Another destructive fire season has Western states searching for ways to prevent it. As climate correspondent Lauren Sommer reports, some answers might lie in the Southeastern U.S. The region leads the country in setting controlled fires — burns to clear vegetation that becomes the fuel for extreme fires.
It’s the Never Forget Extravaganza! We’re joined by military tech journalist Kelsey D. Atherton to breach the memory hole of forever war and consider the invasions and occupations, technologies and tactics, abroad and at home, that have defined the post-9/11 era. This is part one of our conversation with Kelsey. Part two – and TMK’s 100th episode – will drop on the Patreon feed on 9/11.
We set the scene by casting our minds back to the beginning of the Global War on Terror – then provide something like a bestiary of vehicles, weapons, and surveillance systems – then explore the deep and decades long entanglement between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, along with all the demonic initials like the CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, ICE – then wrap it up with a broader analysis of the forever war machine: how we got here, why it was overdetermined, and what comes next.
Follow Kelsey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AthertonKD
Subscribe to Kelsey on Substack: https://athertonkd.substack.com/
Some stuff we reference:
• These machines were supposed to help win the war in Afghanistan. What happened? | Kelsey D. Atherton: popsci.com/technology/timeline-us-airborne-tools-of-war-afghanistan/
• This is the real story of the Afghan biometric databases abandoned to the Taliban | Eileen Guo and Hikmat Noori: technologyreview.com/2021/08/30/1033941/afghanistan-biometric-databases-us-military-40-data-points/
• The Global Garage | Will Meyer: thebaffler.com/latest/the-global-garage-meyer
• The MRAP Story: Learning from History | Stephen W. Miller: asianmilitaryreview.com/2018/10/the-mrap-story-learning-from-history/
• Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror | Louise Amoore: sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00655.x
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)
Abigail Shrier is a lawyer, a reporter and author of Irreversible Damage. One way to describe her book would be: controversial. She has been accused of spreading misinformation by GLAAD. A prominent ACLU lawyer called for her book to be banned. A favorable review of the book in Science-Based Medicine ignited an online mob, which led to the journal disappearing that first review and replacing it with a negative one. Amazon and Target have also been pressured to stop carrying Shrier's book.
But it hasn’t worked. Despite being ignored by outlets like the New York Times Book Review, Irreversible Damage is an enormous bestseller. Some readers felt so passionately about this book that they took out billboards advertising it on their own dime.
Both the subject that Abigail writes about and the treatment of her book deserve your attention.
From COVID-19 to climate change and gun violence, kids have a lot on their minds these days. A new Illinois law will soon let them take off five mental health days a year.
Last week's jobs report for the month of August show signs the delta surge is slowing the economic recovery, just as some pandemic safety net programs disappear. The Supreme Court recently struck down a federal eviction moratorium, and supplemental pandemic unemployment benefits expired on Monday.
NPR's chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley explains what that could mean for the pace of the recovery.
With a federal eviction ban no longer in effect, renters could tap into billions of dollars in federal rental assistance authorized by Congress. But there's a problem: states have been slow to get that money into programs that can distribute it to tenants and landlords. NPR's Laurel Wamsley reports on one effort to speed things up in Tennessee.
Additional reporting in this episode from NPR's Chris Arnold, who's been covering evictions during the pandemic.
Today on “The Breakdown,” NLW briefly covers yesterday’s bitcoin price crash and why it was driven by market structure more than news. The main topic focuses on revelations from Coinbase that after months of engagement around its upcoming Lend product, the SEC is now threatening to sue. NLW examines the controversy from five dimensions:
The argument for and against lending as a security
The SEC’s pattern of regulation by litigation
How the SEC is rewarding bad actors by punishing compliance
The concerning surveillance implications of one of the SEC’s requests
Why these strong-arm tactics are doomed
Should Coinbase take the battle to court?
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NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for Bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Only in Time” by Abloom. Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images News, modified by CoinDesk.
When states suspended regulations to better equip private actors for handling COVID-19, it raised an important question: Why did we have them to begin with? Sal Nuzzo of the James Madison Institute comments on some of the bright spots in healthcare during the pandemic.
It's no secret that the story of US history taught in school doesn't always match the reality of certain events -- and the deeper you dig, the stranger some stories become. In today's episode, the guys dive into the historic mystery surrounding Melungeons and other communities collectively known as tri-racial isolates, groups throughout the southern and eastern United States known for their enigmatic origins and insular, rural communities. Where did these groups actually come from? Are any of the legends about them true? Tune in to learn more.