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The Woman Whose Invention Helped Win a War β and Still Baffles Weathermen
ut in the post-lunch hours, meteorologists started picking up what seemed to be a rogue thunderstorm on the weather radar. The “blob,Θ as they referred to it, mushroomed on the radar screen. By 4 PM, it covered the entire city of Huntsville. Strangely, however, the actual view out of peoples’ windows remained a calm azure.
The source of the blob turned out to be not a freak weather front, but rather a cloud of radar chaff, a military technology used by nations all across the globe today. Its source was the nearby Redstone Arsenal, which, it seems, had decided that a warm summer’s day would be perfect for a completely routine military test.
More surprising than the effect that radar chaff has on modern weather systems, though, is the fact that its inventor’s life’s work was obscured by the haze of a male-centric scientific community’s outdated traditions.
The inventor of radar chaff was a woman named Joan Curran.
Records show fervent Trump fans fueled US Capitol takeover
The insurrectionist mob that showed up at the president’s behest and stormed the U.S. Capitol was overwhelmingly made up of longtime Trump supporters, including Republican Party officials, GOP political donors, far-right militants, white supremacists, members of the military and adherents of the QAnon myth that the government is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals. Records show that some were heavily armed and included convicted criminals, such as a Florida man recently released from prison for attempted murder.
The Associated Press reviewed social media posts, voter registrations, court files and other public records for more than 120 people either facing criminal charges related to the Jan. 6 unrest or who, going maskless amid the pandemic, were later identified through photographs and videos taken during the melee.
The paranoid-style of politics
The paranoid-style of politics …
I have always been very fascinated by the now quite old Richard Hofsteader essay. While his decades-old essay is mostly about the right-wing movements of the earlier centuries, paranoia is a central part of “fringe” politics. Sometimes it’s distrust of monied interests, sometimes it’s Hollywood or big business, sometimes it’s a distrust of a religious group, race or political party.
The Mayo Clinic defines paranoia as a “An unrealistic distrust of others or a feeling of being persecuted”.Β
If you look hard enough at any community, you are bound to find some people aren’t completely honest. There is a lot incentive to cut corners and we all develop cliques and have close connections that sometimes blind our objectivity. Sometimes there is outright corruption or criminal activity, but they tend to be a lot less frequent then the paranoid imagination would imagine. Most people don’t engage in criminal conspiracy, simply because of the risk to their own reputation and the fact that most institutions are built in ways to actively discourage criminal behavior by having audits and positive reinforcement for good behavior.
Out groups often don’t see that. People who believe the politicians are ignoring their wishes are likely to believe that the reason that representatives aren’t representing them is because they are somehow corrupt or evil. That’s ignoring the fact that politicians often have very active feelers on public opinion — elected officials read and study the newspapers and regularly conduct public opinion polling to ensure that they are acting in ways that the public wants. After all, if a politicians isn’t representing the public will, they are likely to get voted out of office, which means fired from their jobs. And most elected officials want to be loved, not hated by the public if only to stroke their egos.
Sometimes people just have ideas that are different then the majority’s view in their community. The farther you go out and up — the county, the state, the national level — the more diverse the electorate and the more likely to have a majority opinion different then your own in-group. Seeing one’s own political ideals ignored and snuffed out can be alienating, and lead people to search into the depths, looking for evidence that they have been defrauded and that their opponents are not playing honestly, using deceit and other illicit means to achieve their power and prominence.
Often I see paranoia being emphasized as a right-wing phenomenon, but if you look at many of environmental, labor, housing, and anti-war movement activists, you will see many of the same paranoid trends on the left. Some of it might just be rhetoric – often political rhetoric is more paranoid-sounding then actual belief. But you can’t look at the far-left activist and not hear many of the same conspiracy theories you hear on the right.
Are the fracking companies really working to poison your drinking water?
Coo-Coo – Big Brother And The Holding Company
Joseph McCarthy condemns George Marshall (1951)
“How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.
Who constitutes the highest circles of this conspiracy? About that, we cannot be sure. We are convinced that ean Acheson, who steadfastly serves the interests of nations other than his own, the friend of Alger Hiss, who supported him in his hour of retribution, who contributed to his defence fund, must be high on the roster.
The President? He is their captive… I do not believe that Mister Truman is a conscious party to the great conspiracy, although it is being conducted in his name. I believe that if Mister Truman had the ability to associate good Americans around him, be would have behaved as a good American in this most dire of all our crises…