Blogging is a form of communication I enjoy, and that is accessible regardless of the ability to hear. But there are other forms of communication as well; together, these methods shape our history. As a historian, there are different ways to access information, from oral histories to written documents to eyewitness accounts to secondary sources that analyze primary sources.

Until fairly recently, there were just a few straightforward ways to communicate in society: verbal dialogue (whether through speech or sign), and writing, which until the 19th century, was largely limited to literate people who had access (and the means to purchase) to parchment paper, slates, and other rudimentary means to convey one’s thoughts.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the explosion in technology, we’ve seen a proliferation in the various ways humans can interact with each other. I recently ran across this post that has a rather interesting table and analysis of language and how people use it.

The author’s argument, I think, centers around how humans no longer have to be in each other’s presence to converse, to discuss, to argue, to reach consensus, to unify, to advance as a species. Now we can use electronic communications, video, and other forms of global interchange.

What I found interesting is that instant messaging and blogging are roughly about the same age. But to me, they’re two distinct forms of expression:  IMs are often rapid one-liners, perhaps brief paragraphs, that often mimic spoken conversation. Blogs, on the other hand, are personal journals, editorials, online reporting, articles about food, art, theater, and other forms of culture.

Texting is older, by just a handful of years, yet I see texting as a means of talking that has supplanted other forms, and often seems to dominate over actual in-person exchanges. It lends itself to the moment, to the here and now. The author discusses this under the heading, “Immediacy.”

You might also say “latency”; how long does it take from a message to filter via language from your mind to mine? Face-to-face speech has excellent immediacy, as does a telephone conversation. The immediacy of texting is somewhat less, and a blog post doesn’t arrive until the reader gets around to looking.

Yet everywhere I look these days, half the population is glued to their phones, to their pagers, to their PDAs.  People aren’t talking to each other anymore, and if they do, it’s through artificial means. Additionally, personal conversations intrude more and more in public spaces, from grocery stores to sidewalks to parks and even to libraries.

Because many of these new technologies are based on electronic forms, the potential for messages to exist longer than that period of immediacy has expanded, I think. What does this mean in relation to history? To privacy? If we extend these two aspects, what does it mean in terms of civil liberties? Some of us are very casual about what we say, what we share, and who knows the information we have about ourselves and the people around us. Others are fiercely protective of their privacy, and some are almost manic about it. Some, like me, are advocates of privacy, but prioritize the level of privacy needed depending on what is being disseminated, why, and to whom. For example, I use a pseudonym on this forum. While I’m maintaining a semblance of privacy, I know it’s unrealistic to expect that my identity would be a closely guarded secret from everyone; the public act of blogging itself means it’s public.  So what guarantees should I have? What guarantees should I expect?

The author continues his discussion by extrapolating on a graph various factors, such as immediacy, audience, and lifespan. I found it interesting that while blogs don’t have the same immediacy as texting and face-to-face encounters, the expected lifespan is long. This makes sense, but it also adds to my sense of responsibility about what I type here!

In the middle of this post are a couple of questions I found thought-provoking. I’d like to share them with you, then open the floor to your comments (given the fact that I haven’t used the word “deaf” thus far, it’ll be interesting to see what interest this post garners, and what response I get, if any!).

I observe this, and questions occur to me. Have we invented all the communication modes we’re going to need, or will there be more? What needs are going un-addressed? And at the meta level: Does all this have a general higher-order structure that might help us think about these things?

Interesting, don’t you think? So here’s what I’d like to know. For my readers in general, “Have we invented all the communication modes we’re going to need, or will there be more? What needs are going un-addressed?”

Now, specifically for my deaf readers: How do you think the deaf community is being shaped by these changes? Are these transformations for better or worse? What can we do to influence how we use and are used by technological forms of communication? I’d also like to ask that final question as well: “What needs are going un-addressed?”

