Graphic, above: A new version of You Are Here. The blue dot in the center is where you're reading this.  Laniakea is the galaxy supercluster that's home to the Milky Way, the Solar System and Earth. It was defined in September 2014, when a group of astronomers led by R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii published a new way of defining superclusters according to the relative velocities of galaxies. The new definition of the local supercluster subsumes the prior defined local supercluster, the Virgo Supercluster, now an appendage.

The Laniakea Supercluster encompasses 100,000 galaxies stretched out over 160 megaparsecs (520 megalight-years). Superclusters are some of the universe’s largest structures, and have boundaries that are difficult to define, especially from the inside. The team used radio telescopes to map out the motions of a large collection of local galaxies. Within a given supercluster, all galaxy motions will be directed inward, toward the center of mass. In the case of Laniakea, this gravitational focal point is called the Great Attractor, and influences the motions of our Local Group of galaxies (where our Milky Way Galaxy resides) and all others throughout our supercluster.

The new method used to analyze galaxy movements to distinguish peculiar motion from cosmic expansion is Wiener filtering, which works for well-defined positional information, allowing analysis out to about 300 Mly (92 Mpc), showing flow patterns. With this limitation, Laniakea is shown to be headed in the direction of the Shapley Supercluster, so both Shapley and Laniakea may be part of a greater complex. 

[other text:]  . . . The scientists from Hawaii were able to determine the strings of galaxies by measuring the cosmic flow of galaxies by subtracting cosmic expansion to see the gravitational pull of galaxies. Figuring out the pull allowed them to paint the strings.

You can read more about this new discovery in Nature and by watching the fascinating video below. 

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Bud Weinstein, SMU, in re: House Oversight, Senate EPW, Launch Investigation into Improper NRDC Influence Over EPA  Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), and U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, along with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), sent letters to Gina McCarthy, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The letters request documents and information regarding the NRDC’s involvement in drafting the Agency’s proposed regulations for carbon emissions from existing power plants, as well as their influence in preventing the proposed Pebble Mine project from moving forward in the permitting process.

“It appears that NRDC’s unprecedented access to high-level EPA officials allowed it to influence EPA policy decisions and achieve its own private agenda. Such collusive activities provide the NRDC, and their financial backers, with an inappropriate opportunity to wield the broad powers of the executive branch,” the Members wrote. “The fact that an ideological and partisan group drafted a rule that places a tremendous cost on everyday Americans through increased electricity prices is harmful and outrageous . . .  Accordingly, these practices must cease immediately.”

Sen. Vitter and Rep. Issa have been engaged in a joint investigation into alleged collusion to craft regulatory policy and shape agency action between national environmental groups and the EPA. The NRDC has received $1,877,907 from EPA in grants since January 2009.  NRDC has also received tremendous amounts of funding from wealthy donors and foundations based out of New York and California.

In July 2014, EPW Republicans published a report entitled, “The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA,” documenting NRDC’s influence at EPA and its close relationships with the Billionaire’s Club.   Sen. Inhofe is the . . .

Growing reliance on mineral imports poses economic and political risks  When Americans think of mining, they typically think of coal, oil and natural gas, but dozens of other minerals are extracted by above- or underground mining processes that are critical to our manufacturing and construction industries.  These nonfuel minerals include phosphates, nickel, iron ore, molybdenum, manganese, silver, copper, zinc and rare earth metals, many of which are used in conventional and renewable energy components, consumer electronics and hundreds of other products.

Tesla Motors, whose proposed “gigafactory” Texas hopes to attract, requires huge amounts of rare earths for its battery packs. Few of us are familiar with rare earths such as neodymium, samarium and dysprosium, but they are crucial in the manufacturing of jet fighter engines, antimissile systems, night-vision goggles and smart bombs, among other advanced military systems.  Mining contributes mightily to the U.S. economy. According to a recent study by the National Mining Association, in 2011 America’s mining operations contributed $232 billion to gross domestic product. Direct and indirect employment totaled 2.1 million jobs, and the industry paid almost $51 billion in federal, state and local taxes.

In Texas, mining activity adds $13.8 billion to gross state product, supports 129,000 jobs and pays $953 million in state and local taxes. Most of these minerals can be found in great abundance here at home, but because of cumbersome regulations and permitting processes, we now rely on foreign suppliers for more than half our needs. . . . [more]

Bernard L. Weinstein is associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute and an adjunct professor of business economics in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. His email address is bweinstein@cox.smu.edu.

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Shadi Hamid, Brookings, and author, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, in re: ISIS and historical determinism

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Josh Rogin, Daily Beast, in re:

Congress Set to Bow to Obama on ISIS War

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: John Markoff,  NYT, in re: Brainy, Yes, But Far from Handy

Hour Two

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: What Homer's Iliad Tells Us About the Islamic State    America's military castes love to call themselves warriors. Moreover, national security keyboard artists have found their true rhetorical love comparing ancient Greek hoplites to our own "warrior" panoplies of war, as though we share the same battle-mettle -- and the same frames of strategic choice and action -- Would war with China be like the Iliad? Or would it be like the Peloponnesian War?

