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EARLY MARCH 2017A10 • ARGUS VIBE

Tired of Winter Shutting You In? Go LIVE!Visit Some of The City’s Great Concert Venues for A Great Change of Pace

Coming March18thTo The Peabody Opera House

400 Market Street, 63103

Neil deGrasse TysonThursday, March 18, 2017

Etienne CharlesSaturday, March 11, 2017

Concert Begins at 8:00 PM

One of today’s most compelling and exciting young jazz artists, trumpeter Etienne Charles, still in his 20s, has recorded three impressive albums for his own Culture Shock Music imprint. His new album, Creole Soul, is a captivating journey that taps into a myriad of styles rooted in his Afro-Caribbean background, examining the musical depths of the islands, from calypso to Hai-tian voodoo music. This concert

is also available as part of The Sheldon Art Galleries’ Caribbean Experience!

Sponsored by The Steward Family Foundation and World Wide Technology, Inc.

Welcomed by 88.7 The Sound

With additional support from Pierre Ferrand

Call MetroTix at 314.534.1111, The Sheldon at 314.533.9900 or visit TheSheldon.org for more information.

Expand Your Universe..!

As a highly popular and infl uential science advocate, Neil DeGrasse Tyson man-ages to capture audiences with his sometimes humorous and always informative insights into modern physics. A regular guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and host of his own enduring radio show

StarTalk, there is something of the entertainer about Tyson, continually inspiring genera-tions old and new to take an interest in the universe around them.

Most recently, he has taken on the challenge of updating Carl Sagan’s defi nitive 1980 television series ‘Cosmos: A Personal Voyage’ with ‘Cos-

mos: A Spacetime Odyssey,’ asking questions about the abyss of space. An evening with the Frederick K. Rose Di-rector of Hayden Planetarium will stretch your imagination and keep you entertained far beyond this dimension! Don’t miss him when he comes to Peabody Opera House in St. Louis, MO, May 18, 2017

BACKSTORY: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson (born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, au-thor, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.

Born and raised in New York City, Tyson be-came interested in astronomy at the age of nine after a visit to the Hayden Planetarium. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Sci-ence, where he was editor-in-chief of the Physi-cal Science Journal, he completed a bachelor’s degree in physics at Harvard University in 1980. After receiving a master’s degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he earned his master’s (1989) and doctorate (1991) in astrophysics at Columbia University. For the next three years, he was a postdoctoral research associ-ate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210-million recon-struction project, which was completed in 2000.

From 1995 to 2005, Tyson wrote monthly es-says in the “Universe” column for Natural History magazine, some of which were published in his book Death by Black Hole (2007). During the same period, he wrote a monthly column in Star Date magazine, answering questions about the universe under the pen name “Merlin”. Material from the column appeared in his books Merlin’s Tour of the Universe (1998) and Just Visiting This Planet (1998). Tyson served on a 2001 govern-ment commission on the future of the U.S. aero-space industry, and on the 2004 Moon, Mars and Beyond commission. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in the same year. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS. Since 2009, Tyson hosted the weekly podcast StarTalk. A spin-off, also called StarTalk, began airing on Na-tional Geographic in 2015. In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.[1] The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded Tyson the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his “extraordinary role in excit-ing the public about the wonders of science”.

Reuters recently reported that the administra-tion plans to rename “Countering Violent Extrem-ism” (CVE) — a Department of Homeland Secu-rity program that funds local terrorism prevention efforts — to “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.”

The news was met by strong resistance from Democratic politicians such as Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who joined 10 other senators in drafting a letter to Cabinet secretaries warning that ignor-ing far-right groups “would severely damage our credibility with foreign allies and partners as an honest broker in the fi ght against violent extrem-ism, and prove divisive in communities across our country.”

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment about CVE and how the Trump administration plans to prioritize far-right groups such as the sovereign citizens.

Paudert went public with his concerns on the Trace, in an as-told-to commentary headlined: “My Son Was Murdered in the Line of Duty by Right-Wing Extremists. Trump Should Focus on the Threat Posed by ‘Sovereign Citizens.’”

Using information from government reports and the trials of tax protesters, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated in 2011 that the number of people testing out sovereign techniques nationwide was about 300,000, with one-third of those being “hardcore sovereign believers.” Among the movement’s best-known acolytes is Terry Nichols, who helped plan the Oklahoma City bombing, according to the FBI.

Mobilized by economic uncertainty and fears that the federal government planned to confi scate people’s fi rearms, far-right groups increased dra-matically in number nationwide during President Obama’s eight years in offi ce, experts say.

Even so, Paudert cautioned, the sovereign ide-

ology is apolitical in nature and attracts followers from inside and outside the mainstream — regard-less of who’s running the federal government.

“A lot of people think these are disgruntled people who are out of work, but doctors, lawyers and FBI agents have all been involved with sov-ereign citizens,” Paudert said. “They hate govern-ment and they’re willing to kill and be killed for their beliefs.”

Of the 66 criminal justice/military homicides perpetrated by al-Qaeda and its associated movement and far-right extremists from 1990 to 2015, 54 of those deaths — more than 80 percent — came at the hands of the far right, according to an analysis by the University of Maryland’s START (Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism) program.

Ryan Lenz, the editor of the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog, said the key to combating far-right terror groups is forcefully engaging them. “If the Trump administration chooses to ignore the far-right threat,” he said, “it is risking calamity.

“I think it speaks to negligence and shortsight-edness to say these people are not dangerous when all data points to the fact that white domestic ter-rorists have killed more people since 9/11 than Islamic extremists,” Lenz said. “When the federal government starts to step in and crack down and garner convictions — high-profi le or low-profi le — there becomes this panic in the movement and they start moving into different ideologies. That’s what we’ve seen in last few years of Obama administration — local authorities doing a great job cracking down on paper terrorism and making sure they know they’re under the microscope of the law.”

Even now, with the sovereign citizen movement classifi ed as a domestic terrorist threat, Paudert said, too many law enforcement agencies across the country remain ignorant about the threat, the movement’s members and how to identify them before it’s too late.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM, from A3