Posts Tagged ‘2012’
A Few More
* Sitcom Characters Still In Shock After Christmas Episode Proves Existence Of Santa Claus.
* io9 Star Treks Into All the Clues and Easter Eggs from the Star Trek Into Darkness Teaser Trailer. Furious time-traveling Picard or nothing.
* Harlan Ellison + Paul Chadwick team for major new DC sci-fi comic.
* Senate Hits New Low as Mitch McConnell Filibusters Himself.
Blast from the Past
An all-male troop of science fiction writers from 1987 predict 2012. Only Asimov really comes close:
Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much.
Though Gregory Benford has his moment:
…the attitudes expressed in this collection of predictions will seem very outmoded and “twen-cen.”
Nailed it.
Monday!
* Police Tape is an Android app from the American Civil Liberties Union that is designed to allow citizens to covertly record the police. When activated, it hides itself from casual inspection, and it has a mode that causes it to send its recording to an ACLU-operated server, protecting against police seizure and deletion.
* Capitalism can turn anything into a miserable boondoggle: London Olympics edition.
* Share Our Future – The CLASSE Manifesto.
* “I’ll be paying this forever,” said Chelsea Grove, 24, who dropped out of Bowling Green State University and owes $70,000 in student loans. She is working three jobs to pay her $510 monthly obligation and has no intention of going back.
“For me to finish it would mean borrowing more money,” she said. “It makes me puke to think about borrowing more money.”
* 2012 drought rivals Dust Bowl.
* Journalists really should just refuse quote approval. That’s just not how this is supposed to work.
* And Nate Silver says voter suppression efforts probably won’t determine the results of the election. But digby and Ed Kilgore say light your hair back on fire.
Sinister Climate Scientists Continue to Lie to Everyone for Their Own Nefarious Purposes, Just Ignore Them
Bombshell: After Fixing Errors, UK Met Office Says 2010, 2005 Hottest Years on Record, World Warming Faster Than Thought. Sure, and next you’ll want me to believe 2012 never had a winter.
Sunday Reading™
* Babies born this year are the best babies. Fact.
* Gingrichmania! Republicans in disarray! How he did it. Nate Silver:
But South Carolina’s seeming rejection of Mr. Romney goes beyond cultural or demographic idiosyncrasies. Mr. Rtaxomney was resoundingly defeated by Mr. Gingrich, losing badly among his worst demographic groups and barely beating Mr. Gingrich among his best ones. Had you extrapolated the exit poll cross-tabulations from South Carolina to the other 49 states, Mr. Romney might have lost 47 of them. Moreover, the decline of Mr. Romney was almost as significant in national polls as it was in South Carolina.
Now poor Romney has to release his tax returns. Onward to Florida!
* Great moments in Fox News: Newt Gingrich’s repeated betrayals of the people closest to him suggest he’ll make a trustworthy president.
* 11 Lesser-Known 2012 Presidential Candidates.
* “One of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.” Via zunguzungu.
* When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke,President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
* Steve Shaviro reviews Carl Freedman’s The Age of Nixon. I actually bought this one just on the strength of the author and title.
* Another absolute must-have: Alison Bechdel’s followup to Fun Home, Are You My Mother?
* David Graeber: The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity.
* Michael Greenberg: What Future for Occupy Wall Street? Also on the OWS tip: diluting the 99% brand.
* They’re still trying to make a movie out of Jeff Smith’s Bone.
* And the Chronicle of Higher Education has an obituary for Dean Jo Rae Wright. I only knew her over email, but I was very sad to hear this. She was a very generous supporter of graduate projects at Duke.
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuce Watch
Well, things are starting to heat up down on E Street.
A lot of you have been hearing that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will be on tour in 2012. That is absolutely correct. The European dates run from the middle of May until end of July and are being announced this week. Info on the US dates and the World tour dates will coming up shortly.
In addition, we want you to know that the music is almost done (but still untitled), we have almost settled on the release date (but not quite yet), and that we are all incredibly excited about everything that we’re planning for 2012. That’s all the info we have for right now, but we’ll get back to you–real soon.
A Nuclear Error, but I Have No Fear
“London Calling” Repurposed as Tourism Jingle. Best/worst musical reappropriation since Reagan and “Born in the USA”…
All the Things That Happened Today
* Sad news: Terrorist attack at Moscow’s busiest airport.
* Rumors are swirling that the Wachowskis may pull a Lucas.
* Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult.
* SOTU 2011: “How We Win the Future.” Warning: climate change may not exist in the future.
* Will big-name Republicans sit out 2012?
* The problem with regarding the photography of suffering as ‘pornography.’
* Killjoys keep debunking the “twin suns in 2012” Betelgeuse supernova story. Can’t I have just this one thing?
* Soccer science! As game theory predicts, legitimate falls far outnumber fake falls, Wilson reported at the meeting. Only 6% of the 2800 falls were highly deceptive dives. Players were two to three times as likely to dive when close to the goal, where the payoff was huge: Statistics show that there is an 80% chance of scoring from penalty kicks. Almost none of the highly deceptive dives resulted in free kicks against the diver. And referees were most likely to reward dives that occurred close to the goals—perhaps because the players were farther away and the deception harder to detect, he noted.
* James Kochalka is Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate.
* Headline of the day: Man admits mailing hundreds of tarantulas.
* I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it appears the Bush administration may have broken the law.
* Genghis Khan: history’s greenest conqueror?
Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion actually cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
So how exactly did Genghis Khan, one of history’s cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today’s environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.
Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world’s total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.
For certain values of “green”… Via MetaFilter.
* And also via MetaFilter: Vermont vs. corporate personhood. Republicans vs. the Internet. Rahm Emanuel gets Chicago’d. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. The United States of Shame. Teacher salary? Damn you North Carolina!
Saturday Afternoon Fever
* The Mayans Jawas predicted it: Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012.
* The Republican Study Committee wants to defund the arts. Entirely.
A group of conservative Republicans, called the Republican Study Committee, revealed a new plan on Thursday to cut federal funding for arts down to zero. This means the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be left in the cold. Not to mention the potential hit at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
* David Neiwart gets literary with Glenn Beck’s favorite poem.
But it’s really quite revealing that Beck NEVER gets Niemoller’s poem right. There are a number of different versions with slight variations, but the most common is this one:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.Then they came for the trade unionists ,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist…
* Also in Glenn Beck news: his latest target is receiving threats. She is 78.
* The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations. Obligatory Colbert flashback.
* Standing on Zanzibar: If the world’s population lived in one city.