This tendency is a mistake, for two reasons. The first is that we do not resemble ancient Greeks (and that should be cause for celebration). The second is that there are men today who do, completely  . . . and they are our sworn enemies, the enemies of civilization itself.  The beheading of James Foley is our warning that we face the forces of Homer -- real warriors from a heroic age -- and that is bad news. But the worse news will come if we persist in denying it.

No one will deny that we are the remote posterity of Bronze Age fighters. But it then took us 3000 years to rediscover writing, create philosophy and science and history, and also democracy. We still burned girls as witches 300 years ago, and 150 years ago millions of Americans were still no more than high-value chattel property.  We have emerged as better humans only very recently. Civilization is at last becoming . . .

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: As John Lendon tells us, Greco-Roman thought and belief were always in the end about the Iliad:

[The] congruence of Homeric and later Greek ethics ensured that the heroes were not only old, but also admirable, and so the past of the Greeks was not inert, but to be imitated by the men of the present. The heroes of epic always sat invisible upon the shoulders of the Greeks, whispering their counsel . . .  epic made the Greek past irreducibly past and so, rather than envisaging the past as the present, they tended rather to understand the present by means of the past.

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Ruben Navarette, Jr, Daily Beast, in re:  Why Obama Won't Act on Immigration Conservatives and liberals both assume that the president will eventually halt the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants through an executive order. They’re wrong.

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block D:  Ken Croswell, Science magazine, in re: How to find your way home from deep space   If aliens ever abduct you to a galaxy far, far away, this map might help you find your way back home. Presented online today in Nature, the map spans more than 1.5 billion light-years, coloring the densest concentrations of observed galaxies red and areas with the fewest galaxies blue. Your home galaxy, the Milky Way, is the blue dot at the center. The red region above the Milky Way includes Virgo, the closest galaxy cluster, about 55 million light-years from Earth. The orange curve illustrates the key finding of the new work: It encircles galaxies that would fall toward one another along the curved white lines if space weren't expanding; the astronomers have named this huge assemblage Laniakea, after Hawaiian words for "spacious heaven." It is 100 quadrillion times as massive as the sun—equivalent to 100,000 Milky Ways—and stretches across more than half a billion light-years of space. Outside Laniakea, other galactic gatherings appear green on the map: the Shapley Concentration at the upper left; the Coma Supercluster at the top; and the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster at the right.

Hour Three

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block A:  Peter Berkowitz, Hoover & RealClearPolitics, in re: "Addressing the Crisis in Liberal Education Too Liberally"

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  Mark Moyer, Hoover, in re: Overambitious Reach Undermines Islamic State’s Prospects of Creating a Caliphate While self-designation as a caliphate has distinguished the Islamic State from other Islamist utopian projects, the nature of the undertaking and its challenges have several recent precedents. In the past two decades, the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia, Yemen, and Mali have occupied territory and established local governments. In each case, they have been undone by a combination of draconian governance and strategic overreach. The Islamic State is at risk of sinking for the same reasons.

In each of the prior failures, the Islamist utopians alienated locals by imposing severe punishments for relatively minor violations of Islamic law, while failing to provide positive inducements such as effective governmental services. Consequently, they limited their bases of support and made enemies who subsequently helped foreign powers overthrow them. The Islamic State has learned from these experiences. In both Syria and Iraq, it has cut back on cruel punishments, shifting emphasis to educating the people on Islamic law. It has allocated funding and manpower to electricity, trash collection, and other services. Accusations of overzealousness in meting out punishment have, however, continued, and therefore the problem is likely to persist to some degree.  In most of the recent cases, foreign powers did not take action against the Islamist utopians when they first gained control over territory. Only when the movements attempted to wield power beyond . . .   [more]

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, in re: Rand Paul’s Fatal Pacifism   This past week, President Barack Obama shocked those on the left, right, and center when he announced that he had not yet developed a strategy for responding to the threats that ISIS posed to the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. It would, however, be a mistake to think that his paralysis in foreign policy is characteristic only of the progressive wing of the . . .  (1 of 2)

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, in re: Rand Paul’s Fatal Pacifism . . .  Democratic Party. Libertarians are equally clueless on the ISIS threat. In fact, their position on ISIS is, if anything, more dangerous than that of the president. While the president has yet to formulate a strategy on the question, the hard-core libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul have endorsed a strategy of nonintervention, which I believe is totally inconsistent with libertarian principles . . .  (2 of 2)

Hour Four

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn (1 of 4)

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn (2 of 4)

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block C: Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn (3 of 4)

Friday  5 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn (4 of 4)