Trump and Allies Seek to Turn Violence at Protests to His Advantage ; The Dangers of Seeing the World Through Ubiquitous Video ; and More Picks 9/1
Trump and Allies Seek to Turn Violence at Protests to His Advantage (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Trump’s presidency has been characterized by a staunch refusal to reach out to Americans outside his base of support. The latest rhetoric from the president and his surrogates took that one step further, setting out an explicit effort to cast urban Democratic strongholds as threatening and lawless, in contrast with less densely populated parts of the country where the president’s loyalists dominate.”
More Baltimore County Jail Inmates File Federal Lawsuits Alleging Unsanitary Conditions (Dana)
From the Baltimore Sun: “Two more Baltimore County jail inmates have filed federal lawsuits over a sewage leak inside their cell blocks, complaining that detention center staff were slow in responding and did nothing to help as they and other inmates lived in dangerous, foul and unsanitary conditions for days. … Inmates Keith Wiggins and Reginald Dorsey said in separate complaints filed last week that they were forced to sit in filthy jails with no running water or working toilets for at least four days, beginning on April 14. The men said that problems caused by a sewage leak were made much worse after staff members decided to ‘take actions.’ They said those actions, including shutting off water in each cell and keeping inmates locked inside with no ability to leave, created dangerous conditions that violated their civil rights.”
The Dangers of Seeing the World Through Ubiquitous Video (Mili)
The author writes, “Video resists thought. It breaks linear modes of argumentation and resists complexity, containing all within a frame often now the size of a human hand. Videos can mislead us even when they aren’t clearly false or fraudulent, dangerous or destructive. Even those we might consider ‘news’ or ‘documentary’ may be a form of propaganda, compressing and distorting events, stories, and issues.”
Who Will Pay for the Huge Costs of Holding Back Rising Seas? (Dana)
From Yale Environment 360: “The [Center for Climate Integrity] recently issued a study concluding that by 2040, building sea walls for storm surge protection for U.S. coastal cities with more than 25,000 residents will require at least $42 billion. Expand that to include communities under 25,000 people and the cost skyrockets to $400 billion. That’s nearly the price of building the 47,000 miles of the interstate highway system, which took four decades and cost more than $500 billion in today’s dollars.”
Japan’s ‘Flying Car’ Gets Off Ground, With a Person Aboard (Dan)
The author writes, “The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory. Japan’s SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of ‘flying car’ projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard. In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet (1-2 meters) off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.”
