Invisible Weapons

"This book explains how grassroots communities are infiltrated and politically co-opted in ways that render their resistance harmless. It reveals contemporary practices of domination, as powerholding elites - from elected officials to welfare bureaucrats - are teaching oppressed people to internalize their grievances and silence their needs. In the end, politics becomes a space where advocating for social justice makes less and less sense to people. It is therefore explaining the politics of inaction through disengagement from radicalism. It considers multiple sites of resistance to police violence, including the police killing Akai Gurley, Freddie Gray, and Korryn Gaines in particular. It also considers the mass protest associated with the wider Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). The book argues that anti-radicalism is an embedded feature of neoliberalism, that the widespread adoption of neoliberal politics has reinforced ongoing racial and gender oppressions, and that these same oppressed communities are being infiltrated in order to minimize their commitments to radical political resistance. Covering multiple sites and methods - from in-depth interviews on the resistance politics of Black welfare recipients in Chicago, to nationally representative survey data on hard-work beliefs in politics and the labor force, and case study analyses of police violence in Baltimore and New York - the book shows how political domination today is about ensnaring minds, constraining imaginations, and upending resistance. With the creation of the invisible weapons framework, future research can better explain sites of political disengagement and the connection to the erosion of whatever remains of democracy in the U.S"--

"Describes the threat of biological and chemical weapons, including their history, their use, and the methods created to end their construction"--Provided by publisher.

Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.

This book focuses on Biopreparat, the Soviet agency created in 1974, which spearheaded the largest and most sophisticated biological warfare programme the world has ever seen. At its height, Biopreparat employed more than 30,000 personnel and incorporated an enormous network embracing military-focused research institutes, design centres, biowarfare pilot facilities and dual-use production plants. The secret network pursued major offensive R&D programmes, which sought to use genetic engineering techniques to create microbial strains resistant to antibiotics and with wholly new and unexpected pathogenic properties. During the mid-1980s, Biopreparat increased in size and political importance and also emerged as a major civil biopharmaceutical player in the USSR. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, an acute struggle for control of Biopreparat’s most valuable assets took place and the network was eventually broken-up and control of its facilities transferred to a myriad of state agencies and private companies.

This text examines the political history of telecommunications between 1851, the year the first telegraph cable linked France and Britain, and the end of World War II. The author attempts to illustrate the political aspects of information technology, such as radio propaganda and cryptography.

What will the political and cultural landscape look like to Christians in 2050? Will progressivism have eliminated Christian values altogether? Will the Christian foundations of America stage a comeback? Will Christians be anticipating the end times? Will the tribulation have come? Beginning with the emergence of the New Left out of the tumultuous 1960s, the first two installments of Tribulation Cult stretch over three generations, climaxing with the election of 2048. Center stage are four college friends who follow divergent life paths— two Christians who become ministers, their liberal counterparts who rise to the summit of world politics.The journeys of the four focus many interconnected themes in the lives of men and women who must decide where they stand as the nation increasingly splits along liberal and conservative lines, and what role the church is meant to play in that divide. Will true Christians be viewed as a cult, ostracized from mainstream society, culture, and politics?These are only two of the questions the characters in Tribulation Cult are forced to grapple with in this deeply challenging spiritual drama written in the style of Phillips' best-selling contemporary page-turner Rift in Time.