Posts Tagged ‘immigration’
A Few Friday Night Links
* Tarheel Summer? Roughly 600 people gathered outside the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Monday as part of a growing wave of protests called Moral Mondays, which have now led to 153 arrests over four weeks.
* DIA’s art collection could face sell-off to satisfy Detroit’s creditors.
* Harvard Professors Call for Greater Oversight of MOOCs.
* Immigration-related offenses are now the leading type of federal prosecution, constituting more than 40% of cases compared with 22% for drug crimes, according to federal crime data.
* Study: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Real Hard.
* And for his 72nd birthday, a map of every street, town, and city Dylan has ever sung about.
Thursday Morning Link Transmission!
* American says no to MOOCs. So does SFSU.
* Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University says no to tenure.
“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”
Far better for them to spend those five or six years trying to get a TT job at another school.
* Scenes from the Fitness Palace at Purdue.
* In practice, however, that doesn’t happen. The scholarships go towards “merit aid”, which is often, dismayingly enough, a polite way of saying that the college is helping to pay for wealthy kids to attend, even if they’re not particularly smart. Some 20% of students with GPAs below 2.0, for instance, receive merit aid. And at the same time, the “need aid” is carefully calibrated so that poor kids won’t take the colleges up on their offers… See also: Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students as Aid Funneled to Rich.
* The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor. And its equally unhappy, equally exploitative shadow.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to cut student interest rates to near zero.
* Food service workers in St. Louis have gone on strike. So might adjuncts in Chicago. Amazon workers sue over mandatory post-shift search. Cooper Union Students Occupy President’s Office To Protest Tuition.
* Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Medical Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Keep Naked Girls on Leashes.
* NYC Considering Allowing Non-Citizens To Vote. Good!
* “Demolishing the Competition: The Longitudinal Link Between Competitive Video Games, Competitive Gambling, and Aggression,” a new study that will appear in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that aggressive behavior is tied to competition, not violence, in videogames and gambling, according to Forbes.
* Scientists also say that guns are bad, glass is not a liquid, and the Toba catastrophe may not have happened.
* This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl).
* Here’s another example — I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (several times) and I never noticed that Riker doesn’t know how to use a chair. When the guy sits down he pulls the chair back and dramatically slings his leg over the back of it like he’s mounting a freakin’ horse. He apparently does this all the time, regardless of the situation. It’s nuts.
* Lucas wanted Indiana Jones 2 to be a dinosaur movie. I honestly can’t decide if this is the best or the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Tuesday Morning
* #AltAc megapost: Humanities Unbound: Careers & Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track.
* Decadence watch: Flights Delayed Across Country Amid Budget-Cut Furloughs of Air Controllers.
* Reddit wants you to know it is sorry. Time to focus on its core competencies of creepshots and porn.
* World’s energy nearly as dirty today as it was 20 years ago.
* France Legalizes Gay Marriage After Harsh Debate.
France legalized gay marriage on Tuesday after a wrenching national debate and protests that flooded the streets of Paris. Legions of officers and water cannon stood ready near France’s National Assembly ahead of the final vote, bracing for possible violence on an issue that galvanized the country’s faltering conservative movement.
The measure passed easily in the Socialist-majority Assembly, 331-225, just minutes after the president of the legislative body expelled a disruptive protester in pink, the color adopted by French opponents of gay marriage.
I have a lot of questions.
* REPORT: Hundreds Of Immigrants Are Being Deported From Their Hospital Beds.
* Tumblr of the day: http://100percentmen.tumblr.com.
* Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr stated in letters to the Michigan Employee Relations Commission (MERC) that it is within his power to end collective bargaining in the city. Specifically, Orr claimed he is under no legal obligation to participate in bargaining or compulsory arbitration with public safety employees, including police, firefighters and emergency medical responders.
Then There Is The Matter of ‘White Power’
The untold story of “Get Back.” Satire is a dangerous game.
Wednesday!
* Duke’s Jebediah Purdy has the solution to the problem of animal-rights muckrakers I blogged about yesterday:
Fairness and safety are real issues. So is transparency, and that is why we should require confined-feeding operations and slaughterhouses to install webcams at key stages of their operations. List the URL’s to the video on the packaging. There would be no need for human intrusion into dangerous sites. No tricky angles or scary edits by activists. Just the visual facts. If the operators felt their work misrepresented, they could add cameras to give an even fuller picture.
On what grounds could the slaughterhouse industry possibly object to that? Via DotEarth’s post on the personhood of non-humans.
* All told, over the last five fiscal years, the Education Department has generated $101.8 billion in profit from student borrowers, thanks to low borrowing costs for the government and fixed interest rates for students, budget documents show.
* Student loan interest rates are scheduled to double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Congress extended the lower rate on federal student loans for a year in an effort to control the nation’s formidable student debt crisis, but will now have to decide whether or not to cancel the interest rate hike once again. Interests Diverge on Interest Rates.
