Posts Tagged ‘morally odious morons’
Thursday!
* At last we have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem’s oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science of the day in ways far ahead of most science fiction of the time.
* Compassion and Hubris: The Dalai Lama Speaks to the Wisconsin Legislature.
According to one observer, “the ones who fell asleep (or at least appeared to be asleep) [were] Tranel, Marklein, Pridemore, Tittl, Hutton, Bies, Nass, Tiffany, and Knodl. It was hard to tell with some of them, but Tranel was definitely asleep. Nerison, who sits next to him, shook him awake at one point.”
* Tressie McMillan Cottom on MOOCs.
I think we have to accept that traditional colleges like ours have benefited from inequality. That’s biting us in the ass now because it’s being used to say we’re elitist as if we weren’t designed to do precisely what we’re doing. I mean c’mon. So let’s accept that part of our own story and say yeah we’ve got other stories too.
Jonathan Rees has been pounding the MOOC beat for weeks; here’s his latest roundup.
* Yale fined $165,000 for underreporting sex offenses. Is that a lot of money? You might very well think so.
* The Freud Museum announced earlier this week that it needed £5000 to restore Freud’s couch, the centerpiece of a study crammed with other relics, a cluttered cabinet of antique curiosities that Freud called his ‘old and dirty gods’.
* Jennie Runk: My life as a ‘plus-size’ model.
* Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note.
* And the headline reads, “Venezuela Has Run Out of Toilet Paper.”
Thursday
* National Louis, a private, nonprofit institution based in the greater Chicago metropolitan region, served about 10,000 students before the restructuring process in 2012. In addition to terminating 63 faculty members, among them 16 tenured professors, the institution eliminated four departments in its College of Arts and Sciences: English, fine arts, mathematics and natural sciences. Today, about 8,300 students attend the university — 9 in 10 on a part-time basis. What does this school teach if not English or math or arts or science? What’s left?
* The fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas on Wednesday night was fined by the Environmental Protection agency in 2006 for failing to have a risk management plan that met federal standards, an EPA report shows.
* Yesterday’s Senate Gun Control Vote Was Even More Undemocratic Than It Appeared. Angus crunches the numbers.
In twenty-one of the nation’s 50 states, both Senators yesterday voted in favor of the Manchin-Toomey background check amendment. Although those 42 Senators represent less than half the body, they represent more than half the country — 157 million people out of 313 million. The 16 states whose Senators both voted against the amendment, in contrast, represent less than a quarter of the nation, but nearly a third of the senate. That’s the equivalent of dividing the country up into states of equal population, but giving the no-vote states three senators each, and the yes-vote states just two.
And what of the other states, the ones who split their votes yesterday? Well, if you allocate half of their population to each senator, and add up the totals, you find that senators representing 62.7% of the nation’s population voted for Manchin-Toomey yesterday.
* Gun Violence Victims Detained, Put Through Background Check For Yelling ‘Shame On You’ At Senators. Conservative radio host: Families of Newtown shooting victims can ‘go to hell.’
Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss.
They lost their kids. What would Bob Davis have lost even if the bill passed?
* What Happened to Working-Class New York?
* And Bill to Create ‘New University of California’ Dies. Here’s the current state of proposed flexible online education in California. Amended Steinberg is still privatization.
Tuesday Mo(u)rning Links
* Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.
* Uncomfortable metaphor watch:
The two spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, have been orbiting the Moon since their launch in September 2011 to create a gravity field map of its surface.
But, with not enough fuel to carry out further experiments, the American space agency opted for a “controlled descent” to avoid the risk of obliterating astronaut Neil Armstrong’s footsteps on the Moon.
* Questions They Might Ask You at Your MLA Interview.
* Great moments in attendance policies.
* Fill-in-the-Blank Generic Gun Massacre Cartoon. Joe Scarborough, communist. Obama speaks at Sandy Hook Vigil. The formula is simple: The more batshit malevolent the gun cult gets, the more power they exert. Our Moloch. On politicizing tragedy:
What that means in practice is that in the aftermath of contemporary gun tragedies, we don’t see new gun legislation. What we do see is a spike in gun sales. After the shooting last summer in Aurora, Colorado, gun sales went up. After the Giffords shooting, there was a surge in purchases of the very Glock semiautomatic that wounded her. Certainly, the firearm industry and lobby will confront some bad P.R. in the coming weeks, but they can likely find succor in an uptick in business. Following the Newtown shooting, Larry Pratt, the Executive Director of Gun Owners for America, suggested that these massacres might be avoided in the future, if only more teachers were armed.
As Pratt’s sentiment should make clear, the United States has slipped its moorings and drifted into a realm of profound national lunacy. Ponder, for a second, the fact that I cannot walk into a C.V.S. today and purchase half-a-dozen packages of Sudafed, but I can walk into a gun dealership and purchase a .50 caliber rifle of the sort that U.S. snipers use in Afghanistan. In fact, I can buy six or ten—there is no limit imposed by law. Should the gun dealer think it fishy that I might want to acquire a weapon capable of downing a small aircraft (much less six of those weapons) he may report the purchase to the A.T.F. But in most states, he’s not required to.
