Happy Walpurgisnacht!

When a hail of bullets extinguished dozens of lives at an elementary school last month, the ugly consequences of the nation’s gun culture shot into the media spotlight. The debate around gun control in the aftermath of Newtown has yielded confused policy proposals like further militarizing schools, or preemptively tracking mentally ill people.

But a key aspect of the gun-control debate remains hiding in plain sight.

David France’s bold, powerful, heart-wrenching documentary How to Survive a Plague follows the evolution of ACT UP NY and its Treatment Action Group (TAG), capturing the outrage, agony and activism that changed the social, political and medical fabric of the United States from the 1980s with the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Director/co-writer David France and Howard Gertler, one of the film’s producers, are our guests tonight.

Jonathan Moreno’s book is certainly timely, as military research into neuroscience and other brain and behavior-related research is certainly taking off. For instance, see this September 19 ExtremeTech article, “DARPA combines human brains and 120-megapixel cameras to create the ultimate military threat detection system.” (Readers will be glad to know Mind Wars has an entire chapter on the history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

Meanwhile Moreno asks the primary question: Is anyone minding the ethical store? Who is addressing the problems and dilemmas of subjugating science to national defense concerns?

Let’s just be very clear right up front, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco may have both collected their share of mainstream awards, like Pulitzers, American Book Awards, and the like, but with this book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, they remove any doubt about whether they are “celebrity couriers,” as they derisively term a lot of what is left of the mainstream, main street journalists out there today slapping whitewash on poverty and helping spin the machinery that manufactures rose-colored glasses. They have traveled through some of the hellholes on the dark side of the American economic reality and they are angry about the whole damn thing, fired up, fed up, and desperately looking hard for a fight. This book needs to be read, and it needs to sell very well because these guys are pretty much unemployable now. Trust me, I know this!

Martin A. Lee’s latest book, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical Recreational and Scientific reflects his skills as a researcher, especially in the historical sections and his analysis of scientific and medical research. The copy is dense and packed with detail, frequently footnoted for those readers who may be skeptical of his scientific claims. If most Americans would take the time to read this book, it would certainly put the topic of legalizing marijuana in some helpful historical context, and it might help convince those who oppose marijuana legalization that they should reconsider their opposition.

Amidst ongoing controversy surrounding the results of last Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico, the declared winner of the contest, Enrique Peña Nieto, is unambiguously organizing to take over the government come December. The election was marked by claims of fraud, irregularities, and manipulation by the major media in favor of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country for much of the twentieth century, and sponsored Peña Nieto’s run for the presidency. While all of these allegations are likely true to an extent, they ultimately fail to convince. And while the opposition continues to protest Peña Nieto’s victory, the president-elect has moved on.

Last night after an hour of vegging out in front of my computer, I moved on to the television. As I surfed the channels, I landed on a reality show about female police officers.

Going away to college is one the defining moments in anyone’s life, and for Scags Morgenstern, the heroine of Deborah Emin’s Scags at 18, her first semester at an elite Vermont college, where she’s a scholarship student, shifts her world.

Told in the first person as diary entries, Scags’ first semester expresses the questioning and discovery that comes with growing into adulthood.

Sylvia Longmire is a retired Air Force Captain and former Special Agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

She has worked as an intelligence analyst for the state’s Emergency Management Agency, focusing on drug trafficking and border violence.