* Every meaningful resistance to neoliberalism must be a feminism.
* Now, however, the City College of San Francisco might pay a heavy price for its faculty-oriented ethos: being shut down.
* The L.A. Times pans the New University of California.
* Millions of Americans have grown up with a defining family immigration story. But while our families may have endured hardship coming to America, the simple fact is that most of our immigration stories would not be possible at all under today’s immigration laws. Great idea for a site.
* The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won’t linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed “gone.” It’s a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the future: Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium.
* Animated Renderings of America After 25 Feet of Sea Level Rise.
* They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.
* Trends in Instructional Staff Employment Status, 1975-2011.
* And xkcd considers the mise-en-Adobe.
Even More Tuesday Links (Collect Them All!)
* Wisconsin, unfortunately, has become a case study in the failure of austerity economics at the state level.
* The NCAA wants you to know that its unpaid workers absolutely definitely have health insurance.
* Contingency Plan: Outsourcing Education.
As Maisto puts it: “The most vulnerable students tend to get taught by the least supported faculty. And if that doesn’t bother people, it should.”
Stick around for some eye-popping rationalizations from senior administrators.
* Of those students who place into remedial math at CUNY, 20 percent have progressed to a for-credit course two years later. After six years, just one in four have managed to earn any degree. A national research report published last year called remediation a “bridge to nowhere.” System Failure: The Collapse of Public Education.
“If you start in remediation,” says Tom Sugar of Complete College America, the think tank that published the “bridge to nowhere” report, “there’s virtually no chance you’re going to end up with a college degree.”
* A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise.
“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”
* Tough times in the U.K.: the Queen got a mere $5 million dollar raise this year.
* The Associated Press announced today that it will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
* New journal: The Journal of Popular Television, Volume 1, Number 1.
* And your Tumblr of the minute: Mean Girls + Mad Men = Mean Mad Men. So good I don’t even care if I’ve done this one before.
…And More
* I’ve said this before: let’s have an academic decathlon. You choose a team based on whatever pedagogical criteria you want. You can choose students from public school or private, unionized teachers or not, parochial or secular, from charter or magnet, from Montessori or KIPP or whatever else you want. However, I choose the demographics of the students on your team. For my team, the situation is reversed: you choose the pedagogical factors for my students, but I choose the demographics. You stock your team kids from whatever educational backgrounds you think work, and mine with whatever educational systems you think don’t work. Meanwhile, I give you all children from the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden inner city and impoverished rural districts where we see the most failure. I stock mine with upper-class children of privilege. I would bet the house on my team, and I bet if you’re being honest, you would too. Yet to accept that is to deny the basic assumption of the education reform movement, which is that student outcomes are a direct result of teacher quality.
* Stunning front-page from UNC’s Daily Tar Heel today.
* If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.
* Elderly Obama And Boehner Daughters Arrive In Time Machine To Demand Climate Action.
Who among us can forget Malia’s first words to a rapidly-growing crowd in this historical meeting between present and future, “People of 2009, we come from–” words that were immediately interrupted by her younger self, surrounded by Secret Service, saying, “It’s 2013,” which led future Malia to punch future Sasha, saying, “I told you not to mess with the controls.” Malia then continued, “2013, seriously? What’s the friggin’ point?”
* Academic jobs watch: Specialist Professor, Homeland Security.
* California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making. Krugman is optimistic that the Republicans’ stranglehold on the state seems to be abating; I’d note that in the arena of public education at least all the worst ideas are coming from the Democrats.
* When (and how) Brad DeLong trolled David Graeber for months. Jesus.
* That’s because these workers represent what’s happening to U.S. work in three critical ways. First, precarity: Workers lack job security, formal contracts, or guaranteed hours. Second, legal exclusion: Labeled as “independent contractors,” “domestic workers” or otherwise, they’re thrust beyond the reach of this country’s creaky, craven labor laws. And third, the mystification of employment: While a no-name contracted company signs your paycheck, your conditions are set by a major corporation with far away headquarters and legal impunity. Guest Workers as Bellweather.
* How to Get a Black Woman Fired.
* Overwhelming Student Debt Has Parents Getting Life Insurance Policies on Their Kids.
* But if Emanuel brought Byrd-Bennett in to work the same kind of charter magic in Chicago that she did in Detroit, he may be dismayed to encounter one important difference: Chicago is now in a good position to fight back. The school closings hearings were packed with engaged, motivated citizens, and the teachers union is more organized than it’s been in three decades. During its popular and successful strike, the union’s approval rating climbed while the mayor’s fell—public opinion polls showed that taxpayers blamed Emanuel for the ugliness that took place during negotiations. The CTU’s current leadership has built relationships with community leaders and organizations, forming a coalition to fight the slash-and-burn privatization pushed by the Board of Education and its corporate sponsors, and has even hosted civil disobedience trainings open to the public. This afternoon’s protest will serve as further evidence that Emanuel is indeed up against a new opponent, one strong enough that not even the best “cleaner” may be able to defeat it.
