Posts Tagged ‘Afghanistan’
Closing All My Tabs Before the Nuclear War Links
* Welp. Here we go. To Launch a Nuclear Strike, Donald Trump Would Follow These Steps. Could Trump help unleash nuclear catastrophe with a single tweet? As one Republican Hill staffer said to me, “if we get Gorsuch and avoid a nuclear war, a lot of us will count this as a win.” Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable? In North Korea, ‘Surgical Strike’ Could Spin Into ‘Worst Kind of Fighting.’
* Meanwhile, in the war that stopped being fun.
* President Trump has sent private messages to Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. How Will The Mueller Grand Jury Handle Classified Information?
* Unlearning the myth of American innocence.
* ♫ Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high… ♫
* The modern suburb in America began as a means of providing abundant and comfortable housing to white Americans and has now evolved into a carefully tuned media surround — replete with ubiquitous screens running alarmist commercial media — that seeks to sustain that apartheid at any cost. But just as the media elevated a man to the presidency only to have him turn around and name it the “enemy of the people,” the built environment of suburbs is riven with contradictions that will ultimately be its undoing.
* It’s so strange to me that anyone talks about anything in The Handmaid’s Tale *but* the epilogue. That’s the whole thing.
* Say it again: The Problem Is Capital.
* Worrying development for academic freedom.
* The JCC Bomb-Threat Suspect Had a Client.
* Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* Can You Distinguish These Real British Places From Fake Ones an AI Made Up?
* Ideology at its very, very purest.
* I’ve said this about movies like Pacific Rim, and I think it’s absolutely the fantasy at the heart of Game of Thrones as well: The ultimate enemy of all humanity is coming—climate change—and we will stop it by dropping a nuclear bomb on it.
* Maybe the media should stop doing free promotion for all the worst creeps in the world.
* “Respondent did not realize that advertising a ‘women’s-only’ screening was a violation of discrimination laws,” the theater wrote to the city. “Respondent has a very strict non-discrimination policy in place, but this policy did NOT include a specific prohibition against advertising.”
* Another streaming service you’ll have to subscribe to. What does this mean for the Daredevilverse?
* This head-spinning optical illusion will melt your brain.
* American Chess Is Great Again.
* Finally, the movie you can barely remember has four sequels you’ve find incredibly stupid…
Wednesday Morning Links!
* Coming soon! Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. I have a short piece in this one ruminating on Rogue One and the problems of multiple authorship in contemporary franchise production.
* Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never.
* The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
* Not half-light, not dimness, not relative dark: total, pitch darkness. Darkness so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face, or even be sure whether your eyes are open or closed. Lost within an ancient cave, the man and woman started off separate and alone, confronting mind-bending isolation that played tricks on their senses and produced ever-more-disorienting hallucinations. Fumbling and crawling, never sure which next step might break their necks or worse, they navigated through an alien environment marked by vermin, severe cold, tight confines, sudden drops, yawning pits, and sharp rocks. Eventually, they found each other deep below the earth, then painstakingly made their way to the surface. And the entire time, circling silently about them in the darkness, intimately near yet incredibly far away, has been a crew of producers and camera operators documenting their every move.
After the trial, Weirich spoke to the local news media. ‘‘It’s a great verdict,’’ she said. Noura was sentenced to a prison term of 20 years and nine months. Weirich’s victory helped start her political career. In January 2011, she was appointed district attorney in Shelby County, after the elected district attorney left to join the administration of Gov. Bill Haslam. Weirich, a Republican, became the first woman to hold that post. She then won election in 2012 and 2014 with 65 percent of the vote, running on a law-and-order message against weak opponents. A friend said her husband, who is also a lawyer, began talking about moving the family into the Governor’s Mansion one day.
* Universities and colleges struggle to stem big drops in enrollment.
* A soccer star from Gaithersburg won a college scholarship. But ICE plans to deport him.
* 18 Texas sheriffs sign up to join forces with federal immigration officers.
* All U.S. Catholics are called to oppose mass deportations under Trump. Here’s why.
* ‘The moment when it really started to feel insane’: An oral history of the Scaramucci era.
* Coast Guard ‘will not break faith’ with transgender members, leader says.
* The chaos, legislative fumbling, and legal jeopardy should not obscure the ways that the administration is remaking federal policy in consequential ways. Evergreen headlines: The Past Week Proves That Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy.
* Trump helping his son draft a misleading statement could be witness tampering.
* Always, always: unreal that it’s still this high.
* America’s former envoy to Afghanistan says the war can’t be won. Is there even a strategic goal at this point?
* The plate tectonics of Middle-Earth.
