No, YOU’RE Procrastinating: Wednesday Afternoon Links!

* We just landed a spacecraft on a comet for the first time. Here’s why it matters.

* Capitalism and the space program.

This is no accident. The same contradictions that have divided human aspiration from human achievement, producing growing hunger and want in a world with the technological means to solve both, paralyze the reach of humanity into the solar system. The task to reclaim space as humanity’s birthright is inseparable from that necessary to oppose war and conquer want and deprivation. In other words, it is the fight for socialism.

* Theory and Event‘s special supplement on Ferguson and “Disposable Lives.”

* Interview with Sherryl Vint on science fiction and biopolitics.

* College Athletes of the World, Unite. Ladies and gentlemen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

* This is a great TNI interview on California, “the carceral state.”

If we believe that the prison system is broken, then we must also believe in its ability to be fixed. Here we can see how the PIC keeps functioning through the rehearsal of the “broken system” narrative. As Angela Davis and many others have argued, it is precisely through reform that the ­prison-industrial complex expands. We can see the materiality of this expansion through the mandatory increase in police in schools through Proposition 47.

* Wisconsin woman said this week that she may have to file for bankruptcy because she was taken to an out-of-network hospital after having a heart attack, but now she owes more than $50,000 more than she would have if she had been taken to a hospital less than half a mile away.

* I was fired for sending a letter to the League for Innovation in the Community College, criticizing the Moraine Valley Community College administration for treating adjunct faculty as a “disposable resource” and the “chilling effect” on adjuncts who lack job security.

* Can White Teachers Be Taught How to Teach Our Children?

* America’s workers steal more than its shoplifters.

* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Man Points Rifle At Teen Daughter After Game Of Battleship Goes Bad.

* And again. To limit divorce settlement, conservative billionaire argues that he got rich through luck.

* And again. Maryland School Board Asked To Recognize Muslim Holy Day, Strikes References To All Religious Holidays Instead.

* Pretty good fan pitch for what The Force Awakens should be about.

* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary: Domino’s founder turning FL town into unconstitutional contraception-free ‘Catholic enclave.’

* Bruuuuuuuuuuuuce.

* And Christoph Waltz has been stealing my bit.

[Werner Herzog voice] And still after forty years the children cannot find Sesame Street. They beg for directions, a map that never comes.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 4, 2013

[Werner Herzog voice] We must conclude that Sesame Street has never existed, except in the monsters the children of the city already know.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 4, 2013