to me there are two clearly defined paths we could go down, pending the results in November. The outlook is, honestly, quite dismal. There are two candidates, at this point: The Republicans have incumbent President Donald Trump, the Democrats have former Vice President Joe Biden – each one with a very different campaign.

Before I state my opinion on the matter, let me explain a little about each side.

The big deal with Trump is that one side believes he is the kind of person that we need in office, that he is doing good for our country. The other side says that he is detrimental to our country and that he is bad because he is undoing a lot of what President Barack Obama did while in office.

On the flip side, we have Biden. His supporters say that Biden knows what’s up and can fix the damage that Trump has caused. The other side says that Biden could just be a front – that the true goal may be to get California U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris in the Oval Office by electing

The reason our fate hangs in the balance is, because, according to some people, myself included, if Trump is re-elected there is a very real possibility this country could be faced with an American “Civil War II.” On the other hand, if Biden wins this country will be headed straight down the toilet.

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Ultimately, either Positions Available outcome isn’t great, • Writers • Advertising Managers • Artists • Graphic Designers and this country is in • Cartoonists • Photographers for a world of hurt no • Videographers matter who comes out on top. I know this is a dark perspective, and I generally like to see at least a glimmer of hope with these things. While I believe that there is darkness to come regardless of who wins, I will state that I personally have a sense of hope. To put it simply, I believe in God and I believe that God has blessed this nation from its founding. Despite the looming darkness, I believe that things will work out for good, no matter how bad things get.

I truly hope and pray that this country can find its way out of this proverbial pickle it has gotten into.

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OPINION | COLUMN

OCTOBER 2, 2020

PHOSPHINE DISCOVERIES ON VENUS RAISE MANY QUESTIONS Carson Koch The Advocate

Venus is likely the closest thing to the biblical description of hell: a hot, violent, destructive, inhospitable horror of a planet. It is similar in size to Earth, but due to a runaway greenhouse effect has an atmosphere 92 times thicker than that of the surface of the Earth, and an average surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

On top of that, it rains sulfuric acid there.

When the USSR sent a lander there, technicians only gave it a mere 30 minutes’ life expectancy.

However, this little lander-that-could managed to hang on for 2 hours and 7 minutes before being simultaneously crushed and melted by Venus’s catastrophic conditions.

While the planet was named for the roman goddess of beauty, science has truly revealed her for what she is – hell in the night sky.

Astonishingly enough, however, scientists have recently found evidence for life on Venus. Step aside, Mars!

What scientists are typically looking for in the search for alien life are what’s called biosignatures. These come in many forms; for instance,methane, a gas that decays very quickly. Having a large amount of a gas that decays quickly could indicate that there are a lot of things on a planet, that are, for lack of a better term, doing a lot of farting. Or a lot of bacteria breaking things down. Either way, something living is breaking something down and creating new things, although these biosignatures are often explained away Web Graphic. quickly by geologic or astrophysical processes.

One of these biosignatures is called phosphine, and it is the big fish: It’s a molecule strongly associated with the chemistry of life that has few methods of production outside of life, especially on rocky planets such as Venus.

And now, astronomers have found phosphine on Venus.

The implications of the announcement made Sept. 14 in the Nature Astronomy journal are massive; so massive, in fact, that they prompted NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine to respond on Twitter with the message, “It’s time to prioritize Venus.”

To date, the discovery of phosphine on Venus might be

the biggest development in the case for locating alien life.

Phosphine has already been detected in Jupiter and Saturn, as under extreme conditions it can be produced by simply jamming hydrogen and

phosphorus together – proving that, in fact, the material can be produced in large quantities without life.

However, Jupiter and Saturn are gaseous, and researchers say that rocky planets such as Venus and Earth simply do not have the energy to create phosphine in large quantities without the aid of living things.

Even on Earth, the creation of phosphine is very mysterious. It is often found where anaerobic life forms exist, but we have never actually seen anaerobic life forms produce it, a subtle yet important distinction that might prompt further research into the subject.

Phosphine is also very easily broken down by light,

Cover by: Web Photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Wikimedia Commons

which means to have a lot of it, there needs to be an abundant source. And, Venus has a lot of it: 5-to-20 parts per billion, in its atmosphere. At first glance, that might seem very small, but for perspective that is a few thousand times more than what is found here on Earth.

With the initial data we have now, many experts can see little to no explanation for the presence of this molecule aside from anaerobic life.

It cannot be understated that more research is needed. Venus has long been neglected in being studied.

As it stands, the only current mission studying the planet is one, lonesome Japanese orbiter, called Akatsuki.

As a result, the picture we have of its atmosphere is very incomplete. Its upper atmosphere is where we think life could exist, needing to live in tiny droplets of water and sulphuric acid, suspended in the air. To call it extreme would be an understatement.

Still, we currently have no explanation for phosphine on Venus, other than life. As the saying goes, it is never aliens, until it is aliens.

This apparent discovery is momentous, out of the blue, and quite frankly,mind-blowing. It will certainly prompt more research there. We live in a stunningly huge universe, and we have only begun to scratch the surface of what even our closest planetary neighbor has to offer. We have a lot to learn, a lot of big questions to answer, and this discovery has opened the most recent chapter in answering the question of whether or not we are alone in the vast black expanse we call space.

With renewed focus and effort, maybe we can finally find that first bit of tiny microbial life, in a place where we thought it least possible.