* White Capital, Black Labor. We don’t need a TV show about the Confederacy winning. In many ways, it did.
* With one dietary change, the U.S. could almost meet greenhouse-gas emission goals.
July the 5th Be With You Links
* I have spent the entirety of my academic career so far watching the intensified hollowing-out of my profession. The destruction is not limited to those friends and grad-school colleagues whose “job hunt” turned up nothing—or turned up academic jobs which make the same demands as the tenure track without the same job security. The harm can be counted, too, in the numberless person-hours every academic I know has spent tailoring job application materials, drafting custom syllabuses, and performing all the other rituals of applicant abjection. If you care about the work scholars do, the atmosphere is demoralizing. It is, to be sure, worse in worse jobs: when I was a part-time adjunct, I found the isolation particularly depressing, and I liked my “individualized” health insurance plan even less. But even in a good job with outstanding colleagues and students all around, something eats away at the ordinary routines of my academic life: all the day-to-day work of simply doing the job (teaching the students, carrying on the research, going to the meetings, the meetings, the meetings) takes on more than a tinge of denial, something for the few of us who have good academic jobs to do while we wait for the last curtain to fall on professional scholarship. Nor is it encouraging to witness the parade of more active forms of denial: bad-faith solutions, illusory comforts, and intellectualized excuses for selfishness. But mostly I regret the good work that could have been done by all of us in a better, more just system.
* Mills College Lays Off Five Tenured Professors.
* Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.” The syllabi of Junot Díaz.
* Space is the Place: A Crash Course in the Sounds of Afrofuturism.
* A call for applications: Foundation is looking for a book review editor.
* * The “mass graves” story I linked yesterday was fake. Thanks to a longtime reader for the tip. I wonder what the point of making this up was; the best I could come up with was that it was for research about how news spreads on the left and on the right.
* 25 at 50. The 25th amendment is a fantasy.
* Not our Independence Day. Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution.Capitalism and Slavery.
* This woman’s name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don’t we know her story?
* CTRL-F “rape” CTRL-F “slave” CTRL-F “Hemings”
* Speaking of which: Sally Hemings’s slave quarters have been discovered at Monticello. And from the archives: The Monster of Monticello.
* Dear TNI Contributors, Our August issue theme is PATRIOTS.
* Seize the Hamptons. Probably should take a look at seizing the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, too.
* In sum, here’s what they found: If you’re going to die via an asteroid, it will be the wind and shockwave that gets you.
* Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays.
* Mother charged with child endangerment for leaving her ten-year-old in the LEGO store unattended.
* ‘Beta Males’ Want To Kill Women Because They Can’t Get Laid.
* The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans. Even that seems too kind a description for Rahm Emanuel.
* What does opposition do that resistance doesn’t? It offers a positive agenda for a better social contract, embedded in institutional transformations. Like, for example, everything that Dems don’t ever propose: real universal healthcare, public media, public higher education, debt relief, real safety nets, and so on. A social contract — whole and full and true.
* But don’t worry folks; we’ve got this.
It’s called Win the Future, and Pincus is even courting potential WTF candidates like the frontman of ’90s rock band Third Eye Blind.
* This Is Why Antarctic Sea Ice Crashed This Year.
* U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare.
* Never forget: America didn’t die, they murdered it.
* New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed. His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
* UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side.
* Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) Check your privilege, NYT. You don’t speak for me.
* A stressed, sleep-deprived couple accidentally invented the modern alien abduction phenomenon.
* Always money in the banana stand: Congressional panel puts plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 defense budget.
* Journalism in America in 2017.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still.
* Nice work if you can get it: Controversial U of T professor making nearly $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.
* When basic common sense seems radical: Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police.
* Forget the blood of teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Forget the blood of teens? Screw you, Wired, you don’t speak for me either!
* And a few Fourth of July links from my Tumblr: Check out Captain Woke. What have you done to keep liberty alive? Untitled (Questions). Don’t Tread on Me. Brain expansion meme. Spang!
#SFRA2017-turday Links!
* Keep watching #SFRA2017! It’s been a great conference. And it contains gems like this. Two other little theoretical highlights from my scattered live-tweeting:
* The audio from last week’s Octavia Butler conference at the Huntington is now up at Soundcloud. I’m track 7!
* Sci-Fi Legend Samuel R. Delany Doesn’t Play Favorites.
* Will losing health insurance mean more US deaths? Experts say yes. Republicans Left Ron Johnson for Dead Last Year, Now He Could Kill Their Health Care Bill. Crowdfunding is the Sad, Dark Future of Healthcare.
