Reading Time: 5 minutes One lucky lander escaped the world’s nonsense this week, when on August 23 India celebrated being the first country to successfully set down near the moon’s south pole. Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander holds a rover equipped for 14 days of exploration, to improve our understanding of lunar geology. The successful landing came days after Russia’s own […]
January 6 Capitol attack
Posted inPolitics
Beyond warring narratives: The struggle for US democracy
Reading Time: 7 minutes US news has found two incompatible ways to talk about threats to democracy. Is the US is on the verge of losing its democracy if Trump takes office in 2025? Or is he the savior of that democracy, rescuing it from liberals run amok? Missing from the conversation is a deeper way of returning to normal civic discourse.
Posted inSocial Media
Is there any rock bottom to our crisis of authority?
Reading Time: 5 minutes It hasn’t been a great week for signs of species-wide maturity. In response to criticism for hosting disingenuous anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr. on his podcast, Joe Rogan called for vaccine scientist Peter Hotez to debate RFK Jr on air (because of course the court of public opinion is where science is properly reviewed and […]
Posted inWar and Peace
After Memorial Day: Where the US struggle goes from here
Reading Time: 6 minutes It was a complicated Memorial Day weekend in the US, and not just because of the nation’s now-quotidian gun violence, or because the current debt ceiling crisis threatens an already “degraded” US military with further hits to “readiness and morale”. Just prior to the weekend’s events, which honor and mourn people who died in the […]
Posted inNews
Dominion and democracy: What Fox News avoided, for now, and what comes next
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last year, I asked a rhetorical question in the wake of the nearly one billion dollar verdict in the Alex Jones fake news case, which involved relentlessly broadcast lies stoking conspiracy theories around the Sandy Hook massacre. Yesterday, as everyone reported the settlement with Fox News and parent company Fox Corp, of $787.5 million to […]
Posted inPolitics
Far right attacks in Brazil highlight world’s ongoing anti-democratic wave
Reading Time: 3 minutes On January 8, thousands of supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, the far right past president of Brazil who flew to Florida days before the end of his term in office, stormed Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in the capital, Brasilia. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) condemned these attacks as the work […]
Posted inPolitics
Congress, Oklahoma, and Jan 6: A difficult start for US politics in 2023
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s called the “Millstone Act of 2023”, which should tell US citizens everything they need to know about the ongoing struggle with far right Christian extremism. Named after Luke 17:1-2, a passage in which Christ advocates that it’s better for a person to have a millstone tied around their neck and be drowned, than that […]
Posted inSocial Media
The EU is cracking down on big-tech privacy theft. Why not the US?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Although most of us never read the endless expanses of fine print in social-media-user “terms of service” agreements, the European Union’s (EU) “big-tech” regulators do. These agreements and the corporate abuses they accommodate can have far-reaching negative effects on societies—such as social unrest of the kind that ended up with a lethal, riotous assault on […]