California is one of the largest states geographically. It’s also the most populous state in the country. So while California has lots of acreage, it also means there’s tons of people living here. As a native Californian, I’ve lived in/traveled to three cities/metro areas in the state: Sacramento, San Francisco, and of course, Los Angeles. I’ve also lived elsewhere, including the Washington, D.C. area, and I’ve seen how these places have changed over time. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen the effects of unchecked growth and rampant sprawl in these urban areas, and it troubles me.

This past Sunday, in the San Francisco Chronicle, an article written by developer Joseph Perkins (a piece which probably should have been clearly marked and stuck in the Op-Ed section) discusses the need for the Bay Area “to rethink rules on land use” and zoning.

Perkins begins with an authoritative tone, and figures and facts intended to lead the reader into thinking that there is an alarming problem:

The Association of Bay Area Governments projects that the nine-county Bay Area region will add nearly 1.5 million residents by 2030.

Yes, it’s true that the population will continue to grow in the San Francisco Bay Area, just as it will here in the Los Angeles metro area, the DC metro area, California’s Central Valley, and in countless urban and metropolitan areas nationwide.

Perkins then posits the question that he will address in the remainder of his piece:

How and where is the Bay Area going to house its additional 1.5 million residents?

This is a good question, and is a question all of us are going to have to consider, regardless of where we live. So far, so good. But Perkins points to a major part of the problem– he feels that anti-housing activists have obstructed growth, and prevented solutions from coming to the fore. As Perkins puts it,

Yet the no-growth, anti-housing environmental alliance continues … arguing that the Bay Area is “built out,” … that Bay Area home builders have paved paradise and put up a subdivision.

This is where Perkins and I begin to disagree. While I agree that “no growth” is an impossible ideal, I do think quite a few areas around the country are “built” out, and that home builders definitely have paved paradise. To be fair, a newspaper article or Op-Ed piece is a very limited place to explore what is a far more complex issue. But it’s also a lot less simplistic than Perkins would like to pretend it is.

Let’s look at the history and geography for a few moments. Historically, people built their towns and villages near resources. These needs included sources of potable water, easy trade routes (whether by land or water), and arable land and pastures. There also needed to be materials for building homes and businesses, whether the construction was done with wood, stone, or other durable components.

As these hamlets grew into towns, and the towns grew into small cities, more and more natural resources were needed; increased amounts of water, more acres of farmland and pastures, more wood and other building materials, and additional staples.

Over time, many natural resources waxed and waned, but as the population grew, these raw materials slowly became more finite. Since the dawn of the Industrial Age over 200 years ago, the consumption rate has skyrocketed along with the population: a planet that held roughly 1 million people in 1800, and was not yet fully “explored” (take a look at the maps back then– Africa’s borders were detailed, but the center was still not filled in– California was, until the near the end of the Spanish Empire, considered an island.) has now expanded to a world that holds over 6 billion people. China and India alone account for one-third of that total (it’s estimated that China alone accounts for about 20% of the world’s current population).

When you consider that the amount of arable land on the planet was limited to begin with, the shrinking acreage should be a concern for all of us. Deforestation has been a huge problem over the centuries; Spain is an interesting example. While the Iberian peninsula was never a lush green paradise to begin with, it was heavily deforested over the centuries, especially during the Roman era and the period afterwards. Today, Spain contains the only real “desert” in Europe; the semi-desert region of Tabernas, in Almeria (this is where Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns were filmed). While this region didn’t develop due to deforestation, large swaths of Spain are arid, sparsely forested acres.

This isn’t a problem just in Spain; portions of Russia are starting to suffer from deforestation and desertification as well. It’s happening elsewhere too– as the Amazon Basin is rapidly clear-cut, the poor soil is overworked by farmers and ranchers, and then abandoned. While nature will eventually reclaim her own, it will take many generations before the land returns to a shadow of what it once was.

