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“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell
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* MORE NOTEWORTHY POSTINGS
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March 31, 2023
Trump Indictment
what happens next
By Ivan Pereira — ABC News
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March 28, 2023
Donald Trump Is Promising the Apocalypse
By Karin Tumulty — The Washington Post
If there is one thing that is becoming increasingly clear about Donald Trump’s 2024 bid for the presidency, it is that this campaign is going to be a far darker endeavor than even the two that came before it.
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The New Anarchy
The New Anarchy — In The Atlantic’s Cover Story, Adrienne LaFrance reports that America is facing an extremist violence it does not know how to stop.
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“People build their political identities not around shared values but around a hatred for their foes, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship.”
— Adrienne LaFrance
The New Anarchy
By Adrian LaFrance — The Atlantic
We face a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies.
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March 29, 2023
Entwined African and Asian Genetic Roots
of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast
By Nature
The urban peoples of the Swahili coast traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were among the first practitioners of Islam among sub-Saharan people. The extent to which these early interactions between Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic exchange remains unknown. Here we report ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from 6 medieval and early modern (AD 1250–1800) coastal towns and an inland town after AD 1650.
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March 28, 2023
Our Universe Was Lost Forever
what happens when a tech glitch erases your memories?
By Sarah Hagi, Marlowe Granados, Sloane Crosley and Sam Wolfson — The Guardian
No matter how much our computers assure us they’re backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole – from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs.
GET A CLUE:
Make double offline backups every time!
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March 28, 2023
Did Vietnam Peace Protests
stop Nixon using nuclear weapons?
By Charles Kaiser — The Guardian
A new documentary about demonstrations against the Vietnam war in late 1969 argues that the hundreds of thousands who filled the streets in Washington and almost every major US city convinced Richard Nixon to abandon a plan to sharply escalate the war, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Some historians think otherwise.
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Aired March 28, 2023
The Movement and the Madman
By American Experience — PBS
The Movement and the “Madman” shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 — the largest the country had ever seen — pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his “madman” plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. At the time, protestors had no idea how influential they could be and how many lives they may have saved.
Watch the film here!
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March 24, 2023
Writing Vietnam
four novelists talk about what it means to capture the war and its aftermath in their work
Perspective by Nick Hilden — The Washington Post
Nguyen Phan Que Mai, Tim O’Brien, Nguyen Viet Thanh and Karl Marlantes
This month marks 50 years since the United States withdrew from Vietnam. While the country’s civil war would drag on for another two years, by the end of March 1973 U.S. military involvement was effectively finished, as America extracted its combat forces, progressively reduced material support to its southern allies, and narrowed its presence to a smattering of diplomatic and CIA advisory personnel operating out of the American Embassy in what was still known as Saigon — today, Ho Chi Minh City.
Two years later, the world watched in shock when the final remainders of the U.S. presence fled the fall of Saigon, leaving their South Vietnamese collaborators to their fates as North Vietnamese tanks entered the city.
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March 20, 2023
Republicans Delayed US Hostage Release
to sabotage Jimmy Carter reelection
By Adam Gabbatt — TheGuardian
Former Texas governor John Connally urged Middle Eastern leaders to convince Iran not to release hostages before 1980 election. “Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr Reagan will win and give you a better deal.”
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse
now a deserted fantasyland
By ROB BESCHIZZA — bOiNGbOiNG
It’s not just the amateurish, low-tech design; it’s not just the sparse attendance and desultory interactions. It’s the total absence of mood. It reminds me of when I’d try to get together with friends over Zoom during lockdown — everyone’s face appearing in a box in the grid like contestants in some bleak, prizeless game show, the total absence of physicality making us feel more distant from one another than ever.
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The Age of Easy Money
a two-hour special on economic uncertainty
By Raney Aronson-Rath — PBS FRONTLINE
This weekend, the U.S. government took emergency measures to shore up the banking system after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. It was the biggest U.S. bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis, and it heightened concerns about economic stability at a time when uncertainty was already high and the specter of a recession was already looming around the globe.
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Glacial Lake Missoula
The massive lake that fueled unimaginable floods refilled and emptied many times.
By Keely Larson — ARS Technica
Had the city of Missoula, Montana, existed thousands of years ago, it would have been under water.
During the last Ice Age, a sheet of ice 20 miles wide got stuck in the Idaho panhandle and blocked the Clark Fork River, creating glacial Lake Missoula. At its highest, the water level reached 4,250 feet above sea level—over 1,000 feet above the present city’s altitude. The ice sheet ultimately gave way to the pressure of the water, and glacial Lake Missoula drained catastrophically.
It’s estimated that the biggest flood discharge reached 386 million cubic feet per second. At that rate, it took the lake only a few days to drain, with its waters eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean.
The scariest thing is not the scale of this event—it’s that floods of this size happened multiple times. Thousands of years after that first flood, scientists finally pieced together whether it was a one-time deal by looking to the dirt for answers.
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Fossil Fuels Kill More People Than Covid
Why are we so blind to the harms of oil and gas?
By Rebecca Solnit — The Guardian
Were we able to perceive afresh the sheer scale of fossil fuel impact we might be horrified, but because this is an old problem too many don’t see it as a problem.
If fossil fuel use and impact had suddenly appeared overnight, their catastrophic poisonousness and destructiveness would be obvious. But they have so incrementally become part of everyday life nearly everywhere on Earth that those impacts are largely accepted or ignored.
Why is that?
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10 Emerging Computer Technologies
that will shape the future
By Gunett Kaur — The Cointelegraph
Discover 10 emerging technologies in computer science that are set to shape the future, including quantum computing, extended reality and robotics.
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Paul Krugman Predicts
How GOP ‘Fanatics’ Will Make People Feel In 2023
By Lee Moran — HUFFPOST
The “prospects don’t look good,” the economist warned in his New York Times column. The party’s unhinged lurch will lead people to “spend much of 2023 feeling nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism” in U.S. politics.
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The January 6th Report
![The January 6th Report by [Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, David Remnick, Jamie Raskin]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/415ntsZIIPL.jpg)
By Select Committee to Investigate, David Remnick, Jamie Raskin
On January 6, 2021, insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol, an act of domestic terror without parallel in American history, designed to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. In a resolution six months later, the House of Representatives called it “one of the darkest days of our democracy,” and established a special committee to investigate how and why the attack happened.
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Hatchet Man
How Bill Barr broke the prosecutor’s code and corrupted the justice department
![Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department by [Elie Honig]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41wvhypg-EL.jpg)
By Elie Honig
Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig uncovers Barr’s unprecedented abuse of power as Attorney General and the lasting structural damage done to the Justice Department. Honig uses his own experience as a prosecutor at DOJ to show how, as America’s top law enforcement official, Barr repeatedly violated the Department’s written rules, and those vital, unwritten norms and principles that comprise the “prosecutor’s code.”
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Dark Money
The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
![Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by [Jane Mayer]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61+kHHNLcNL.jpg)
By Jane Mayer
Donald Trump’s election victory was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money into the American political system.
- Why is America living in an age of profound and widening economic inequality?
- Why have even modest attempts to address climate change been defeated again and again?
- Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats—headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys—who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.
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The End of Everything
(Astrophysically Speaking)
![The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by [Katie Mack]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/IMAGERENDERING_521856-T2/images/I/51j0s6E0kjL.jpg)
By Katie Mack
We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it expanded from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life as we know it.
But what happens to the universe at the end of the story?
And what does it mean for us now?
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