via New America

Excerpt adapted from Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America by Lee Drutman.
Today, American parties are more united internally around competing visions of national identity than any time since the Civil War. This division defines national partisan conflict and communicates to voters what is important. And because it is binary, it communicates only two, irreconcilable options. Voting means endorsing one of these visions, either implicitly or explicitly. A vote with reservations counts the same as a vote without reservations. An enthusiastic vote for Trump’s anti-immigration policies counts the same as a hesitant vote against Clinton.
A multiparty system in America would not collapse such thinking into reductionist binary generalizations. It would offer more options across the spectrum and give voters more ability to see nuance and shades of gray. A ranked-choice voting system, where voters could order their preferences, would add even more precision and nuance to elections.

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Posted on January 24, 2020

By Doug E. Doug

LOS ANGELES – Based on his viewpoint that the historic contributions of the Hip-Hop generation has largely been ignored by popular culture, actor and comedian Doug E. Doug has released his first novel, titled The Fall of 1987, which tells the dramatic story of a young Black man investigating the mysterious death of his brother during the rise of the Hip-Hop genre.
“I noticed that there was little attention paid to my generation in media,” said Doug. “Mythmakers and storytellers go on and on about the World War II generation – the so-called ‘Greatest Generation.’ The achievements of the Civil Rights generation are chronicled with due heroism and some complexity. Now, we are launching into the voices and perspectives of the Millennials and Gen Y.”

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Posted on January 14, 2020

By Boing Boing

In A Public Service, activist/trainer Tim Schwartz presents the clearest-ever guide to securely blowing the whistle, explaining how to exfiltrate sensitive information from a corrupt employer – ranging from governments to private firms – and get it into the hands of a journalist or public interest group in a way that maximizes your chances of making a difference (and minimizes your chances of getting caught).
Parts of A Public Service read like a spy thriller, covering detailed operational security planning – everything from buying a burner phone to doing research into possible journalists to take your docs to – all without leaving a trail that can be traced back to you.

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Posted on January 10, 2020

By The National Press Club

Reporter Jerry Mitchell, who spent years investigating the most infamous murders of the civil rights movement, will speak at a National Press Club Headliners event on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020 about his upcoming book, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Right Era.
Race Against Time chronicles Mitchell’s quest to unearth the truth behind some of the most gruesome and harrowing unsolved murders of the civil rights era. Mitchell’s reporting is credited with helping to bring killers to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers, the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham, and the murder of three civil rights workers commonly referred to as the Mississippi Burning case.

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Posted on January 8, 2020

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson/Undark

Aiming to provide the “sum of all human knowledge,” Wikipedia is one of today’s most highly trafficked websites. Of its content, Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation – the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia – writes: “We believe in ‘knowledge equity,’ which we define as the idea that diverse forms of knowledge should be recognized and respected.”
But does the encyclopedia live up to this vision, or is it playing a part in perpetuating and entrenching long-standing biases?

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Posted on January 4, 2020

By Boing Boing

In the 1970s, the Soviets managed to intercept top secret communications in the U.S. embassy in Moscow and nobody could figure out how.
While an antenna was eventually found hidden in the embassy’s chimney, it took years to determine how what data was being collected for transmission and how.
As a last resort, all equipment at the embassy was shipped back to the U.S. for analysis.
From IEEE’s Spectrum:

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Posted on January 1, 2020