Here in the United States, the virgin forest that once covered the eastern third of the nation has been gone for ages now. Urban regions have grown where there once was farmland. Perkins neglects to mention this in his piece. In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, the orchards and fields of the Santa Clara Valley are today the office complexes, warehouses, parking lots, factories, and McMansions of Silicon Valley. The rivers and marshes have been drained and built over (with potentially disastrous consequences during earthquakes– such areas are far too unstable and have led to enormous damages– witness San Francisco’s Marina district, for example). The fields, groves, and orchards of communities like Dublin, Walnut Creek, and Livermore exist no more; in their place are massive subdivisions.

The same is true here in Los Angeles. During the 1920s, the San Fernando Valley had ranches, citrus and olive groves, and dairy farms. The orange groves and strawberry fields in Orange County were plentiful as late as the 1950s. But gradually over the decades, as the metropolis expanded, annexing numerous communities along the way, these agricultural and rural areas vanished. Today there are still patches and plots here and there, but they are largely ghostly remnants of a past that cannot return. “Paving paradise” doesn’t necessarily have to be about destroying parks and green hills; it can also be about destroying arable land– land that contains topsoil that can never be regained.

This is part of the problem that the San Francisco Bay Area faces, along with other such regions nationwide. Water is another part of the equation. There’s only so much water, and there hasn’t been “new” water since the Earth formed. When you add in measures such as flood control, you end up with problems such as soil erosion, the risks of living in historical flood plains, and the loss of nutrients that flooding can bring to the soil (ancient Egypt flourished thanks to the annual flooding of the Nile, and so did the regions along the Ganges, the Tigris and Euprhates, and China’s Yellow River). Areas that are overdeveloped beyond their carrying capacity (such as Las Vegas and practically all of Arizona) will face severe problems as the amount of potable water becomes scarce.

We are all going to have to explore alternative solutions. Desalination, relaxation of flood control, recycling treated wastewater are possible solutions for our water woes. Building more apartments, developing cities with grid patterns again, constructing and encouraging mass transit, and building smaller and taller homes are ideas we should be exploring to reduce sprawl and maximize land use.

But I digress (slightly!)… Back to Perkins. He reveals a “secret”: “Only 16 percent of the region’s land area has been developed.”

Yep, and the remainder are places like Golden Gate Park, the Marin headlands, the Coast Ranges, and other places of beauty, natural reserves, and often, impractical places to build (see yesterday’s post on the foolhardiness of building in areas such as canyons, ridgetops, and other fun places prone to wildfires, mudslides, and earthquakes– the Oakland Hills are a perfect example). Not practical, not realistic, and not going to happen, Mr. Perkins.

But again, we reach a point where I sort of agree with Perkins. He notes that environmental groups

…suggest that most of 1.5 million additional residents expected in the Bay Area over the next quarter century can be accommodated by smaller-scale, infill housing development.

No, that can’t happen either. This is a problem everywhere. Everyone thinks of solutions and lot of people jump and say, “Infill!” The problem with infill is that the infrastructure is already present, and often operating at capacity. Sure, you can build a bunch of apartments (or more likely, overpriced condos) on a parcel of land in an already developed area, but you can’t widen the streets or add roads. You likely already have a limited amount of water for that area, and an electrical grid that is most likely already operating above and beyond its specifications. Infill is a lovely idea, but it’s also a potential recipe for disaster. It also removes potential parks, gardens, and other public areas from the table– spaces that can add to the regional quality of life.

Perkins closes his article by stating that the environmentalists’ desire to “add an additional 1 million acres of land to the inventory of permanent space over the next three decades,” a decision that will “damp[en] housing production in this region… further escalating Bay Area home prices, and … making the dream of home ownership that much more unattainable for the next generation of Bay Area residents.”