* Trump’s Twitter and the judgment of history. Bill to create panel that could remove Trump from office quietly picks up Democratic support.
* The Internet Is Actually Controlled By 14 People Who Hold 7 Secret Keys.
* After the president’s tweet, I must withdraw my support for everything but his agenda.
* Getting closer and closer to the point where Republicans say it was good that Trump colluded with Putin. This is 100% guaranteed and will be the official position of Your Dad in six months.
* More on the voter suppression commission.
* The Trump Administration Is Using Immigrant Children as Bait to Deport Their Parents. Afghanistan’s All-Girl Robotics Team Can’t Get Visas To The US.
* Why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand running for president? Or is she?
* The moral code of Chinese sex workers.
* Political correctness is destroying this country’s cultural heritage.
* When someone says something mean to me. The kids just call it “Twitter.” And I want your secret.
#SFRA2017 Links for All Your #SFRA2017 Needs!
* Watch #SFRA2017 for all the tweets from SFRA2017! I’ll be presenting this afternoon in the 4 PM session: “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene,” mostly talking about John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire but also hitting Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, H.G. Wells, and others.
* And just in time for #SFRA2017, SFFTV 10.2 is now available! A special issue on the SF films of Stephen King.
* From Canavan’s Razor to Kotsko’s Hammer: If you believe that you have caught your enemy in a contradiction, you are mistaken. At best, you have misjudged their real priorities and goals. At worst, you have fallen for a deliberate smokescreen, designed to confuse and distract you.
* CFP: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200 (Science Fiction Studies, Special Issue).
* Can’t you see? Star Wars needs mediocrity.
* Return of the travel ban. Return of the lawsuits. The travel ban going into effect would have saved zero lives from terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. It’s going to get worse.
* Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.
* GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn.
* Republican Health Care Bill Cuts Medicaid 24 Percent By 2036. Trumpworld’s push to get a Senate health deal. Senate GOP Health Care Surrender Watch.
* “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”: The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here’s why.
* The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump. And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.
* Normally I’d say “teach the controversy,” but these allegations are simply too serious to treat flippantly: NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars.
* Cyberattack attacks Chernobyl radiation monitoring station.
* On desistance and detransition.
* Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget.
* US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup.
* SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite. SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.
* Just what is happening at Disney?
* Rick and Morty season three, at last, by God.
* And Jurassic Park but with the dinosaurs from the 90s TV show Dinosaurs, forever and ever amen.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The course descriptions for Marquette’s Fall 2017 English classes are up at the department website. Check them out! I’m teaching Tolkien and a grad seminar on utopia.
* Also in Marquette news! Marquette to host ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ conference in April.
* Becoming a parent forces you to think about the nature of the problem — which is, in a lot of ways, the problem of nature […] the realities of aging and sickness and mortality become suddenly inescapable. […] [My wife] said something during that time I will never forget. “If I had known how much I was going to love him,” she said, “I’m not sure I would have had him.” Mark O’Connell on transhumanism and immortality.
* From the great Ali Sperling: Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene. And this review of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem from the great David Higgins!
* Adam Roberts reviews New York 2140. Another review, from a climate scientist. And an interview with Stan. My review comes out in LARB this weekend…
* The Most Cringeworthy Monuments to Colleges’ Innovation Jargon.
* Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq.
* The liberal arts at Harvey Mudd College, whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford.
* You-might-be-from-Wisconsin-if at Ask MetaFilter.
* Wisconsin is apparently harassing trans state employees.
* Chaos, again. This is fine. Even James Comey. Twilight of Reince Preibus. Ten Questions for President Trump. Ten More Questions for President Trump. Remember when it was scandalous that Obama, years before he became a politician, once sold his house?
* It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy.
* The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
* “Forever war, but too much.”
* An Afghan family of five that had received approval to move to the United States based on the father’s work for the American government has been detained for more than two days after flying into Los Angeles International Airport, a legal advocacy group said in court documents filed on Saturday. Profiles of immigrant arrested in Austin. Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws. (Note this lawsuit was filed in 2014.) This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World. And if it were a book, it’d seem laughably contrived: A letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Resisting ICE. Here we go again.
* 4chan and the Great Meme War.
* Russia and the Cyber Cold War.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation. I think this is a very good reminder of the need to stay calm and detached from the chaos of the news cycle.
* Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
* Democrats keep trusting demographics to save them. It hasn’t worked yet — but maybe this time…
* NASA unveils plan to give Mars an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere.
* House Republicans Unveil Bill To Repeal Obamacare. The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.
* Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.
* No! It can’t be! Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win.
* Contrary to What You Learned in Sex Ed, You Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant.
