Government
NPR
Civil liberties advocates are warning that the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol could lead to new police and surveillance powers. If history is a guide, they say, those tools could be used against Blacks and other people of color in the justice system, not the white rioters who stormed Congress.
If American Democracy Collapsed, You Almost Certainly Wouldnβt Notice It
Working from these two pointsβdemocracy is a pattern of behavior, and laws only constrain if people behave as if they are constrainedβit follows that we would be correct to say that democracy has collapsed if the explicit or implicit patterns of behavior that govern access to political authority no longer operated. And we would not look to the passage of a law, or necessarily even the outcome of an election, to determine if democracy had collapsed.
emocracy, in fact, makes it particularly challenging to know if democracy has collapsed. That is because when democracy functions, challenges to it are usually hidden, and when they emerge in the open, they are processed through a system that presumes that challenges can be handled democratically. Political actors invoke laws and Constitutions as if they were binding constraints. Stresses that pose questions about the stability of the regime over time, therefore, are fundamentally ambiguous. They may be regime-altering, or not. And the responses to them by those who hold power may be regime-altering. Or not.
And that is why, if American democracy were to collapse, you almost certainly wouldnβt notice it. Not right away, at least.
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though, is the fact that its inventor’s life’s work was obscured by the haze of a male-centric scientific community’s outdated traditions.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.
KunstlerCast 339
KunstlerCast 339
1/5/21
Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/117388740
Episode: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_339.mp3?dest-id=14822
Adam Ellwanger is a professor of English at the University of Houston – Downtown, where he teaches rhetoric and writing. In addition to those topics, his varied research interests include popular culture, political philosophy, media studies, and the American Mess writ large. Check out his dangerous new book on the modern politics of identity, entitled Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self. You will also like his essay on the Human Events website: Toward a Woke Metaphysics. Recently, he authored an open letter signed by over 180 professors that outlines forms of non-compliance that signatories will undertake in an effort to resist the current ideological trends on campus. Ellwanger also offers regular commentary at sites like Human Events, New Discourses, American Greatness, Quillette, and more. In his free time, he writes, plays guitar, drinks beer and ruby port, and listens to music. Follow him @DoctorEllwanger on Twitter. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.
We Just Witnessed the Dangers of the Autocratic Disinformation Playbook – Union of Concerned Scientists
We have seen those same tactics employed by President Trump and those in his administration to bury evidence about the dangers of COVI-19 and fuel distrust in election integrity. The goal of disinformation, regardless of its source, is the same: to confuse the public and control the narrative for financial, political, or ideological gain.
rom the start of President Trump’s term, he actively worked to erode trust in the wheels that turn our democracy: the free press, science-based agencies, state election boards, even the Postal Service. By giving his audience no hope in the integrity of our institutions, he positioned himself as the only hope, an autocratic ruler, rather than the person who governs three branches of government and does the bidding of the electorate.
Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Updates : NPR
When a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, surprisingly few police stood in the way. Protests had been expected for days, but police appeared unprepared for an actual insurrection and not even prepared to keep all the doors locked. Video showed police calmly talking with attackers after they moved into the building.
This came after a year of protests and confrontations with police after police shootings and other kinds of killings across this country. Many of those protests were put down more harshly, including those in Washington, .C. Officials often responded with tear gas or Tasers or stun grenades.