Just as I don’t buy infill as a solution, I also don’t buy this argument. Sure, the Bay Area, among many other places, has exorbitant housing prices. But the outlying regions are being overrun with new houses that are also over-appreciating rapidly as well. Developments that started in the “low 200,000’s” several years back ramped up to values nearly twice as much just a handful of years later. Regardless of where you live in California (and in many other places: the Boston-New York-Washington megalopolis, the L.A. area, or any number of other highly desirable urban areas nationwide), the number of people that can realistically afford to buy a house has dropped sharply over the years.

Now that the bottom is falling out of the housing market, quite a few homes are now languishing on the market. Building new houses on additional acreage is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would be far wiser to first let the market correct itself, and re-fill these homes at prices that are far more sane. That of course is another problem, one that Perkins touches on briefly (but fails to go into too much depth about): overpricing and a free-for-all sponsored by banks and lenders. Greed has spiraled, leading landlords to push for condo conversions, and developers to push for more McMansions and cookie-cutter developments in suburban tracts. Greed has spiraled, leading lenders to push ridiculous mortgage loans into the hands of people who financially were better off not buying at all. Now the foreclosures and defaults occurring are depressing the market, which in turn is depressing the economy. Greed has spiraled, allowing investors and so-called flippers to overreach; these folks are now suffering the backlash. We haven’t seen the end yet; excess inventory in some markets (witness the glut of condos in Florida) means developers are going to be stuck with quite a few empty houses and condos for some time yet.

I could continue; there’s a lot to say on this subject. But I’m going to wrap things up by stating that I think things aren’t black and white, and they can’t be. I’m as much an environmentalist as any of the environmentalists out there. But I’m also a wee bit more realistic than some. Until the world can get a grip on its population woes, there’s going to have to be some creativity on the part of all interested parties. That means those of us that want to preserve the land are going to have to give a little and get a little. “No growth” is not a realistic goal. “Slow” or “controlled” growth is far more realistic and pragmatic.

Developers will have to give as well. There can’t be rampant over-development of huge parcels of land, and there certainly can’t be more cul-de-sacs and other hallmarks of suburbia. In a 21st century world, we need to move beyond the fantasy of 20th-century life, and declare suburbia dead. There needs to be a stronger balance between the environmental and physical needs of the population, and that means developers need to actually plan, not just throw up a bunch of houses made out of ticky-tacky. This means working with cities and regions on a large-scale smart growth plan.

Cities and local governments are also going to have to stop the political infighting, the bickering, the jostling over revenues, taxes, and other “benefits” of development. The hard choices surrounding development that developers and officials face revolve around infrastructure. Going back to the Bay Area as an example, when BART was first proposed, each county had to vote on whether to participate in the development and support of mass transit. Santa Clara and San Mateo counties chose not to participate; thus BART was never extended past Fremont or Daly City for years. San Jose finally “woke up” and has a light rail system in place, and BART was recently extended to the San Francisco airport, but the fallout remains.

Here in L.A., the bus system isn’t bad, but we blew it by not planning our infrastructure as well as we could. Greed prevailed, allowing the automobile and oil industries to collaborate to destroy the famed “Red Car” system and instead push for the expansion and development of the freeways. Now we’re in the midst of trying to decide how and when to extend the so-called “Subway to the Sea.” But smart planning obviously wasn’t happening at City Hall or in other divisions. During the recent renovation of Santa Monica Boulevard, the remaining Red Car tracks were torn out, which means that should the trolley system ever be reconsidered, the city will have to start all over again, which will add to the headache and expense. I also don’t understand why they didn’t secure funding to install a subway tunnel under Santa Monica as well: should a “subway to the sea” ever become a reality, it would make a lot of sense for the preferred Wilshire Boulevard path to deviate from Wilshire at its intersection with Santa Monica, head down Santa Monica past Century City (which could really use a stop), and travel down to Westwood, where it could then turn right and head back up to Wilshire, with a UCLA/Westwood Village stop. But that’s short-term, short-sighted planning born of greed, indecision, and paralysis for you…

We homeowners, both potential and actual, aren’t off the hook either. We need to stop salivating over houses of 3,000 or 4,000 square feet and start reducing our overall “footprint” on the planet. How many people really need a four or five-bedroom, three bath home anyway? Nowadays Billy and Sally require their own rooms, and Mommy and Daddy really need the library, the office, and the den, in addition to the three-car garage. That’s bunk. Back in the 1940s, the average house was 1200 square feet. Children often shared rooms, even those of different sexes (at least up to a certain age). People didn’t have the outlandish number of material goods they do today. Do we really need all those extra gadgets and toys? Do we really need the lawn (that requires so much water to maintain), or the garden full of non-native plants (that also require more water than we should be sparing)?