* Mid-decade gerrymander in Georgia.
* What We’ve Learned from Giving Dolphins LSD.
* Possible lynching outside Seattle, in 2017.
* In the richest country in human history, children have “lunch debt.”
* “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.” How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.
* Finding a jury of your peers in a racially segregated society.
* Divination hasn’t disappeared; it’s taken over the world.
But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.
When I said that opinion polls are sibyls and soothsayers, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Opinion polling has all the trappings of a science—it has its numbers and graphs, its computational models, its armies of pallid drones poring over the figures. It makes hypotheses and puts them to the test. But polls are not taken for what they are: a report on what a small number of people, fond of changing their minds, briefly pretended to think. Instead, we watch the tracking graphs as if the future were playing itself out live in front of us. The real structure of the electoral-wonk complex is more mystical than materialist: it’s augury and divination, a method handed down by Prometheus to a starving and shivering humanity at the faint dawn of time. Behind all the desktop screens and plate-glass of his office, the buzz of data and the hum of metrics, Nate Silver retreats to a quiet, dark, and holy room. He takes the knife and slits in one stroke the throat of a pure-white bull; its blood arcs and drizzles in all directions. He examines its patterns. And he knows.
* There’s a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not they’re breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that it’s like we’re doing Godfather Part I and II, only it’s going to nine movies? And we’re just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? We’re gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you can’t have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, “Get in this bed and dream, but don’t touch the pillows or move the blankets.” You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade. James Mangold on Logan.
* The making of The Silmarillion.
* And we have but one choice: the Ring must be destroyed.
Start Monday Off Right with Monday Links, Half-Price for the Entire Month of August with Offer Code CANAVAN
* Things are bad all over: No new novel cracked the top 20 print bestsellers in the first half of 2016.
* Stranger Things thinkpiece roundup! The Solution to Our Political Problems Lies in ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ Homophobia Is the Real Monster in Stranger Things. The Problem of Barb. This Stranger Things supercut shows how meticulous the show’s ’80s references really are. And the inevitable remix.
* Elsewhere in 80s nostalgia: a brief history of The Thing.
* Teach the controversy: Was Philip K. Dick a Bad Writer? Meanwhile, it turns out there is no Man in the High Castle!
* Reports: 2 Professors at American U Afghanistan Abducted.
* Several private universities are boosting stipends and benefits ahead of a federal ruling that could clear the way for graduate students to form unions. To some grad students, it’s an attempt to persuade them that they don’t need collective bargaining to get a raise.
* Curated by Mohammad Salemy and a team of researchers from The New Centre for Research & Practice, Artificial Cinema is a large collaborative effort which explores the history of science fiction cinema and its potentials for arriving at a synthesized vision for the future of art. The exhibition traces a trajectory away from “Anthropocinema” — human-centered cinema — towards more open and complex collaborations between humans and machines.
* Online fandom isn’t all smiles and rainbows.
* How Katie Ledecky became better at swimming than anyone is at anything.
* Abandoned Olympic venues from around the world.
* One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth.
* A start-up’s race to harvest the moon’s treasures.
* The American Psychiatric Association issues a warning: No psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. They’re working for Putin too! And so is George P., looking for the Bush family’s revenge some dark day a decade from now.
* Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump.
* Trump’s shrinking electoral map.
* Send First-Gen Students to Grad School.
* Defending the humanities in a skills-obsessed university.
* The last word on cargo shorts and neoliberalism.
* It’s George R.R. Martin’s media ecology, we just live in it.
* The fight over H.M.’s brain.
* Teaching in the Age of Trump.
* Suicide Squad Sets Box Office Record Because We Don’t Deserve Better Movies. Allow me to recommend Improv4Humans #251, Mattman v. SupArmen, which is better than anything this incarnation of the DC Universe has put out so far.
* Where are the Natives in Hamilton?
* Ideology disguises itself as common sense, as what everybody already knows.
* And a helpful questionnaire.
31. Do you take on extra work because you are concerned that it won’t otherwise get done?
32. Do you take on extra work because you do not believe other people can do it as well?
33. Do you underestimate how long a project will take and then rush to complete it?
34. Do you delay beginning a project and experience a surge of adrenaline as you prepare at the last minute or go forward unprepared?
35. Do you believe that it is okay to work long hours if you work for justice?
36. Do you get impatient with people who have other priorities besides work?
37. Are you afraid that if you don’t work hard you will be a failure?
38. Is the future a constant worry for you even when things are going well?
39. Do you feel that others are not doing enough?
40. Do you feel that you are not doing enough?
