Posts Tagged ‘Superman’
Some More Friday Links
* For a few hours on this Saturday afternoon, the incarcerated fathers will be allowed to take part in an American tradition, the father-daughter dance. “A Dance of Their Own,” thought to be the only event of its kind in the country, will be in the jail’s small, windowless multipurpose room.
* Gerontocracy watch: Will Old People Take Over the World? Oh, what would the world be like if old people ran it for their own benefit at the expense of the young! Truly chilling to think about.
* …they did not find households easily shifting up and down the inequality scale. Instead, they found “the advantaged becoming permanently better-off, while the disadvantaged becoming permanently worse-off.” For men, the added inequality was entirely of the permanent sort. For households, three-quarters was permanent.
* Langston Hughes’ Collection of Harlem Rent Party Advertisements.
* Bonnet Rippers: The Rise of the Amish Romance Novel.
* When J.J. Abrams almost made Superman.
* Twinsters is a project on Kickstarter by a pair of women who look very similar, were both born in South Korea, both born on November 19, 1987, both adopted three months after birth, and have never met. It’s the most compelling Facebook family reunion since last week’s aunt and niece.
* O’Reilly Sounds The Alarm About The Left’s War Against The Easter Bunny.
So, if the far left can marginalize Santa and the Easter bunny, of they can tell the children those symbols are obsolete and unnecessary, they then set the stage for a totally secular society in the future.
Who told him our plan?
* And a set of Penguin style book covers re-imagined for Quentin Tarantino screenplays.
Tuesday Night Links
* Local news! Marquette has named Dr. Richard Holz its new dean of the Klinger College of Arts and Sciences.
* More local news! Students at The Marquette Tribune strike back against proposed budget cuts.
* Now, the United States has reached “mass incarceration”—“a level of imprisonment so vast that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group,” Western writes. He has found that 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts in the United States will go to prison before age 35. The deterrent effect of incarceration is lessened if it becomes so common that it no longer carries any stigma. “The American prison boom is as much a story about race and class,” he writes, “as it is about crime control.”
* Adam Kotsko explains neoliberalism. Exactly so.
* Scott Walker vs. the unions, round two.
* Harry Potter pulls one over on the paparazzi.
* Missouri Bill Makes It A Felony For Lawmakers To Propose Gun Safety Legislation. I mean really.
* What’s remarkable about this rejected 1998 proposal to revamp Superman from Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer is how many of the ideas wound up being used in other superhero comics like All-Star Superman and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
* Florida Atlantic University names its football stadium after a for-profit prison company.
* Climate change to bring alligators to DC.
* And 40% Of Americans Now Make Less Than 1968′s Minimum Wage. Freddie deBoer: Absolutely nothing can be done to address this country’s problems until people are willing to admit that our economy has become a machine for siphoning more and more resources to those at the top.
Tuesday Night Wrapup
* From the too-good-to-check file: Samuel Beckett Used to Drive André the Giant to School, All They Talked About Was Cricket.
* This scandal has everything! Jeb Bush caught up in LEGO-related corporate corruption.
* The new UC logo may be done with Aaron Bady, but Aaron Bady is not yet done with the UC logo.
* Today in Kirk/Spock slash: On “The Footnote.”
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Not ever having to fill out this questionnaire.
* Chicago Sets Record For Consecutive DaysWithout Snow.
* Study finds half of those shot by police are mentally ill.
* To be a philistine, before we dismiss the possibility of major public support for the humanities, we need to picture ourselves with money. Humanities faculty, I suggested in Austin, should then come together to design the proper infrastructure–staff research support, research-learning undergraduate courses, the copy writing, editing, and printing facilities, the relationships with institutional advancement, the distribution channels, travel and meetings, conference circulation and return invitations, the whole ensemble of people and activities that define healthy, modern, and socially valuable research divisions. We need to cost it out at each of our institutions. Then we need to enlist chairs, deans, and administrations to develop a multi-year plan to make this redevelopment happen.
* Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, occasionally as young as fourteen or fifteen. Some operate through the haze of addiction; others, like Hoffman, are enrolled in state-mandated treatment programs that prohibit their association with illegal drugs of any kind. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.
* Michigan is your next flashpoint for the war on labor.
* Things From Thomas More’s Utopia That Have Come True Today.
* It’s not that I think liberals support torture. No, I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. What liberals want is ultimately to do what conservative hawks want to do, but only after experts and leaders assure them that they have no choice. They want extreme events to make the choice for them.
* Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested.
* ‘The despair that I felt was overwhelming’: on teaching in a New Orleans charter school.
* SEK: Against (the late) Springsteen.
