Posts Tagged ‘New Jersey’
Three for Sunday Night
* Cory Booker, surrogate from hell. But what does it profit a man to gain a Senate seat and lose his soul?
* This Elizabeth Warren thing is breaking my heart. She would have been a decent candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, but I can’t see that happening now unless she can provide some evidence she’s really Cherokee. Really sad.
* Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: Anderson, it seems, has finally and thoroughly gone up his own ass—and yet the film happens to be one of his best and most inviting works. Moonrise Kingdom—deftly orchestrated but deliberately uncomplicated—is easily Anderson’s sweetest, most sincere movie, and the only one, aside from Rushmore, where the director’s stylistic and thematic conceits are perfectly in sync. It may be the twee-est, archest film of a director frequently accused of tweeness and archness, and it may veer closer than any of Anderson’s other films to outright kitsch (e.g. the brownish, Jean-Pierre Jeunet-style color grading)—but there is a grace and a beauty to the way all of its fussed-over parts click together.
Potpourri
* Jacob Remes explains May Day.
* My Joss Whedon zombie essay from PopMatters is out in Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion today. Last night I submitted my abstract for the upcoming Politics of Adaptation conference on Cabin in the Woods, drawing me ever closer to total Joss Whedon scholarly completism.
* Roundtable on Non-Western SF, at Locus.
* A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that “liking” a Facebook post is not free speech. To repeat my own Twitter quips, yeah, because it doesn’t cost money.
* New polling shows Amendment One will likely pass after all.
* al Qaeda’s discovered our only weakness: our insatiable love of porn.
On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.
Buried inside them was a pornographic video called “Kick Ass” — and a file marked “Sexy Tanja.”
Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence — more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group’s most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.
* Hungry for good nerd press, Netflix is teasing it might resurrect Jericho.
* Aetna, according to the report, cited exclusions and said it would not cover the claim because Scott developed breasts after she changed sexes. N.J. transgender woman wins battle with insurance company to have mammogram covered.
* And somebody page Nick Bostrom: Entire Observable Universe Modeled Using French Supercomputer.
Thursday Night Links
* I just want to hear him deny it: Chris Christie Denies Falling Asleep at Springsteen Show.
* Top 10 dying industries in the United States. Top 10 fastest growing industries in the United States.
* But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary.
* How killing by remote control has changed the way we fight. More here.
* I know some people who have this: Witzelsucht (the Germans just have the best words for everything, don’t they?) is a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior. It’s also sometimes called the “joking disease,” and as Taiwanese researchers phrased it in a 2005 report, it’s a “tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes.”
* Details on the coming Arrested Development revival on Netflix.
* Tumblr of the day: Context-Free Patent Art.
* Avengers vs Avengers XXX: I’ve just seen the film… the real film, the proper film. It’s quite possible that the porn parody will pass the Bechdel test, where the real film doesn’t…
* Drew Goddard talks to AICN about Cabin in the Woods.
* Back to the Future: The Pitch Meeting.
* Hey, Everyone — Stop Taking This Picture!
* Cheap theatrics, but okay, you got me: “President Barack Obama sits on the famed Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum following an event in Dearborn, Mich., April 18, 2012.”
* Actually existing media bias. (1)
* Actually existing media bias. (2)
* http://www.yourlogicalfallacyis.com/.
* In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.
* Eric Rabkin is doing an open course on fantasy and science fiction. Details at the link.
* And the strange case of Vatican v. Nuns.
The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.”
The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.
Wednesday Night Links
* George Zimmerman in custody, charged with second degree murder.
* Dinosaur Times: probably a lot less fun than you think.
* Neal Kirby remembers his father, Jack.
* The Port Huron Statement at 50. Warning: this is primarily about the compromised second draft.
* The Fraiser theme song explained. Finally.
* Bad polling news for Romney in North Carolina, Colorado, and pretty much everywhere else. Who could have predicted that aggressively alienating 51% of the voting population would have turned out so badly?