* Detroit Schools Emergency Manager Gets Accolades as Children Fall Further Behind.
* Nate Silver makes your Final Four book: Louisville Favored in Final Four, but Wichita State Could Become Unlikeliest Champion.
* Zero Dark Thirty is supposedly a film about freedom. A “freedom so threatening that there are those around the world willing to kill themselves and others to prevent us from enjoying it,” as the TV sound-bite in the background puts it. The odd thing is that this freedom is never once glimpsed within the film itself. Obviously, we are constantly reminded of the imprisonment and torture of the al Qaeda suspects, but it is never their freedom we are meant to be concerned with. More tellingly, it is the American spaces within the film that leave this freedom unseen. A strange becoming-prisoner takes hold of the spaces, and of the American body itself: not unfolding, in the end, either defeat or victory, but pulling together in a constricted space the impossibility of both.
* Gen X hits the nostalgia capitalism threshold.
* And dollar tracking site WheresGeorge suggests discrete commerce zones in the U.S.
Wednesday Morning Links
* I’ll be at SCMS 2013 in Chicago tomorrow, talking about War and Science Fiction in Battle: Los Angeles. I have to be back in Milwaukee that evening and Friday, but I’m hoping to meet up with some people while I’m there.
* How to Turn Higher Education into an Engine of Inequality.
* The Nation on the Legacy of Hugo Chávez. At FAIR. At the New Yorker (c. 2008).
* Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make. Trickle-Down Feminism.
* The technocrats are akin to conspiracists in that they both claim a monopoly on the sorts of political facts that should sway policy. Both groups come equipped with their own body of experts and studies to vouch for their prescriptions. And both Jones and Klein derive their legitimacy from having, through their supposed diligence and uniquely sharp analytical minds, privileged access to some set of truths of political significance. Both assume that answers to factual questions will make the necessary political action irrefutable. All that divides the conspiracist from the technocrat is the nature of the facts they fetishize.
* There’s no direct analog to statistical analysis in baseball. But where Congress and the White House are concerned, what if the press put much greater emphasis put on “the sausage” and much less on the sausage-making? What if we judged legislators on their votes, Obama on what legislation he signs and vetoes, and left it at that?
* Jeb Bush disagrees with own book released yesterday.
* A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013. The Atlantic responds. Some commentary.
* If People Talked About Seinfeld Like They Talk About Girls.
* Gawker is shitty, but Amy Poehler makes it all okay.
“Aw, I feel bad if she was upset. I am a feminist and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff. “
* Civilization with a global warming focus. Climate change will open up surprising new Arctic shipping routes. Los Angeles Aims To Be Coal-Free In 12 Years.
* China experiments with arcologies.
* Ralph Macchio finally old enough for long-awaited Karate Kid sequel.
* 12-Year-Old Victim of Bullying Dead After Being Attacked At School.
* Breaking: men aren’t actually better at math than women. Gasp!
* Jon Stewart Is Taking the Summer Off to Make a Movie About Iran. John Oliver will guest host for 8 of the 12 weeks he’s gone; I hope Jessica Williams takes the other four.
* “If she had said elephants, I would have said elephants.” How does that make it better?
* This time, Judge Nina N. Wright Padilla asked all 12 to approach so she could shake their hands.
“I hope you continue your work in a law-abiding way,” said Padilla. “I must say you are the most affable group of defendants I’ve ever come across.” Jury acquits Occupy protesters.
* New Elevators Segregate Rich from Poor.
* Another new twist on the zombie genre: zombie rehab.
* And the only news around here that people really care about.
A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links
* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.
* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.
* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6
* The politics of the Papal Conclave are fascinating.
* Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries. Pope blesses thousands at Vatican as details of ailments emerge.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics “people skills.” These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects.
* Cooper Union will probably not be free anymore.
* Roopika Risam on breaking the silence of the job search.
* Freddie deBoer: I’ve been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we’ll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. Adam Kotsko: What is education actually for?
* Margaret Atwood teases Maddaddam:
“Maddaddam begins where The Year of the Flood finishes and goes on from there,” she says. “It explores what happens when the conventional humans and the new creations find themselves in the same space. You can see that there might be some cultural misunderstandings.”
* Comics explained: the backstory of Rachel Summers. It couldn’t be simpler!
* Aaron Bady on Ngugi wa Thiong’o's In the House of the Interpreter.
* The New York Times profiles flood management technology in the Netherlands.
* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? And that universe is on the back of an even larger turtle…
* Forest Whitaker Accused of Shoplifting, Frisked at Upper West Side Deli.
* Obama says kill the penny. He would say that. He hates capitalism.
* Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.
* Kidding on the square: another National Review blogger calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
* Gasp! Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All.
* The phenomenology of solitary confinement.
* Surveying self-confessed rapists.
* How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.
* Data-crunching the Internet Adult Film Database.
* Data-crunching the Lord of the Rings.
* The Internet has finally developed impermanence technology.
* And Iceland might ban Internet porn.
Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country’s anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:
“We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech…”
This is Iceland, after all. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir is the first openly lesbian government head in the world. It’s already illegal to print and distribute porn within the country, and since 2010, strip clubs have been prohibited as well…
Canavan’s Razor – 2
A system whose behavior appears to be irrational is simply serving some purpose other than the one you think. See, for instance, the war on drugs, the war on immigrants, the U.S. military, the New Jersey Turnpike, the academic job market.
There was a request in the comments of the first Canavan’s Razor post to elaborate on my examples. Sure, why not?
* My understanding is that the tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike don’t even pay for the cost of their own collection. To the extent that they’re not just a ditch-digging-style make-work initiative, and (increasingly) a scheme to funnel public money to EZ-Pass, they exist for the purposes of political patronage.
* The war on drugs works much the same way. Spending all that money to lock up pot smokers is obviously nuts! But it exists and persists because public money can be funneled to private interests through building tons of prisons and militarizing police, and because there has to be some excuse for elites to declare war on poor people.
* I don’t know the last war America fought that made rational sense to pursue given its stated objectives. World War II?
* Anti-immigrant laws are deliberately crafted to be both draconian and ineffective in order to create a terrorized and immiserated population of workers with no standing to combat their illegal exploitation, while simultaneously appealing to aging white voters who feel threatened by the country’s changing demographics. They’re diabolically effective at both.
* And Bousquet’s got the academic job market covered already. The short version is that graduate programs generally exist not to produce future professors, as they claim, but cheap, flexible labor…
Why Hasn’t Somebody Made Sunday Reading an Internet Tradition?
* Less than 24 hours after last night’s Powerball drawing, reports confirmed that the two winners of the $587 million jackpot are both already divorced from their respective spouses, alienated from their friends and families, and completely bankrupt.
* Calvin and Hobbes search engine. Get it before it’s DCMA’d!
* Vandana Singh interviews Ted Chiang.
Finally, can you tell us something about what you’re working on now?
I don’t want to talk too much about what I’m working on, so I’ll just say that it’s a story about memory and the written word.
Sold!
* Kurt Vonnegut’s term paper prompt.
As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”
* Another round of analysis from Yves Smith on the Rolling Jubilee tax issue.
If Rolling Jubilee’s tax position is incorrect, the consequences would be ugly. In many cases, the people it claimed it was helping would be worse off than if it had done nothing.
The forgiven debt would be treated as taxable income. If the individual is a non-taxpayer (as in has too little income) the debt forgiveness could push them into owning taxes, and for anyone who was a taxpayer in the year the debt was forgiven, would result in additional taxes owed.
The worst of this is that in many cases, the debt forgiven by OWS would be invalid debt: past the statute of limitations, discharged in bankruptcy, disputed, paid off but for some reason not removed from a bank’s systems. In these cases, if Rolling Jubilee’s tax view turns out to be incorrect, the borrower will be considerably worse off, since he could have disputed the invalid debt (and debt collectors tend to roll easily) but will now have to disprove the validity of the debt to the IRS. The result is that this shifts the burden of proof: in debt collection matters, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, the debt collector, to demonstrate the validity of the debt and the amount owed. In disputes with the IRS, the burden of proof is with the taxpayer.
In addition, even if Strike Debt is correct in its gift argument, it would in some cases owe gift taxes. It does not appear prepared for this eventuality. Nor would winning on the gift question save it from running afoul of the private benefit question. Even a gift to an individual is a private benefit. If it were to lose its 501 (c)(4) status, Rolling Jubilee would owe additional taxes and penalties.
* Rejected jokes submitted to a kids’ jokes site.
* Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist? The third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite. And the very worst thing you’ll read today:
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
* A growing if largely invisible community hard-hit by Sandy faces a unique challenge: Undocumented immigrants must get help to fix illegal apartments.
* The Sports Tax That Everyone Pays.
* People on the Internet are going to have to start self-diagnosing themselves with something else: Asperger’s Dropped As Separate Condition From DSM-V.
* And the mint is considering eliminating $1 bills entirely. Yes, again!
Canavan’s Razor
A system whose behavior appears to be irrational is simply serving some purpose other than the one you think. See, for instance, the war on drugs, the war on immigrants, the U.S. military, the New Jersey Turnpike, the academic job market.