You are terrible: The tragedy in Newtown, Conn., is a price that is paid for protection of the Second Amendment. You are terrible: Huckabee Blames ‘Tax-Funded Abortion Pills’ For Newtown Massacre. You are terrible: Can you imagine being in the shoes of the one who feels his power slipping away? You are terrible: If we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.
Unless I am missing a very subtle parody of libertarianism, McArdle’s plan to teach children to launch banzai charges against mass murderers is the single worst solution to any problem I have ever seen offered in a major publication.
Support the creation of local organizations to act as “neighborhood watch” for schools. Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive. Perhaps it’s time we start asking for volunteers to protect our children. It will require security checks, but isn’t that worth it? This dovetails with the union problem; the unions will fight this measure tooth-and-nail.
No, Really, Regulate the Bullets. Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege. What makes America’s gun culture totally unique in the world, in four charts. But maybe this chart is the only one you need.
* Dreams in Infrared: The Woes of an American Drone Operator.
* I’m sorry to say I’ve followed Ricky Gervais pretty far down the “obnoxious asshat” rabbit hole, and even I can’t imagine how his staring in The Muppets 2 could possibly turn out good.
* Popular Mechanics makes 110 predictions for the next 110 years.
2012 to 2022
Drones will protect endangered species. Guarding at-risk animals from poachers with foot patrols is expensive and dangerous. This summer rangers in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park previewed a savvy solution: Hand-launched drones armed with cameras and GPS provided aerial surveillance of threatened Indian rhinos.
Digital “ants” will protect the U.S. power grid from cyber attacks.Programmed to wander networks in search of threats, the high-tech sleuths in this software, developed by Wake Forest University security expert Errin Fulp, leave behind a digital trail modeled after the scent streams of their real-life cousins. When a digital ant designed to perform a task spots a problem, others rush to the location to do their own analysis. If operators see a swarm, they know there’s trouble.
Vegetarians and carnivores will dine together on synthetic meats. We’re not talking about tofu. We’re talking about nutritious, low-cost substitutes that look and taste just like the real thing. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has already invested in Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based chicken strips so convincing they almost fooled New York Times food writer Mark Bittman.
Bridges will repair themselves with self-healing concrete. Invented by University of Michigan engineer Victor Li, the new composite is laced with microfibers that bend without breaking. Hairline fractures mend themselves within days when calcium ions in the mix react with rainwater and carbon dioxide to create a calcium carbonate patch.
* Catfood forever! Catfood for everyone!
* And Republicans are still planning on rigging the Electoral College. Or you could just try being popular. You could, just once, try that…
Monday Night Grief Bacon
* Destroy your university the California way: In California, where public higher education has experienced cut after cut, the choices are particularly difficult. For the spring semester of 2013, the California State University has told campus leaders they may not admit any Californian students to graduate programs. Given that tuition covers only a fraction of the costs of these students’ education, the university said it couldn’t afford them.
* More lists of words with no English translation: 1, 2, 3, more.
15. Kummerspeck (German) Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.
* 4 Decades on, U.S. Starts Cleanup of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
* Terry Gilliam making 1st sci-fi movie in 18 years.
Living in an Orwellian corporate world where “mancams” serve as the eyes of a shadowy figure known only as Management, Leth (Waltz) works on a solution to the strange theorem while living as a virtual cloistered monk in his home–the shattered interior of a fire-damaged chapel. His isolation and work are interrupted now and then by surprise visits from Bainsley, a flamboyantly lusty love interest who tempts him with “tantric biotelemetric interfacing” (virtual sex) and Bob. Latter is the rebellious whiz-kid teenage son of Management who, with a combination of insult-comedy and an evolving true friendship, spurs on Qohen’s efforts at solving the theorem…Bob creates a virtual reality “inner-space” suit that will carry Qohen on an inward voyage, a close encounter with the hidden dimensions and truth of his own soul, wherein lie the answers both he and Management are seeking. The suit and supporting computer technology will perform an inventory of Qohen’s soul, either proving or disproving the Zero Theorem.
It’s a tale as old as time itself.
* Bookslut reviews the reissue of Samuel Delany’s Starboard Wine.
* Alan Moore apparently turned down $2 million to retain the right to complain about Before Watchmen.
* The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000. With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.
* Marijuana Legalization Could Generate Half a Billion a Year for Washington State.
* The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots musical is coming this November.
* Moonrise Kingdom is now the #1 grossing movie of all time…at the Alamo Drafthouse.
* And our long national nightmare is (nearly) almost over: Keanu Reeves teases Bill & Ted 3.
Morally Odious Morons
…I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.