* Tough primary season for God: Every candidate he encouraged to run has dropped out.
* Chris Christie lied about the Hudson Tunnel project he unilaterally canceled? Say it ain’t so!
* The headline reads, “National Review Fires Another Racist Writer.”
* Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America. Just heartwrenching. Below: A 12-year-old in his cell at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. The window has been boarded up from the outside. The facility is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private company. In 1982, a fire killed 27 prisoners and an ensuing lawsuit against the authorities forced them to reduce their population to maintain an 8:1 inmate to staff ratio.
Monday Lunchtime Links
* Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board.
* Facts are stupid things: Growth In Government Spending Under President Obama Slower Than During Bush, Reagan Administrations. But don’t worry! The White House’s generous offer for even more cuts is still on the table.
* Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military?
“For decades the military has been using video-game technology,” says Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using retooled video games to train their personnel.”
Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending. The prototype for the first home video games console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates, a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date back to at least the second world war.
Later, the games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994, look uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.
“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”
* Daniel Engber at Slate has your Apple apologetics.
But Daisey’s version wasn’t even substantially true. It was substantially false. The version of the story that aired on the radio gave listeners a clear and false impression of the abuses at Foxconn. It inflated the prevalence and massaged the data. How much deeper could the lies have gone?
…
Apple employees are being mistreated in China, but perhaps not so much or so often that it really matters to most people, harsh as that may sound.
Related: zunguzungu on The McNulty Gambit.
* In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that corporate donations to campaign Super PACs were legal because there was no reason to think they led to “corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This was a remarkably specious argument in the first place, but now we’re apparently going to test it to destruction.
* More on the SCOTUS beat: If you believe that the Court’s conservative majority is itching to strike down Obamacare, then the task is to launder this decision of partisan motivation. The Paul Clement court.
* Still more: Obamacare on Trial: Case of the Century?
* If the hole in the ozone layer were discovered today, we’d let the planet burn.
* A Critical Look at the Future of Zoos.
* Fresh from arguing that the female orgasm doesn’t exist, science now concludes women can have orgasms from exercising. Make up your mind, science!
FNL
* My students last summer insisted Mass Effect was important science fiction. Now io9 is telling me the same thing.
* American University’s adjunct faculty have voted to unionize.
* How to design a movie poster.
* You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. What could possibly go wrong?
* Gay marriage passes in New Jersey, only to be vetoed by Chris Christie. Meanwhile marriage equality looks likely to pass the Maryland state legislature. Meanwhile Obama announces it won’t defend laws that ban same-sex couples from receiving military benefits.
* WTFEverywhere: Sweden is only one of 17 countries that require transgender people to undergo sterilization.
* Apple still trying to find some way to make the Foxconn scandal go away.
* And Springsteen explains Wrecking Ball.
“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community … In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid – he’s imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.”
Monday Break
* The liberal blogosphere is falling in love with Rick Santorum, who has taken the lead nationally and who today leads Romney by double digits in Romney’s home state of Michigan. He’s closing in Newt in Georgia, too.
* Black Herstory: The Founders of the Feminist Party.
* 2015 is only three years away: Mattel Is Finally Making the Back to the Future Hoverboard. Thanks Tim.
* Marriage equality fight heats up in New Jersey.
* And your infographic of the day. Via Tumblr.
Tuesday Night Links
* When the equitable distribution of Springsteen tickets is put at risk, the New Jersey State Legislature springs into action. More on the BOSS Act at MetaFilter.
* As usual, Aaron Bady is killing it on the Occupy Oakland beat. Another good post on reporting-as-stenography here.
* CFP for a collection of essays on Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad: The Video Game.
* Tougher Than Wisconsin: Arizona Republicans Launch ‘All Out Assault’ On Public Unions.
* Shocking no one, Romney wins! Florida turnout actually fell from 2008. Can Newt hold on?
