We are about half way through the limited series from The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attach on the Capitol.1 They seem to be getting big audiences, both watching live or streaming the episodes, despite that rather verbose title.
There’s a good reason why people are talking about these proceedings as if it was an offering from Netflix or another of the too-many streaming services: it’s all about the story telling.
A few interesting reads and listens from last week.
The New York Times Magazine’s education edition included a long, very interesting look at education in Michigan where they gambled on charter schools and “Its Children Lost”. It’s a story of lax regulation and oversight, coupled with a concerted effort to privatize public schools, led by the current federal Secretary of Education.
Two podcast episodes that explain in clear language why a do-nothing Congress can actually harm people. Planet Money has three examples our legislators risking the American economy by failing to pass a budget and risking the good credit of the country by playing chicken with the debt ceiling. The third segment addresses immigration and DACA, as does a short edition of DecodeDC, in which they fact check Jeff Sessions. Spoiler: he’s mostly wrong.
In-between watching continuous coverage of Hurricane Irma, read about the men and women who fly aircraft into the middle of those storms to gather crucial information for scientists and forecasters. We often take all this for granted but collecting that data is tricky, dangerous, and very necessary work.
Related to that, the BBC programme (British spelling :-) More or Less explains why the phrase “one in 500 year storm”, used so frequently during the coverage of Hurricane Harvey, has very little meaning. By the way, More or Less does a very good job of explaining those kind of statistical measures used by the media, in a short and very interesting weekly podcast.
With all the stories about data security this week, Motherboard explains why you should never post pictures of your airline tickets or even house keys on social media. Their warning should also extend to any documents that include numbers or barcodes that contain identifying information. If you teach, you may want to explain this to your students as well.
Finally, National Geographic offered a couple of interesting pieces this week, complete with great images, of course. One is a photographic essay of abandoned, decayed resorts in Pennsylvania and New York, side-by-side with post cards of the same scenes. Very creepy. The other profiles a small city in China (where a population of 1.2 million is “small”) that produces “60 percent of the worlds cheap consumable goods”.
You really don’t need watch carefully to recognize that technology is advancing at a rate that is far outpacing the ability of governments and the legal system to keep up.
However, while a few stories of Congress critters struggling to cope with social media and judges being stumped by digital recording systems might be funny in the moment, the legal stagnation when it comes to rapid digital changes has serious implications for the future of American society.
As The Guardian, the UK news organization that first published Edward Snowden’s revelations of how the NSA is monitoring everyone’s communications, accurately notes, “Technology law will soon be reshaped by people who don’t use email”.
There’s been much discussion — and derision — of the US supreme court’s recent forays into cellphones and the internet, but as more and more of these cases bubble up to the high chamber, including surveillance reform, we won’t be laughing for long: the future of technology and privacy law will undoubtedly be written over the next few years by nine individuals who haven’t “really ‘gotten to’ email” and find Facebook and Twitter “a challenge”.
And we certainly can’t count on Congress to address the issues.
This lack of basic understanding is alarming, because the supreme court is really the only branch of power poised to confront one of the great challenges of our time: catching up our laws to the pace of innovation, defending our privacy against the sprint of surveillance. The NSA is “training more cyberwarriors” as fast as it can, but our elected representatives move at a snail’s pace when it comes to the internet. The US Congress has proven itself unable to pass even the most uncontroversial proposals, let alone comprehensive NSA reforms: the legislative branch can’t even get its act together long enough to pass an update our primary email privacy law, which was written in 1986 — before the World Wide Web had been invented.
As the most recent edition of the Decode DC podcast illustrates, our legislators can’t even manage the flood of email and other messages they receive.
But while our “leaders” are bogged down with re-fighting political battles of the past, legislatures in other countries are looking forward.
By contrast, consider Finland. There, lawmakers are experimenting with a bold new way of reforming a law: crowdsourcing — meaning turning the legislative process over to the people.
Or consider Brazil, where there is now an experimental computer lab smack in the middle of the Parliament’s committee rooms. There, official staff hackers throw together apps and games and data visualizations to help Brazilians — and the members of Parliament — understand the legislative process.
So, any hope our politicians can get their act together and bring our laws into the 21st century? Probably not, especially when a third of their adult constituents (and too many of them) don’t even accept basic scientific concepts and believe in ghosts, UFOs and astrology.
This kind of stupidity has long since passed being funny and is now downright frightening.
Missouri’s Todd Akin, a Representative running for Senator, made headlines through his bizarre misunderstanding of biology, specifically that of the female reproductive system. Overcome by his desire to believe that pregnancy (and thus abortion) shouldn’t be an issue for rape victims, he infamously claimed that the female body could somehow block pregnancy in the case of “legitimate rape.”
But Akin’s (very public) misunderstanding of science pales in comparison to that of Georgia Representative Paul Broun. He’s an MD who is apparently convinced most of modern science is a plot, fostered by none other than Satan. “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory,” Broun declared, “all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”
Pushing it over into scary territory is the the fact that both of these elected representatives hold positions on the House’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
And then there’s the chair of that committee who believes that any evidence supporting the idea that human behavior is altering the climate is produced by scientists who are only in it for the money.
These are the people who are helping to set our country’s science policy.
They are also the same people (and there are many more)* who want to infect the science curriculum with their same willful and dangerous ignorance.
*A writer in Scientific American says the anti-science, anti-intellectual movement growing in this country is actually jeopardizing democracy. It’s a long article but well worth reading.
If you’re not a regular listener to This American Life (I’m not), you still need to hear their program from last weekend, Take the Money and Run for Office.
Produced by the people behind the essential Planet Money podcast, this is a rather depressing hour about how US congress critters spend their time raising money to run for office (more time, in many cases, than on their actual jobs) and what it buys for those contributors.
That flow of money traded for influence has long since moved from the exception to the rule.
That’s our system. If a congressman went in front of a town hall meeting and said, for $5,000, I’ll sit down with anyone of you and have breakfast. You can tell me exactly how you’d like me to vote. He’d be booed off the stage.
But that’s the case for pretty much everybody in Congress. They don’t even have to say it.
I think the worst part of the hour, however, was listening to the incredible hypocrisy of John McCain, co-author of the last major piece of legislation to address campaign finance, as he whined about a situation he continues to wallow in.
Anyway, spend the time to listen and then pass it along to friends and family. If you teach US Government or American History, play it for your students and ask for their responses.
Now, I’m not naive enough to believe one public radio program is going to change anything. But it would be nice if more people paid attention to this crap instead of naively believing the old Schoolhouse Rock version of the legislative process is still the way things work.