8 O'Clock Buzz

With Trump’s “Space Force” in full swing, and already a TV parody available, Professor of Journalism Karl Grossman talks about the reality and truths of weapons and warfare in space. Read more in his on-line booklet “The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space.”

Damita Brown is joined by Stan Woodard and Art Richardson to talk about the murder of George Floyd, protests, police violence, and “what does justice look like?”

Photo by Tipocracia – flic.kr/p/2j8iTXE

President Trump’s love/hate relationship with Twitter took another turn last week.  On May 21, Twitter fact-checked two of Trump’s tweets, including one where the President claimed vote-by-mail would result in widespread voter fraud.  Twitter marked the tweet as “misleading.”  After claiming he would shut down the social media outlet, two days later, Trump had signed an executive order that seeks to upend key provisions of the Communications Decency Act that allow many internet and social media platforms to operate.  Here to help us wrap our heads around this latest unilateral action by President Trump is Anuj Desai, an expert on internet law and free speech at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

With so much of the world shut down during the coronavirus pandemic, it’s not the greatest time to go looking for a job, especially for the class of 2020 who may be graduating into a recession.  Unemployment is high, many employers have slowed or ceased their operations and many traditional ways of networking or accessing resources are unsafe or nonexistent.   The University of Wisconsin College of Letters and Science SuccessWorks program is doing its best to tackle those problems, and to provide alternate ways for graduates and others to land a job or launch a career. Their new summer initiative Badgers on Track provides virtual workshops for students that focus on self-serve resources to build the network and skills necessary to start a career.

Our guests is Rebekah Pryor Paré, Associate Dean for the College of Letters and Science Career Initiative and Executive Director of SuccessWorks.

Shortly after Madison’s May 30th protests against the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd ended, all hell broke loose:  smashed windows, tear gas and pepper spray, people deliberately run down by vehicles, a police car set on fire.  Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway has declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew from 9:30 p.m. last night until 5 a.m. this morning.  How did the turmoil start?  Who was responsible?  Rumors abound, but a clear picture has yet to emerge.  We turn now to three local reporters who were on the scene.  Dylan Brogan is a staff writer for Isthmus and a frequent volunteer here at WORT.  Will Kenneally is a Digital News Editor for PBS Wisconsin.   Finally, Chali Pittman is the News and Public Affairs Director right here at WORT.

In this month’s edition of the ExPO series, Jerome Dillard talks with Tamra Oman, a human services program coordinator (the first Peer Role in a correctional setting in Wisconsin) at the Wisconsin Resource Center; a mental health treatment facility classified as a prison, and her 17-year experience advocating for criminal justice reform.

Milwaukee-based poet, community builder and Latina LGBTQ advocate Carmen A. Murguia joins Damita Brown to share her poetry, story and what we can do to build better communities.

Photo by Emily Mills: flic.kr/p/UtMy6B

In 1793, a Yellow Fever outbreak in Philadelphia led to the creation of the city’s first garbage collection service.  In 1853, the New York City Board of Health authorized the creation of a reservoir system, and New York’s Central Park, in response to a cholera epidemic.  And here in Wisconsin, a 1909 typhoid surge led to the creation of the Milwaukee Sewerage Commission.  Pandemics have often led to dramatic, long-lasting changes in urban life — often for the better.  Will the current coronavirus pandemic lead to similar permanent innovations?  Catherine Brinkley teaches Regional and Community Development at the University of California Davis, and she joins us now by phone.

Humans have inhabited the area where Madison now sits for at least 12,000 years.  Over a thousand years ago, the Woodland Culture people built the highest density of effigy mounds of anywhere on the globe.  By 1800, the area had become the homeland of the Ho-Chunk, who called the area Taychopera, which means “land of the four lakes.”  After European colonization, Madison incorporated as a village in 1836, a full twelve years before Wisconsin became a state.  With such a long and rich history, it’s startling to realize that Madison had never had a historic preservation plan.  On May 20, 2020, the Madison Common Council corrected that oversight adopting the city’s first historic preservation plan.  Preservation Planner Heather Bailey is the city staff person responsible for implementing the new plan.

Most science fiction espouses one of two very different visions of the future.  In the utopian visions of classic “golden age” sci-fi, humanity grows wiser over the years to come, with social, political and economic advances keeping pace with technological change.  In the dystopian vein of more recent sci-fi, humanity may still have cooler tech, but all of our failings, prejudices and greed follow us into the future, essentially unchanged.  You may have missed it while our society was wrestling with the decidedly old-fashioned  scourge of a pandemic, but the U.S. government may have recently taken a step toward one of these two poles — which one, we will leave to your sensibilities. In April, 2020, President Trump signed an Executive Order that declares that space is not a “global commons,” and could pave the way for commercial exploitation of the resources on asteroids and the moon.  Scott Shackelford is an Associate Professor of Business Ethics and the Cybersecurity Program Chair at Indiana University, and a self-professed “sci-fi nerd.”