* And Brad Plumer keeps hope alive for a brokered GOP convention…
By the End of My Second Term Rutgers Will Have a Permanent Campus on the Moon
New Jersey probably could use a visionary reorganization of its state university system—a state its size should have multiple research campuses on par with the SUNY or UNC systems, rather than relying so completely on city/county satellite campuses—but Chris Christie is the worst possible person for the job.
Monday Reading™
* Well, that’s one way to do it: Tennessee Tea Party ‘Demands’ That References To Slavery Be Removed From History Textbooks.
* Russian scientist claims to have evidence of life on Venus.
by the 1960s, the American Mariner probes and their Soviet Venera counterparts had revealed Venus was just about the most inhospitable place imaginable, an acidic world with surface temperatures of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures nearly 92 times that of Earth.
That’s why the new paper by Russian astronomer Leonid Ksanfomaliti, due to appear in the Russian publication Solar System Research, seems to sit slightly outside the scientific consensus. He says that photos taken in 1982 – presumably either by Venera 13 or Venera 14, both of which visited Venus in March of that year – depict a “disk”, a “black flap”, and, perhaps most boldly, “a scorpion.”
Well, it checks out.
* Why a white knight won’t save the GOP from the Mitt-Newt trainwreck.
* Speaking of which: Gingrichmentum!
* Brown and Warren agree to ban third-party ads in Massachusetts. What’s the force of this, if the ads are genuinely third-party?
* Gay rights victories in New Jersey and Washington State.
* Evidence of cooperative play between dolphins and whales.
* …it is now possible to recognize that there are four discrete corridors of cisnormative resistance toward trans people’s readiness to transition.
First corridor, pre-adolescence: “You don’t know any better. You’re too young to understand”;
Second corridor, during adolescence: “It’s a confusing time. Wait until after puberty’s done”;
Third corridor, late development: “You should wait until you’re totally sure. You’ll never pass”; and
Final corridor, maturation: “You’re having a mid-life crisis. What about your kids, spouse, and career?”
* Someone on Facebook just told me Object Lessons from Duke’s Own™ Robyn Wiegman is now out.
* How fluctuations in the academic job market affect time-to-degree.
* And some recent notes on mental health and the Ph.D., via here, via Twitter.
Monday!
* The Brad Delong That Failed: “Things that I think I have gotten really, really wrong so far in my career.”
* TPM games out the early primaries and says Mitt Romney may be in even worse shape than it seems. Of course, with the way horse-race political coverage works in this country, this could just be setup for the inevitable “comeback kid” narrative. Meanwhile, I hope the Republican primary never ends.
* Newt’s Tax Plan: Just give rich people free money. It can’t fail!
* And more Newt: Rick Santorum’s consistency and courage on Iran has been a hallmark of why, if we do survive, it will be in part because of people like Rick who’ve had the courage to tell the truth about the Iranians for a long time. If!
* Military-industrial-academic complex: Blackwater to change its name again to Academi.
* Next year’s Supreme Court schedule should be interesting.
* The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
* The case against charts, Fox News Edition.
* The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Discussion at MeFi.
* The last question American Morning asked the two is what they would call an Occupy Wall Street-themed flavor. “Choccupy?” suggested Ben Cohen. Guys, really, I already solved this.
* When Verizon trolled New Jersey.
* Two from Longform’s Best of 2011: The Movie Set That Ate Itself and This Tech Bubble Is Different. #1:
Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home
and #2:
There’s always someone out there crying bubble, it seems; the trick is figuring out when it’s easy money—and when it’s a shell game. Some bubbles actually do some good, even if they don’t end happily. In the 1980s, the rise of Microsoft (MSFT), Compaq (HPQ), and Intel (INTC) pushed personal computers into millions of businesses and homes—and the stocks of those companies soared. Tech stumbled in the late 1980s, and the Valley was left with lots of cheap microprocessors and theories on what to do with them. The dot-com boom was built on infatuation with anything Web-related. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporizing about $6 trillion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure that has come to benefit businesses and consumers.
