January 18, 2018 Page 7
Politically Speaking
One Man’s Opinion Another Man’s Opinion
Just a Reminder on
this Honorable Day
By Cristian Vasquez
In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Day, it is appropriate to address a lie floating
around the past couple of years. Some
conservatives have taken it upon themselves
to proclaim that Dr. King was a Republican.
Stop it, people. That is a lie. It is wishful
thinking on behalf of a group that, much like
liberals, doesn’t have a squeaky-clean record
on civil rights -- but who unlike liberals has
done more to hinder the spread and protection
of civil rights than to ensure them.
In a 1958 speech at Bennett College in
Greensboro, N.C. Dr. King himself stated
he was neither Republican nor Democrat.
To use the man’s exact words, “I am not
a politician. I have no political ambition. I
don’t think the Republican Party is a party
full of the almighty God, nor is the Democratic
Party -- they both have weaknesses. I
am not inextricably bound to either party.”
Yet, conservatives love to label the man a
Republican. You don’t get to rewrite history
to excuse your ideological flaws from the
present and past. It’s a lie. You are wrong.
So once more, just stop. There is evidence
that Dr. King’s father, like most African
Americans of the time, voted in favor of
the Republican Party. However, there is no
evidence of the man himself supporting said
party. So, much like when conservatives want
people to stop bringing up slavery because
they had nothing to do with it, conservatives
should stop using Dr. King’s father’s voting
habits to identify the civil rights leader under
a false political label.
In addition, the pathetic attempt to rewrite
the past includes the constant reminder by
conservatives that the Democratic Party is
responsible for the KKK and segregation. And
for once, they got a fact right. However, their
selective memory keeps them from mentioning
that this was a conservative Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party was the conservative
party of the past. This is a fact that can’t
be ignored. Conservatives jumped from the
Democratic Party to the Republican Party
during the 1960s and 1970s. The Democrats’
ties to the KKK can’t be ignored, but neither
should the hate-group’s birth in conservatism.
It is disgusting for anyone to deflect the role
of conservatism in birthing the KKK for
political gain, and it takes a complete lack
of human decency to purposely distort these
facts for political gain.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner are names we should never
forget. They were murdered because of their
dedication to fighting against racial injustices.
These men were executed by conservative
Klansmen dedicated the preservation of white
supremacy. When the laws shifted to provide
that equal protection under the law, these
same conservatives jumped to the Republican
Party. The most notable conservative to
abandon the Democratic Party because of his
opposition to civil rights: Strom Thurmond.
Thurmond represented everything wrong
with conservatism and when his Democratic
Party supported legislation to promote civil
rights, he defected. So when sharing out
nation’s history, don’t make up things such
as Dr. King being Republican and don’t
omit facts such as Democrats used to be the
conservatives when the party gave birth to
the KKK. It would be no different than if
I sat here and claimed that Thurmond was
a liberal. •
Don’t Let President Trump’s Poor Choice
of Words Obscure Immigration Reality
By Duane Plank
Wow, the left wing media went into meltdown
mode last week when it was leaked
that President Donald Trump had apparently
used some coarse language when speaking
during what was supposed to be a private,
closed-door session with members of Congress
ruminating over the DACA situation.
Trump initially denied commenting about
the immigration status of s--hole countries
located in Africa, Central America and the
Caribbean, though at least two people in
the meeting said he did use the derogatory
phrase while trying to fix our broken-down
immigration system.
Trump would rather see legal immigrants
invade our borders from thriving countries like
Norway than from third-world enclaves such
as Haiti. Gee, what a dumb, racist thought,
right? America should continue to allow
in, many times illegally, the most poorly
educated folks from allegedly developing
countries -- many who have no discernible
skills and dodgy histories in their homeland.
Then once the immigrant invades America,
allow said immigrants to play tag with their
alleged relatives … and through the idiotic
leftist chain migration program, export a bunch
of people not fit to be here and oftentimes
exploit our lefty social services and raid our
financial coffers.
When was it decided, and by whom, that
Americans do not have the right decide whom
we allow to enter our country? Would you
really rather import a horde of people who
barely speak English, may not be all that
educated, and may lack the job skills necessary
to thrive (not just survive on the dole)
in America? Or allow in (even recruit) men
and women who speak English, are welleducated,
and possess the skills -- whether
technical or so-called “blue collar” -- that
our country needs?
The lefties and their lock-step media buddies
will trot out the same excuses for letting
darn near anyone who wants to call America
home to land here. We are all immigrants,
they thunder. If we don’t let immigrants
in, who will man the jobs that Americans
won’t do? Yada, yada. And they automatically
brand as racist those who don’t agree
with their jaded way of thinking.
So, the blathering talking heads in the
southpaw media went full bore at the
president, excoriating him for what were
supposed to be private thoughts leaked by
deep-staters with their own agenda, privy
to the DACA meeting.