* “A lot of us are campaign officials — or campaign professionals — and we want to do everything we can to help our side. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines — whatever it may be,” Tranter said with a laugh.
* Is an education crisis good for business? As the Ed Week reporter cited above pointed out, “There are market trends that support that theory. The commercial education market grew significantly in the past four years, but no segment grew faster than instruction and services. Companies like the virtual learning providers K12 Inc. and Connections Academy, or the publishers-turned-service-providers Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, fit that bill.”
* Bill Clinton concedes the drug war hasn’t worked. Gasp!
Friday Night
* Higher Ed as Cheesecake Factory. Reply from Beatrice Marovich. Reply from Ian Bogost.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union.
Meanwhile, during most of these years, Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times that figure, rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow—or were forced to pay double their current tuition—the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.
* “Fox News Op-Ed Says Women’s Nature Is To Be Dominated By Men.” GO HOME FOX NEWS YOU ARE DRUNK
* If you’re gay, your basic civil rights now depend on what mood Anthony Kennedy is in when he wakes up in the morning. Like the Founders intended!
* Vice President Joe Biden is quietly working with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to try to pass an inclusive version of the Violence Against Women Act in the lame-duck Congress. And so far, sources tell HuffPost, Cantor is on board as long as one thing is stripped from the bill: a key protection for Native American women.
* What Are the Near-Term Climate Pearl Harbors? What a weird analogy, especially with “climate change fiscal cliff” just sitting there.
* This is the kind of obscene administrative blight you normally only see on a college campus:
Denver Public Schools plans to buy a 13-story building at 1860 Lincoln St. downtown to house its administration offices and the Emily Griffith Technical College.
According to a memo Superintendent Tom Boasberg emailed late Thursday to DPS staff and the board of directors, DPS is buying the 330,000-square-foot building with $24 million in bond money approved by Denver voters on Nov. 6.
* Why the NCAA Doesn’t Care about Concussions.
What happened to Whitmer wasn’t a mistake in NCAA concussion protocol for the simple reason that there isn’t an NCAA concussion protocol. The ambiguity is by design—in order to remain legally blameless, the association can’t involve itself too closely in the health of the athletes. That’s why the job of devising a response to head injuries is left to the schools themselves. As a consequence, when football programs obfuscate what exactly happened to a woozy-looking quarterback, there’s no one—not the local beat writer, and most certainly not an NCAA investigator—to hold them to account. In both the pros and in college football, the risk of legal liability is dictating the response to a medical crisis.
* The War on Superman’s Underpants.
* Your sleight of hand of the day.
* Pennsylvania still wants to rig the electoral college.
* Arrested Development NES Games.
* Moon flights for a mere $750 million. Back to the Future With 1970s Space Colonies.
* And you won’t have Kevin Smith to kick around anymore. Didn’t he do this same thing a few years ago?
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Supervillain
Read between the lines. They’re setting up a classic heel turn.
Tuesday Links
* David Graeber teaches my superheroes module in one long go at the New Inquiry.
* Affirmative action and the fantasy of “merit” comes to the Supreme Court. Buckle up.
* The wisdom of markets: Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week.
* The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy — not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.
* Annals of Canadian crime: Canada cheese-smuggling ring busted – policeman charged. Maple syrup seized in N.B. may have been stolen in Quebec.
* Obama makes a strong pitch for my particular demographic.
* Are drones illegal? Well, we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, so…
* Let six-year-olds vote: Afghan war enters twelfth year. And onward! And onward!
* The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21… You know what? Let me stop you right there.
* “Man who defaced Tate Modern’s Rothko canvas says he’s added value.” And he’s probably right!
* Community not coming back on schedule is/is not a catastrophe. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they need more time to bring Dan Harmon back.
* Why do Venezulans keep reelecting Hugo Chávez?
To understand why Chávez’s electoral victory would be apparent beforehand, consider that from 1980 to 1998, Venezuela’s per capita GDP declined by 14%, whereas since 2004, after the Chávez administration gained control over the nation’s oil revenues, the country’s GDP growth per person has averaged 2.5% each year.
At the same time, income inequality was reduced to the lowest in Latin America, and a combination of widely shared growth and government programs cut poverty in half and reduced absolute poverty by 70%—and that’s before accounting for vastly expanded access to health, education, and housing.
Oh.
* The Rise and Fall of the Cincinnati Boner King.
* Admitting that scientists demonstrate gender bias shouldn’t make us forget that other kinds of bias exist, or that people other than scientists exhibit them. In a couple of papers (one, two), Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh have investigated how faculty members responded to email requests from prospective students asking for a meeting. The names of the students were randomly shuffled, and chosen to give some implication that the students were male or female, and also whether they were Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese.
