Posts Tagged ‘cartoons’
Actually Existing Media Bias
From Think Progress’s Top Ten Occupy Wall Street cartoons.
Wednesday Links
* Since yesterday there have apparently been small earthquakes in Los Angeles and Iran, and a large one in Peru. I’m ready to call it: S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has an earthquake machine.
* Did Fracking Cause the Virginia Earthquake?
* National Level Exercise 11: a high-magnitude quake hits the New Madrid Fault, which lies on the border region of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi and on which fifteen nuclear power plants sit. More scary news: Virginia Nuclear Plant Had Quake Sensors Removed Due to Budget Cuts.
* Future Shocks: Modern Science, Ancient Catastrophes and the Endless Quest to Predict Earthquakes. Via longform.org.
* The Wire: The Complete Series is on sale today only at Amazon for $72.
* Lots of buzz today around truly outrageous exploitation of international student labor (and an eventual work action) at Hershey’s; good posts can be found at How the University Works and New APPS.
* I linked this on Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth repeating: this short Portal fan film is pretty stellar.
* Hegemony watch: “The Chinese want to make Superman an honorary citizen.”
* Laughably Freudian symbolism watch: “Washington Monument may be cracked, could be closed indefinitely.”
* A big part of the problem is precisely that climate efforts so far have been almost entirely driven by liberal elites. It’s been an extremely intellectualized, top-down sort of undertaking, and as we saw with painful clarity during the climate bill fiasco, an elite-driven strategy isn’t going to cut it. Why Isn’t the Climate Left Stronger?
* As things now stand we are producing a generation of graduates whose lives are being wrecked by debts they will never be rid of (or, if they go into the Income-Based Repayment program, will be rid of in 25 years, which to be fair is only five years longer than the term of service for ordinary soldiers in the Roman Legions when that empire was at its height). The Road to Serfdom.
* And just for laughs wry, knowing half-smiles: How Hard Is It To Get a Cartoon Into The New Yorker?
The Wire: The Animated Series (and Several More)
* Krugman on how the Obama administration came to make its disastrous pivot to the deficit.
* Mad science experiment of the day: Harry Harlow’s (no joke) pit of despair. I wish it were a joke.
* Right-wing lies are printed above the fold on page one; the corrections turn up six months later on page 13 of section F, if they get ever printed at all. Today’s example: the Post’s anti-union snowplow hoax from last winter, thoroughly debunked today to absolute crickets from the media. In their defense, they did manage to catch that one guy lying about his wang.
* Example two: The stats on climate denialism in the media. The denialists outnumber climate realists on the teevee by more than 3-1.
* Coming soon—The Wire: The Animated Series. There’s more here, but nothing else lives up to this magic of this one.
* And this one is for all my Hoosiers: please, don’t be afraid of the space rays.
All the Things That Happened Today
* Sad news: Terrorist attack at Moscow’s busiest airport.
* Rumors are swirling that the Wachowskis may pull a Lucas.
* Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult.
* SOTU 2011: “How We Win the Future.” Warning: climate change may not exist in the future.
* Will big-name Republicans sit out 2012?
* The problem with regarding the photography of suffering as ‘pornography.’
* Killjoys keep debunking the “twin suns in 2012″ Betelgeuse supernova story. Can’t I have just this one thing?
* Soccer science! As game theory predicts, legitimate falls far outnumber fake falls, Wilson reported at the meeting. Only 6% of the 2800 falls were highly deceptive dives. Players were two to three times as likely to dive when close to the goal, where the payoff was huge: Statistics show that there is an 80% chance of scoring from penalty kicks. Almost none of the highly deceptive dives resulted in free kicks against the diver. And referees were most likely to reward dives that occurred close to the goals—perhaps because the players were farther away and the deception harder to detect, he noted.
* James Kochalka is Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate.
* Headline of the day: Man admits mailing hundreds of tarantulas.
* I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it appears the Bush administration may have broken the law.
* Genghis Khan: history’s greenest conqueror?
Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion actually cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
So how exactly did Genghis Khan, one of history’s cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today’s environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.
Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world’s total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.
For certain values of “green”… Via MetaFilter.
* And also via MetaFilter: Vermont vs. corporate personhood. Republicans vs. the Internet. Rahm Emanuel gets Chicago’d. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. The United States of Shame. Teacher salary? Damn you North Carolina!