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Terris Harned Staff Writer The Advocate encourages readers to share their opinion by letters to the editor and guest columns for publication. All submissions must be typed and include the writer’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be printed unless requested. Original copies will not be returned to the author. The Advocate will not print any unsigned submission.

Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words and guest columns should not exceed 600. The decision to publish is at the discretion of the editorial board. The Advocate reserves the right to edit for style, punctuation, grammar and length. Please bring submissions to The Advocate in Room 1369, or e-mail them to advocatt@mhcc.edu. Submissions must be received by 5 p.m. Monday the week of publication to be considered for print. Opinions expressed in columns, letters to the editor or advertisements are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Advocate or MHCC.

Terris Harned is a 41 year old first-year MHCC student who’s planning on pursuing a transfer to PSU for a B.A. in Communications. After he graduates he intends to pursue either journalism or a career as a development consultant/ grant writer. Terris enjoys video games on his PC and Nintendo Switch, camping and fishing, and spending time with his wife and their two cats.

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EDITORIAL

A D V O C AT E-O N L I N E.N E T

THE NATION MOURNS FOR RUTH BADER GINSBURG On Sept. 19, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, noted Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, died after battling pancreatic cancer.

She was the second woman to have been successfully nominated for the Supreme Court, following Sandra Day O’Connor, and was the first Jewish female Supreme Court justice. Ginsburg was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993, serving a total of 27 years on the nation’s highest court.

his home for dinner and made sexist remarks. “He asked all of us to stand up and tell him ‘What we were doing, taking a seat that could be occupied by another man?’ ” she remembered.

Ironically, the dean’s position would eventually be filled by Harvard law professor Albert Martin Sacks, who strongly advocated for Ginsburg’s employment, and the position’s first female (dean of Harvard Law) would be Elena Kagan in 2003, who would become the fourth

This week, Americans have mourned Ginsburg, coastto-coast. Rising all the way to one of the highest positions in the country, fighting barriers of discrimination along her path, she remained humble in remembering that the fight for equality is ever-permanent. She explicitly said that her favorite amendment within the Constitution is the 14th Amendment, citing the words, “... and nor shall any state deny to any persons the equal protection of the laws.”

Few have earned the widespread respect and love of the people more than Ginsburg, who made friendships with her judicial opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, and even drew President Trump to personally pay his respects outside the Supreme Court this week. And even fewer prominent officials have embodied the same idea of equality as Ginsburg.

Ginsburg also provided a dissenting opinion on Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), which revolved around gender pay discrimination. Upon the conclusion of the case, she said that the Court’s ruling was not an accurate reflection of how wage discrimination is performed in practice.

Next was a case which resulted in a majority opinion on Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which questioned if states must license a marriage between a same-sex couple and if states must recognize a samesex marriage performed in another state. Ginsburg was noted to have been particularly outspoken, famously challenging the argument that the purpose of marriage was to sire children and contending that same-sex marriage does not intrude in any way on the right of another person’s marriage.

Ginsburg was a noted follower of loose constructionism, or as being a “a living constitutionalist.” As a living constitutionalist, she advocated that the definitions and meanings within the U.S. Constitution are dynamic and ever-evolving to new situations.

A look back at her remarkable life surely helps explain how, and why, this is true. Born Joan Ruth Bader in 1933 to a furrier and a garment factory .worker, Ginsburg grew up to be the only surviving child of Nathan and Celia Bader, after her elder sister Marilyn died at age 6 (when Ginsburg was 18 months old).

She was interviewed in 2008 on the news show “60 Minutes,” where she was asked about her perspective on being a living constitutionalist. She replied that her views were similar to those of Thurgood Marshall (first Black Justice in the Supreme Court) and quoted him saying, “I celebrate not the Constitution that was published in 1787, but what the Constitution has become.”

She described her mother as an excellent student in her youth who was forced to drop out of school to assist in covering her brother’s college expenses. Celia Bader instilled a strong sense of value in education in her, due to having missed out on finishing school.

Ginsburg said the source of her motivation for women’s rights was ignited when her mother died, the day before her own high school graduation.

She would go on to Cornell University where she would meet her husband, Martin Ginsburg, in her first year there. She often described her husband as being “the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain.”

Shortly after graduating at the top of her class, Ginsburg married Martin and started a family. Then, he was drafted into the military for two years while she raised her first child, Jane, as a single mother.

When Martin came back from military service, Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine females out of 500 students and would become the first female to join the prestigious Harvard Law Review. She recalls a story about her experience with sexism at Harvard in the documentary series “RBG,” where the dean of Harvard Law invited all the female students to PA G E 4

She added that after the Constitution was published,definitions have changed over time without the court’s permission, such as the “we the people” proclamation – noting that the original definition did not include women, African-Americans, or Native Americans but has evolved into including those groups.

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female justice in the Supreme Court. In Ginsburg’s last year of law studies, she decided to enroll in Columbia Law School when her husband took a job in New York City. She graduated Columbia Law School tied for first in her class and just as she broke the gender barrier at the Harvard Law Review, was its first woman graduate.

Justice Ginsburg is widely recognized as being a fierce advocate for women’s rights, both prior to and while serving on the bench. A few of those cases where she had battled for women’s rights on the bench include a majority opinion on United States v. Virginia (1996), which addressed a controversial male-only admission policy at the Virginia Military Institute. She argued that female exclusion at the military college was a violation of the 14th Amendment.

Ginsburg summarized her view on the Constitution with the statement, “I see the Constitution as striving for a more perfect union.”

Given the nation’s current period of bitter political conflict, we at the Advocate join others in hoping that this determined, dedicated woman may rest in peace.