James Comey, the Director of the FBI, says he is unsure if the white supremacist attack on the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, which left nine African-Americans dead, is an act of terrorism. His reluctance to identify white people as terrorists reflects a larger issue of white America’s comfort level with addressing white violence.
via FBI Director Has a Hard Time Calling a White Supremacist a Terrorist – Atlanta Blackstar.
Modeled on Gulliver’s Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it succeeded ingeniously, with episodes scripted by some of the era’s finest science fiction writers. Yet the development of Star Trek’s moral and political tone over 50 years also traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era.
via The Politics of Star Trek.
But by the end of Next Generation, the liberalism that once preached technological progress and human reason has reversed its priorities and now regards “progress” as incipient colonization and a threat to diversity and the environment.
One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.
It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book.
via Google’s Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers – The New York Times.
The origin of the term NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) is a little hazy, but is believed to have originated with the hazardous waste disposal industry in the middle of the last century. The term spread as rapidly as its adherents did and evolved into what we have today in Chicago: FRUIT (Fear of Revitalization Urban Infill and Towers) and BANANAS (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
And so, inspired by a recent article in L.A. Weekly, and not by the pearl-clutching dramatists of the West Loop, or the “I got mine, sucks to be you” crowd of Streeterville, we present a Field Guide to Chicago NIMBYs.
via A Field Guide To Chicago NIMBYs :: The Chicago Architecture Blog.
On Friday, the ACLU asked Judge Anna Brown to conduct her own review of the error rate in the government’s predictions modeling – a process the ACLU likens to the “pre-crime” of Philip K Dick’s science fiction.
“I believe this is the first case in which a court is being asked to review the basis for the government’s predictive model for blacklisting people who have never even been charged, let alone convicted, of a violent crime,” said ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi.