Vulgar Army
Vulgar Army is yet another blog devoted entirely to octopuses in propaganda and political cartoons. Thanks Melody!
Links from the Weekend
* Slate devotes a column to criticizing the U.S. military-based approach to Haitian emergency relief. There’s some attempts at push-back, with varying success, in the MetaFilter thread, particularly about the specifically helpful capacities of the ships that have been sent there, but what can you say about facts like these:
Air-traffic control in the Haitian capital was outsourced to an Air Force base in Florida, which, not surprisingly, gave priority to its own pilots. While the military flew in troops and equipment, planes bearing supplies for the Red Cross, the World Food Program, and Doctors Without Borders were rerouted to Santo Domingo in neighboring Dominican Republic. Aid flights from Mexico, Russia, and France were refused permission to land. On Monday, the British Daily Telegraph reported, the French minister in charge of humanitarian aid admitted he had been involved in a “scuffle” with a U.S. commander in the airport’s control tower. According to the Telegraph, it took the intervention of the United Nations for the United States to agree to prioritize humanitarian flights over military deliveries.
Meanwhile, much of the aid that was arriving remained at the airport. Haitians watched American helicopters fly over the capital, commanding and controlling, but no aid at all was being distributed in most of the city. On Tuesday, a doctor at a field hospital within site of the runways complained that five to 10 patients were dying each day for lack of the most basic medical necessities. “We can look at the supplies sitting there,” Alphonse Edward told Britain’s Channel 4 News.
The much-feared descent into anarchy stubbornly refused to materialize. “It is calm at this time,” Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, admitted to the AP on Monday. “Those who live and work here … tell me that the level of violence that we see right now is below pre-earthquake levels.” He announced that four—four, in a city of more than 2 million—aid-distribution points had been set up on the sixth day of the crisis.
* Some good news: the IMF claims it is “pursuing” the total elimination of Haiti’s foreign debt. And some terrible news: by one estimate (highlighted by Marginal Revolution) a full 8% of Haiti’s population may be orphaned children.
* 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History.
* From the comments: The Five Dials tribute to David Foster Wallace.
* David’s Cross’s The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret has been picked up by the BBC. My friend Bill posted a clip from the pilot not long ago, which he played at his recent show at Raleigh.
* Fan art gone terribly wrong/terribly right: Seinfeld Star Wars.
* Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic: a case report. (Thanks Neil!)
* Via Ezra Klein, I see Tom Toles has somehow gotten hold of the Democratic playbook.
* Glenn Greenwald has a balanced piece largely in favor of the Citizens United v. FEC. Others are saying this decision may give foreign multinational corporations the right to participate in the American political process. Citizens United is by all appearances the first major domestic political crisis of the ’10s, and it came early; if I had sway in the progressive blogosphere I would suggest we devote ourselves to demanding the introduction of a constitutional amendment that reverses this decision by modifying or eliminating corporate personhood. That fight would not be easy—as Matt points out the total spending on Senate campaigns in 2004, $400 million, was just 17% of the marketing budget of a single American bank, which means our already corporatist ruling class would have every possible incentive to ignore such a campaign—but I don’t see much choice; it’s hard to imagine any sort of functional democracy existing in America while Citizens United remains in full effect.
* Republicans believe that Obama’s problem is that he’s pushing so much government intervention in the economy. That’s undoubtedly part of the story. But Obama’s larger difficulty is that he’s pushing so much change at a time when filibuster threats are so common that it requires 60 Senate votes to pass almost everything — and the minority party won’t provide the president votes on almost anything. We are operating in what amounts to a parliamentary system without majority rule, a formula for futility. Steve Benen has a post on the filibuster reform recently proposed by Tom Harkin here.
* Are Republicans “irrationally exuberant” about November? God, I hope so.
* For what it’s worth Obama’s poll numbers continue to match Reagan’s, and he beats nearly all comers in 2012. The one possible exception is the affable, if politically odious, Mike Huckabee, who beats Obama 45-44 in a PPP poll. And it was Huckabee himself who predicted just this week Obama will win again in 2012.
* NASA says 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record. Good thing climate change is a myth.
* The immortal Neil Gaiman is profiled in the New Yorker.
* The last days of Philip K. Dick.
* And if my estimates are correct, we could hit Peak Crayola as soon as 2018.
More Watchmen Irony
More Watchmen irony: Watchmen recast as a Saturday morning cartoon show.
