Posts Tagged ‘a shadow U.S. comprised entirely of garbage’
Weekend Links!
* If I weren’t going to DC on June 4th, I’d be going to this in Madison: Undercommoning the University: A Workshop.
* How writers of endangered languages are embracing sci-fi.
* With the recession over, are states investing in higher ed? Oh, honey.
* This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities.
* A local-interest explainer: Assata Shakur was convicted of murder. Is she a terrorist?
* New York University’s labor record epitomizes everything wrong with the neoliberal university.
* Report Blasts ‘Fantasy World’ of Presidential Benefits.
* FBI admits no major cases cracked with Patriot Act snooping powers.
* TIE Fighter and American Exceptionalism.
* The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
* While 45 percent of the roughly 1,000 respondents said they feel “somewhat prepared” to begin a career after college, slightly more than half said they did not learn how to write a résumé. And 56 percent did learn how to conduct themselves in a job interview.
* The Myth of the Garbage Patch.
* Up to 90 per cent of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly US $19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year, according to a report released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
* 7 in 10 schools now have shooting drills, needlessly traumatizing huge numbers of children.
* North Carolina receives NCAA notice of allegations in academic fraud case.
* New Study on Suicide Among College Athletes.
* BREAKING: Being competent is bad for you.
* io9 says the Supergirl pilot isn’t as bad as you’re expecting.
* This 85-Year-Old Nun Just Spent Two Years In Prison For Protesting Nuclear Weapons.
* Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?
* A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two-Thirds Of Europeans.
* Home, the latest animated kid flick, is actually about colonialism. No, really.
* Can Racism Be Stopped in the Third Grade?
* Modernism is back, baby! A Plea for Culinary Modernism.
* Friends from grad school still tease me about the day I basically went off on this rant in a seminar day discussing Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals.
* #abolishmen: Men get into fatal car crashes twice as often as women.
* And another round of gender-swapped Disney characters.
Tuesday Afternoon
* Things I didn’t know were in the health care bill: menu labeling. Great policy.
* I want to be held accountable for getting it done. I will judge my first term as president based on the fact on whether we have delivered the kind of health care that every American deserves and that our system can afford. Barack Obama at a CAP/SEIU health care forum in 2007, up against Hillary Clinton and history’s greatest monster.
The health care forum in 2007 served as a kind of epiphany for Obama. Time’s Karen Tumulty, who moderated the forum, wrote that Obama “was noticeably uncomfortable when pressed for details” about his health care plan. As Ezra Klein wrote at the time, “Compared to John Edwards, who had a detailed plan, and Hillary Clinton, whose fluency with the subject is unmatched among the contenders, he seemed uncertain and adrift.” Obama himself acknowledged that the health care forum revealed, “I am not a great candidate now, but I am going to figure out how to be a great candidate.” Now, by delivering on the basic health care principles he pronounced three years ago, Obama is already earning praise as “one of America’s finest presidents.”
* Winning has its advantages. Mike Allen:
Rather than dragging down Dems, President Obama’s health plan could turn out to be a net positive for the midterms by goosing his base, re-engaging new Obama voters, giving his party something clear to promote, and providing a blunt instrument for whacking [Republicans]. Obama’s triumph has put Republicans back on the defensive, and even some of them are wondering if they peaked eight months too soon.
* Frum: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
* Related: No one cares what Republicans think about health care anymore.
* Finding common ground: I’m no Sarah Palin fan, but I fully endorse her call for Tea Party supporters to make third-party runs for office.
* Climate next? Let’s hope so.
* Project Kaisei is seeking to turn the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into fuel.
* The University of Michigan has become the 17th institution of higher learning to be implicated in the checks-for-degrees scandal rocking American campuses, representatives from the Department of Justice reported Tuesday.
* Coming to Comedy Central this fall: That’s My Biden.
* Airplanes do not “fly.” They are held aloft through the divine intervention of heavenly angels.
* Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
* And the Big Picture has your record setters. Below: the world’s largest “Thriller” dance.
‘World of Waste’
‘World of Waste: American Mass Consumption in Images. Via Jaimee.
That’s 2,000,000 plastic bottles, the amount America throws out every five minutes.
The North Pacific Trash Vortex
First, they discovered a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico so oxygen-deprived that nothing can live in it; now researchers have discovered a Texas-sized area of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Gerry Canavan 