Perkins has a vested interest in writing his article; he’s a developer, and he and his pals want to expand their income by buying up land and building homes, the consequences be damned. A lot of us are enabling that, by living beyond our means and trying to keep up with the Joneses. But the era of suburbia is past; we are all going to have to come together and plan smartly for the future.

Although the current DVDs aren’t captioned, I watched “Rocky and Bullwinkle” as a child, and again on VHS. One segment of the show I always enjoyed was Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman. I’m not sure if that’s how I first developed my love of history, but they were enjoyable to a five year old. Mr. Peabody and Sherman used the WABAC machine to travel to the past and encounter historical personages. Inevitably, there’d be some sort of problem, and the intrepid duo would fix the situation so that we’d have something to read in our history books.

The website, “The Wayback Machine,” takes its moniker from the WABAC machine, and is a nice way to see what the internet looked like once upon a time.  When I first started surfing the web, about twelve or so years ago, one of the first sites I was introduced to was Yahoo!. At that time, Yahoo! had four buttons on the top of their website; the two on the left led viewers to a “new” website or a “cool” website. For many people, their first encounter with the World Wide Web is a fascinating one, and a lot of people will spend tons of time (or at least *I* did!) just surfing from site to site, adding new bookmarks, seeking out new portals of important, personal, or mundane information. Whatever looked good, whether useful or worthless, got bookmarked.

After some time, I (and probably most of you) got tired of spending hours seeking out the latest, and settled down with a few “old faithfuls”; web pages that were heavily used, relied upon, or frequented on a regular basis.  Occasionally, I was sent to a “new” website by a friend or co-worker, but for the most part, I stayed with what to me were the tried and true.

When blogs became “hot,” I started anew, and added quite a few links to my bookmarks. Again, I became satisfied with what I had found, and I now have a set of blogs/vlogs I read/view on a regular basis (I do stumble across new offerings from time to time, though; I’ll be discussing this a bit very soon!).

However, there are still moments when I’ll find some interesting page, and I’ll either spend some time on it, or file it as a bookmark with the intention of checking it out at a later time. I’ve just found two new pages that I thought were interesting enough to share with you.

For those non-Luddites out there, the future often beckons to you: technology is an artifact of the future, and the past is dead. Still, it’s a nice reminder to see how quickly and how far society has come. For non-futurists, it’s a good stroll down memory lane sometimes to just see what a previous generation did in terms of technology, entertainment, and “progress.” To get a glimpse of the not-so-distant technological past, check out Retro Thing. Here you’ll find books such as The Dangerous Book for Boys, gadgets such as flash cube cameras (anyone remember those?), and eyeball a Commodore Vic-20 (amazing to think how much computers have changed in my lifetime!).

The second site I want to share with you is actually one I found on Retro Thing. Shorpy bills itself as “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.” While not all the images there are centenarians, they are definitely pictures of eras long gone.  From the 1939 dugout home to the mess hall in 1919, the auto wreck in 1922 to the bedraggled family in 1936 Tennessee, it’s a series of snapshots of how our grandparents, great-grandparents, and their friends, neighbors, and acquaintances lived. Looking at the clothes, the equipment, the cars, and the furnishings, we see how different we are, and how in the end, we’re not so different after all.

Two good Wayback Machines on the web. If you know of any more, feel free to share.