* Campus officer kills naked freshman at University of South Alabama.
* The Ohio Statue University marching band pays tribute to video games.
* Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown. / Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound. / Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go. / Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home. On “The Promise.”
* digby imagines what would happen if we tried to ban lead today.
* Like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi, Ridley Scott ends his career a hero.
* Behind the Scenes of the Planet of the Apes.
* And get ready for competing Moby Dick projects! Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?
Sunday Morning
Earlier link dumps this week: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* CUNY Administration Declares War On Rebel English Department. This is stunning. Here’s just a little bit more.
* Education is a political act. For over half a century, the conservative movement has waged a political war on liberal arts education. They have waged this war because they know that without the skills we are provided by a liberal arts education citizens must abdicate our power.
* Well, I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to say it.
* The FBI has successfully thwarted another bomb plot they organized and outfitted. Promotions all around!
* Portraits of Sad Superheroes.
* …for the vast majority of the 500-plus students who graduate each year in Kalamazoo, a better future really does await after they collect their diplomas. The high-school degrees come with the biggest present most of them will ever receive: free college.
Monday Morning Links
* …when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.
* …according to this New York Times piece, working conditions have gotten so bad that advertisers can now depict utopia as… taking a lunch break. But of course it’d never work in practice. Be realistic.
* In the sciences, Ph.D. ≠ job.
* America’s Billionaires: Are They Crazy Enough?
* Finding out Talking Points Memo pays bonuses for traffic is like finding out Santa Claus is as crooked as everybody else. Terrible.
* South Korea may start hunting whales again, for ‘science’.
* NFL concussion update from MetaFilter.
* SMBC presents a superhero for our times: the Iron Sociopath.
* Larry Tye’s brief history of Superman.
* Fraggle Rock‘s Dozers will get their own TV show. Yes, please.
Friday Night Links
* The last days of Gabriel García Márquez.
* In light of this criticism, the Court today announces a new clear standard to guide lower courts in their application of the commerce clause. This new standard will govern when a law exceeds Congress’s power under the commerce clause and when it does not. The new standard is this – a law passed pursuant to the commerce clause is constitutional if Justice Scalia likes the law and unconstitutional if he does not. Similarly, if the law is regulating things that Justice Scalia wants regulated, it is constitutional. If it does not, it is not.
* io9 tries to suss out just how much of the “Uncle Ben never told you what happened to your father” plot from the trailers got cut from The Amazing Spider-Man. But the joke’s on io9; they’re just saving this for the three-boot with Justin Bieber, coming in 2014.
* Elsewhere at io9: A Luminescent Map of the World’s Earthquakes Since 1898 and Don’t worry, people! NASA has a plan for moving the Earth.
* Why are Superman movies all so terrible? Because of Siegel’s Curse, of course.
* Nice work if you can get it: Duke Energy CEO Bill Johnson resigns after one day, gets $44 million in severance.
* Ladies and gentlemen: the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association.
* And the Border Patrol has let former Arizona Gov. Raúl Castro slip through their fingers once again…
Tuesday Night Links
* It’s no surprise to see Buffy is the most-studied pop culture text, with The Wire closing fast—but I’m a bit surprised the Alien franchise clocks in at #2 after all this time.
* Additional legal protections for self-defense killings — including the controversial “stand your ground” laws (the subject of new a U.S. Civil Rights Commission Inquiry) — do not deter crime, according to a new study from Texas A&M University examining laws that “widen the scope for the justified use of deadly force in self-defense.” In fact, according to the study’s authors, the laws do the opposite, increasing the chances of murder or manslaughter “by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force,” according to the study. “[W]e find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted” such laws, the authors wrote, noting that those could be cases “driven by the escalation of violence in situations that otherwise would not have ended in serious injury for either party.”
* A new analysis of climate data shows that Wisconsin is among a group of states that have warmed faster than other parts of the country over the past four decades.
* Getting out just in time: Romney Retakes The Lead In North Carolina.
* How capitalism impoverishes society, health insurance edition: When Erika Royer’s lupus led to kidney failure four years ago, her father, Radburn, was able to give her an extraordinary gift: a kidney. Ms. Royer, now 31, regained her kidney function, no longer needs dialysis and has been able to return to work. But because of his donation, her father, a physically active 53-year-old, has been unable to obtain private health insurance.
* A little Dad humor: Ten Bets You Will Never Lose.
* And from the I’d-watch-it files: Pixar’s Justice League. In particular the artist really nails Superman; that’s exactly how Pixar’s Superman would look.