…So if this tech bubble is about getting shoppers to buy, what’s left if and when it pops? Perlman grows agitated when asked that question. Hands waving and voice rising, he says that venture capitalists have become consumed with finding overnight sensations. They’ve pulled away from funding risky projects that create more of those general-purpose technologies—inventions that lay the foundation for more invention. “Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things,” he says. “We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings.”
And if that fuel of innovation is exhausted? “My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”
* And then there’s Abed Is Joker Now.
Meanwhile, At Rutgers
With state aid cuts and the poor economy, professors across the university are learning to live without common items like office phones, photocopies, pay raises and the latest academic journals.
Meanwhile, the university has increased funding for sports, fueling tension between the athletic and academic communities over the university’s priorities. Last year, the university diverted $26.8 million in student fees and tuition dollars to cover the department’s operating loss, one of the highest subsidies in the nation, a Star-Ledger analysis shows.
Occupy Wednesday
* The Occupy Oakland general strike seems to have been really pretty amazingly successful. The view from Twitter. Another. And here’s Matt’s picture again, having gone viral through me by way of @zunguzungu and @rortybomb. Half those pageviews are rightfully mine, Matt!
* General strikes in U.S. history.
* Arguments not taken seriously that should be: A federal court is being asked to grant constitutional rights to five killer whales who perform at marine parks — an unprecedented and perhaps quixotic legal action that is nonetheless likely to stoke an ongoing, intense debate at America’s law schools over expansion of animal rights.
* When advertising works too well: the strange case of Axe Body Spray.
* Women hold slightly more than half (52.3 percent) of creative class jobs and their average level of education is almost the same as men. But the pay they receive is anything but equal. Creative class men earn an average of $82,009 versus $48,077 for creative class women. This $33,932 gap is a staggering 70 percent of the average female creative class salary. Even when we control for hours worked and education in a regression analysis, creative class men out-earn creative class women by a sizable $23,700, or 49.2 percent.
* Legal Pain Killers Killed 15,000 People In 2008, Marijuana Likely Killed Zero.
* New Report Finds Vermont Could Save As Much As $1.8 Billion By 2020 From Shifting To Single Payer.
* Legendary Glenn Beck sponsor Goldline charged with fraud.
* Jon Corzine’s new firm likely to soon be charged with fraud. My father reminded me today that one universe over Jon Corzine never got in a horrific car accident as a result of his state police driver texting on the highway—which means he’s still the governor of New Jersey, which means he’s cruising towards a run for the presidency in 2016. In this universe he’s probably going to go to jail. It’s hard to think of another public figure whose life has hinged so completely on such a fluke event.
* In thirty years, college tuition has tripled.
* The worst part of the catastrophic implosion of the Hermain Cain candidacy is that he was the only one with a chance of stopping China from getting the bomb. None of the other candidates are even talking about this issue.
* And J.K. reveals she wanted to kill off Hagrid, too. You fiend!
Hundred-Year Events At Least Twice a Year
Wednesday!
* Local news: A major donation at Duke will rebrand the Rare Books, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
* Neofeudalism at Verizon from Pandagon and Feministe.
* Taibbi:
For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG.
There’s a little more here.
* Debunking the Texas miracle: turns out the whole thing was on the back of government jobs. Socialism!
* With Rick Perry already going up in flames, there was a surge of interest today around Chris Christie amid rumors that he was focus-testing a 2012 run. Then New Jersey got downgraded. Now people are talking about Paul Ryan again. Who will be tomorrow’s savior?
* Of course they might not need one. Gallup has Obama’s approval rating on the economy down to 26%, and his disapproval rating up to 71%.
* Also in GOP primary news: Why is Jon Huntsman even a Republican? It seems like the guy is just in the wrong place.
* And your obscene atrocity of the day: Missouri School Sued For Allegedly Making Special Ed Student Write Apology Letter To Her Rapist.