In the decades following Rome’s conquest of its rival, Carthage, the Roman Republic continued to centralize control over its dominions, and to add more lands and peoples to its realm. The Senate, populated with patricians, gradually changed from a political body responsible for the governance of a city-state to an increasingly self-centered clique, absorbed with the accumulation of power and wealth. An increasing divide between the upper classes and the poor in the Rome of this area created a chasm that led to unrest and internal conflict. The clashes for power that emerged in the final century before the dawn of the empire involved political and military leaders such as Sulla, Gaius Marius, Pompey, Marcus Crassus, and Julius Caesar.

One of the crucial changes during this era was the shift of allegiance within the military. Previously, soldiers pledged their duty to the state. But mercurial, influential generals and military leaders began commanding that loyalty be granted solely to them, rather than to the nation. This shift, coupled with flaws in the state’s treatment of its soldiers, led to politically ambitious commanders marshaling their forces in battles for control of all Rome.

Sulla was the first such major threat; while his reign was short, his brief dictatorship exposed serious flaws in the structure of the Republic, and Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar soon took advantage of these fatal weaknesses to form the First Triumvirate.

While the Senate still clung to power, and statesmen such as Cicero warned of the dangers that were present, the inertia displayed by the Senators and other political figures within the Republic allowed the members of the Triumvirate to concentrate on assuming sole power, or at least maintaining the balance of power amongst themselves. Julius Caesar eventually emerged triumphant; his assassination was a desperate response, provoked by the growing awareness that power concentrated in one individual was potentially fatal to the Republic. Caesar’s successors were the members of the Second Triumvirate: Marcus Lepidus, Marc Antony, and Caesar’s adopted heir, Octavian. Within a much shorter period of time, this Second Triumvirate fell apart, with Lepidus removed by Octavian, and Antony siding with Cleopatra. In the aftermath of the Battle of Actium, 31 B.C., Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, leaving Octavian as the sole power in the Republic. A republican government still existed, but the army, now loyal to its leader and not the state, meant that two forms of government were at odds. The victor in this final struggle was Octavian, who would be known to history as Augustus. Where Julius Caesar had assumed power and declared the Republic obsolete, Augustus restored the Republic in name and form, but assumed sole power and control. Although there continued to be a Senate, it was largely impotent from that time on. The Republic was no more; there was now the Roman Empire. For the next several centuries, Rome ruled an empire, with power controlled by the Emperor and the military.

Nearly 2,000 years later, a short-lived experiment emerged from the ashes of a Germany forged by Prussia; the Weimar Republic struggled to overcome an authoritarian history, an unfair peace treaty, and the economic roller coaster that shaped the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Just as in ancient Rome, the military played a role; many of the early members of parties such as the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (later known colloquially as “the Nazis”) were disgruntled ex-soldiers returned to a society that had no place for them. Hitler’s abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch led to his imprisonment in 1924; rather than being executed for treason, he was granted the lightest possible punishment: a mere five years, and eligible for parole in just six months.

Although the Weimar Republic enjoyed some success in the mid-1920s, the limited support from myriad sectors was based on a distrust of democracy; by extension, this meant distrust of the government. Hitler used the time after his release from prison to emulate the Roman commanders of old; in re-tooling the Nazis for the future, he purged from the party anyone who was not loyal to him. Loyalty was not to granted to the state, but to the party; not to the people, but to a leader.

Fast-forward to 1930; a resurgent Nazi party is part of a coalition government. A struggle within the government led the new Chancellor, Heinrich Brunig, to ask President von Hindenburg to invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which granted the chancellor the ability to rule by executive decree without the consent of the legislature. The subsequent invocation of the article, the dissolution of the Reichstag, and the call for new elections gave Hitler and the Nazis the opening they needed. The parties on the extreme left and right won majorities in the 1930 elections. The lack of a political center forced Chancellor Brunig to continue to rule by decree. The acceleration of powers granted to the executive foreshadowed the authoritarian rule of Hitler and his supporters.

