The Covid-19 pandemic has seen the best of science and the worst of science. New vaccines have been produced in less than twelve months. But at the same time we’ve seen evidence exaggerated and undermined, falsified, and flawed. Scientists arguing in public over areas of policy that have reached into all of our lives in an unprecedented way. There has never been so much “science”. But the pandemic has seen science politicised and polarised in ways some of us could never imagine.In this episode of Analysis, Sonia Sodha explores what the pandemic has revealed about the practice of science, and our relationship with it.
13 April 2021
The Red Line: Pakistan's Two Front War
When Obama left the White House he stated that the thing that kept him up at night more than anything else was the potential for Pakistan and India to stumble into an unplanned nuclear exchange. What was once a regional conflict has now drawn in a number of great powers such as China, and the US, but no side yet has a real plan to try to avert the risk of this simmering conflict going nuclear. The estimate is that in the event of an Indian invasion toward Islamabad the Pakistani command may only have around 6 hours to either "use or lose" their nuclear weapons, so we ask our panel what the likely outcome will be for this nightmare scenario. On the panel this week. Ayesha Jalal (Tufts University) Adam Weinstein (Foreign Policy) Andrew Small (George Marshall Fund) For more information please visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus
The Red Line: Iraq: What Went Wrong?
For a number of years Iraq has been spiraling, with worsening insurgencies, sectarian violence and numerous regional players all treating Iraq like a political battleground. How did we get here though? What was the decision made to bring Iraq to the point we stand at now, and will decisions coming up better or worsen the situation? On the panel this week. JAMES LEBOVIC (George Washington University) DIYAR AMEEN (Kurdistan Mission to the EU) JOSEPH VOTEL (Rtr 4-Star US General) For more info please visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus
City Beautiful: Why did railroad companies mass produce cities?
Railroads founded hundreds of nearly identical towns in the American west. Why?
Nautilus Magazine: Digging Deeper Into Holocaust History
The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture. [...]
“Science is the next frontier that will speak about these sites,” Freund says. Geophysical techniques provide a way to locate and preserve sites that have been built over, as is often the case in Holocaust sites across Europe, even locating them under the canopy of vegetation. While certain sites will be excavated, the process of discovering them does not have to be destructive, as with traditional archaeology. Using non-invasive techniques means archaeologists can hold history in situ. Such non-invasive methods are a matter of being sensitive, too. “These are mass graves of people who are victims,” Freund says. “They have been victimized once and we don’t want to disturb them again by disturbing their burials.” [...]
Geoscientists have another ambitious project planned for this summer—searching for a lost cache of information about Nazi crimes and Jewish heroes in Warsaw. Between 1940 and 1943, an organized underground operation, comprising dozens of contributors, collected thousands of documents: photographs, drawings, writings, journals and tabulations, signed and dated. They put them into 2-feet-high metal milk cans and metal boxes, and buried them in the Warsaw Ghetto. Called the Ringelblum archives after historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the caches were buried in three different locations. In 1946, a survivor found the first of the milk cans. According to Freund, the archives were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The second part was discovered in 1950. The archives were used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. No one has found the third cache.
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