Act 13
Pennsylvania working overtime to beat Arizona in the “Pass the Worst Law of All Time” sweepstakes.
Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed and where the U.S. coal, oil and nuclear industries began, has adopted what may be the most anti-democratic, anti-environmental law in the country, giving gas companies the right to drill anywhere, overturn local zoning laws, seize private property and muzzle physicians from disclosing specific health impacts from drilling fluids on patients.
UPDATE: Turns out they want to do the same thing in Wisconsin.
Santorum Pulling Back the Mask
“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. “There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor.”
Wednesday Night Links
* Gingrich’s support is plateauing just when he finally won my heart. Who will bomb Cuba now?
* With all this insane cash it’s making, you’d almost think Apple doesn’t actually need to use slave labor.
* Now you can see global warming at work in your very own garden.
* Actually existing media bias: Sunday Morning Talk Shows Featured Twice As Many Republicans As Dems Last Year.
* Little known fact about Sweden, that supposed bastion of liberal idealism: If a Swedish transgender person wants to legally update their gender on official ID papers, a 1972 law requires them to get both divorced and sterilized first.
* Worst idea ever? NBC plans to spin Dwight off The Office.
* The Daily Show really let Mitt Romney have it last night. This Colbert interview with Maurice “Where the Wild Things Are” Sendak is great too.
* More Romney tax follies: If you count things that aren’t taxes as if they were taxes, his tax rate is actually much higher. And his kids got $100 million tax-free.
* Kottke: President John Tyler’s grandsons are still alive!!
* And all I can say is: What took so long?
Anecdote of the Day
In the Spring of 2000, my friend and former colleague Zack Exley arrived in Washington, DC, to observe the protests that had engulfed the city during the World Bank’s annual meeting. Driving into Washington from the airport, out the window of his taxi he saw ”a teenage white girl with long dreadlocks who wore a homemade t-shirt proclaiming: WE NEED A NEW SYSTEM.”
Later that evening he attended a party at the home of then-Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers along with ”ambassadors, politicians, esteemed professors and what seemed like the entire combined senior economist staff of the IMF, World Bank and Treasury.”
It turned out Larry Summers had seen the girl too and was eagerly telling his guests about an interaction he had with her:
And so I asked the girl: ‘What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!’ And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren’t problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there — they don’t know what they want!
“Mr. Secretary,” said Zack. “You’ve got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you’re asking that girl for a better system? Aren’t the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it’s up to that girl to fix it?”
Summers chuckled and the conversation moved on. Via @tomtomorrow.
Sunday Night Links
Wall Street protests turn violent. More here. Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination. (That’s from David Graeber in the Guardian). Scott Lemieux on perhaps the worst New York Times op-ed I’ve ever read (and that’s saying something). Women in Saudi Arabia to vote and run in elections. Suicides in Greece. Scientists Disarm HIV in Step Towards Vaccine. Google is throwing money at the right-wing. And just because it’s been too long since you had a good cry: “Won’t You Be My Neighbor, 1967-2000.”
Boehnerdämmerung
With Boehner unable to pass even his own debt-ceiling bill, much less a reasonable one, Jack Belkin is talking Plan Bs. In addition to the Fourteenth Amendment option I’ve been hammering for months, there’s also something else a lot of people have suddenly started talking up, platinum-coin seigniorage:
Sovereign governments such as the United States can print new money. However, there’s a statutory limit to the amount of paper currency that can be in circulation at any one time.
Ironically, there’s no similar limit on the amount of coinage. A little-known statute gives the secretary of the Treasury the authority to issue platinum coins in any denomination. So some commentators have suggested that the Treasury create two $1 trillion coins, deposit them in its account in the Federal Reserve and write checks on the proceeds.
In the meantime: NRO’s Douglas Holtz-Eakin loses it. So does Joe Klein. Five Reasons the House GOP Is to Blame. The end of John Boehner. Boehner’s Three-Legged Stool of Doom. And from the Dep’t of Very, Very, Obvious Observations:
If in fact the debt limit is not raised well beyond the August 2 target date, and the economy suffers the severe blow that experts, Democratic politicians, and most Republican politicians believe is likely to happen — the dissenting Republican politicians such as Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert (and other insiders) will not, in fact, admit that they were wrong about it. Instead, they will blame Barack Obama for implementing the debt limit badly. And they will do so no matter how he implemented it (I’d say that would include if he did it precisely how they had advised, which would be true, except that I believe their position is mathematically impossible, so it won’t be happening).
What’s more, and this is only slightly less obvious and slightly less certain, they will almost certainly not be penalized within the GOP for being wrong. Indeed, what’s far more likely is that if, as virtually all economists and budget experts currently insist, failure to raise the debt limit causes economic disaster, the likely effect within the GOP will be to enhance the prospects of those who claim that the experts don’t know what they’re talking about — and any post-limit disaster will be considered yet another sign that the experts don’t know what they’re talking about.