Trump is not the first president to evince
salty language. As we learned during the
Washington. cover-up the Watergate scandal
devolved into, California’s own “Tricky
Dick” Nixon threw the F-bomb around like
a drunken sailor on shore leave. And Southern
gentleman Lyndon B. Johnson spewed
colorful language when dealing with the
post-JFK assassination challenges like, oh,
the Vietnam War, or the revolt that permeated
America as the flower-power pot-heads and
other 1960s unemployed resistors created
mayhem in the streets, chanting, “Hey, hey
LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Point is: Don’t let Trump’s ignorant
choice of words, in what was supposed to
be a closed-door, private meeting, obscure
the fact that we need to get the grip on
whom we are allowing into our best-as-itgets
country. •
Two Astronomers a Century Apart Use Stars to Measure the Universe
Based on a Press Release from the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Provided by
Bob Eklund
How far away is that galaxy?
Our entire understanding of the universe is
based on knowing the distances to other galaxies,
yet this seemingly simple question turns out
to be fiendishly difficult to answer. The best
answer came more than 100 years ago from
an astronomer who was mostly unrecognized
in her time -- and today, another astronomer
has used Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
data to make those distance measurements more
precise than ever.
“It’s been fascinating to work with such
historically significant stars,” says Kate Hartman,
an undergraduate from Pomona College.
Hartman studied “Cepheid variables,” a type
of star that periodically pulses in and out,
varying in brightness over the course of a few
days or weeks.
The pattern was first noticed in 1784 in the
constellation Cepheus in the northern sky, so
these stars became known as “Cepheid variables.”
Cepheid variables went from interesting to
completely indispensable in the early 1900s
thanks to the work by astronomer Henrietta
Leavitt. Leavitt’s contributions were largely
ignored for one simple reason -- she was a
woman at a time when women were not taken
seriously as astronomers.
In fact, when Leavitt was first hired by
Harvard College Observatory in 1895, she
was hired as a “computer.” In the days before
modern computers, a “computer” was a person
hired to perform complex calculations, assisted
only by pencil and paper. Although the work
was demanding, it was not taken seriously by
the male professional scientists of the time -- it
was seen as rote work not requiring intelligence
or insight that could be done by anyone, even
a woman.
So in 1908 when Leavitt discovered a
relationship between the brightness (or
“luminosity”) of a Cepheid variable star and the
time it took to go through a full cycle of change
(its “period”), her work was not immediately
recognized for its significance. It took years
for the mostly-male astronomy community
to realize that this relationship (today known
as “the Leavitt Law”) means that measuring
the period of a Cepheid variable immediately
Looking Up
gives its true brightness -- and furthermore,
that comparing this to its apparent brightness
immediately gives its distance.
Using the period-luminosity relationship
that Leavitt discovered, others later calculated
the distances to Cepheid variables in galaxies
outside our own Milky Way. In doing so, they
discovered that our universe is expanding,
starting from a single point more than 14 billion
years ago at the Big Bang -- a discovery that
would have never been possible without the
discovery of the Leavitt Law.
More than a century later, astronomers like
Hartman are carrying on Leavitt’s work. Her
announcement came about as a result of a
ten-week summer research project at Carnegie
Observatories. Hartman worked closely with
her research advisor, Rachael Beaton, a Hubble
and Carnegie-Princeton fellow now based at
Princeton University.
The tool that Hartman and Beaton are
using to improve our knowledge of Cepheid
variables is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s
Apache Point Galactic Evolution Experiment
(APOGEE), which is systematically mapping
the chemical compositions and motions of stars
in all components of our galaxy.
The very property of these stars that allowed
Henrietta Leavitt to discover the Leavitt Law
-- their predictable variations in brightness
-- creates challenges for APOGEE. “Over
a pulsation cycle of a Cepheid variable, the
star’s properties change,” says Beaton. “Its
temperature, surface gravity and atmospheric
properties can vary greatly over a fairly short
time. So how can APOGEE properly measure
them? I thought it would be an excellent summer
research project to find out.”
The undergraduate to take on the challenge
was Kate Hartman. She was able to demonstrate
that it is possible to get consistent measurements
of the chemical makeup of Cepheid variables,
regardless of when in their cycle they were
observed by APOGEE.
Hartman explains, “I had to look at multiple
spectra from the same Cepheid variable and
measure the amount of different elements in
the star. When we looked at a star’s spectrum
across its entire pulsation cycle, we found
no significant differences in the results. That
means that we’re getting reliable results every
time we look.” •
Henrietta Leavitt (left) and Kate Hartman (right) — two astronomers a century apart studying Cepheid variable stars.
Image Credit: Cynthia Hunt (Carnegie Institution for Science).