Hitler’s ascension as chancellor was soon followed by the burning of the Reichstag building in February 1933. In the wake of the fire, Hitler used the opportunity to persuade Hindenburg to grant the government the power to suspend civil liberties, to permit warrantless searches, and to seize property. Despite these changes, the Nazis never achieved a clear majority at the polls. Instead, Hitler “persuaded” the Reichstag to pass a law, the Enabling Act, that vested all governing power in the cabinet and the chancellor, instead of in the Reichstag. The passage of the act essentially emasculated the Reichstag. Just as powerful generals and politicians subverted a corrupt Senate in Rome, so an increasingly powerful Hitler manipulated and controlled a polarized and weak legislative body. For the next twelve years, Nazi Germany ruled with an iron fist.

I offer these abbreviated summarizations of history as instructive examples. Granted, the histories of Rome and Nazi Germany are far more complex, and involve much more than the little I’ve outlined. But in both examples (and in many others), a republic disintegrated into authoritarian rule. In both epochs, the populace did not seriously challenge the rising forces of autocracy. Economic woes bedeviled pre-Nazi Germany; the hyperinflation of the early Weimar Republic, coupled with the worldwide doldrums of depression, lent itself to economic chasms between the wealthy and everyone else. A similar gap existed between Roman patricians and the general populace; the governmental attitude that existed then has come to us today in the well-known phrase, “bread and circuses.” In both case, a self-deluded governing body felt that they could ultimately control the challengers, only to discover too late that they had become the controlled.

Regardless of the tendency of some to state that today’s United States is akin to Imperial Rome, or that it is Nazi Germany all over again, that is all it is: a likeness. Each nation exists and existed in a time and place that was unique, dealt with internal and external considerations that did not exist for the others. Yet basic considerations, principles, and foundations are common to all. While the United States is not Rome, the United States is not Nazi Germany, there are disturbing parallels.

When a leader adds “signing statements” to laws, and then disobeys or misuses such laws, the will of the people, via their elected representatives, is flouted.

When a government employee stumbles and says she “took an oath to the President” rather than to the Constitution, the cult of personality rears its ugly head.

When a leader addresses a public gathering, and participants are pre-screened for loyalty, then the party has replaced, and become, the state.

When leaders respond to crises by enacting laws that suspend civil liberties, or enhance other laws with little or no oversight, and the legislative branch acquiesces, the republic is weakened.

When government officials, private persons, and others are given the lightest possible penalties for crimes such as treason, legal and social foundations begin to break down; authorities now condone actions antithetical to republican principles.

When a leader blatantly admits breaking the law, then urges changes to the law that are beneficial to the leader and his government, and the request is rewarded by a complacent legislature, liberty is no longer secure.

The changes that transformed Rome from a republic to a full-fledged empire with an imperial ruler took decades, if not centuries. The shift from a republic to a dictatorship in Germany took barely a generation, if that. It remains unseen how the United States will complete its own realignment from a republic to a more authoritarian state, and how long this change will take. It could end up being as rapid as Hitler’s takeover of Germany; or it could stretch out over decades, culminating in civil war and internecine power struggles, as befell Rome. Most likely, the “death” of the American republic will come incrementally.

It’s possible we can still turn back; the key is to become educated, to be informed, to add your voice to a chorus, a megaphone that must shout from the rooftops, “We disapprove. We do not want to go down this path.” In the meantime, here’s a primer of sorts for what this latest law, “temporary” or not, means. One commenter, who lived under the Soviet regime, declares we are now living in a police state.

As it currently stands, an individual is gagged from finding out whether or not they are the subject of a search. Complicit corporations do not have to reveal their collaboration with the government. Control over wiretapping now shifts from a secret court to an equally secret agency.

Say farewell to the Fourth Amendment. As long as we’re drawing parallels, let’s escape into fantasy:

“So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause.” - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)