Posts Tagged ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
Weekend Links!
* South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott. The police can’t police themselves. And now the public is too scared to cooperate with them. Police Reform Is Impossible in America. The Police Are America’s Terrorists. Man Who Recorded Walter Scott Murder Is Worried Police May Kill Him. White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent.
* Montreal professors stare down riot cops.
* Colleges are raising costs because they can.
* How self-segregation and concentrated affluence became normal in America.
* How to survive a mega-drought.
* The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct.
* In The Midst Of Toxic Oil Spill, Vancouver Announces It Will Go 100 Percent Renewable.
* Report: Hillary Clinton Overlooked Labor Violations After Millions in Donations. Guess what I’m #ready for?
* Is Hillary Clinton even any good at running for president?
* Elizabeth Warren Is Right About Everything.
* The Columbia Report on Rolling Stone‘s Rape Story Is Bad for Journalism.
* The Brontosaurus Is Back. Take that, science!
* A Map Showing UFO Hot Spots Across The United States.
* The analysis concluded that, over the past 10 years, the five pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in fees to money managers and have received virtually nothing in return, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said in an interview on Wednesday.
* The man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early.
* What Was On a 1920s Membership Application for the KKK?
* Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale.
* Wired proves the laws of physics don’t apply to Legolas.
* Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to get even more boring spinoff. If that’s possible.
* Memorial for the “Unknown Deserter” – Potsdam, Germany.
* The Photographer Who Took This Picture Barely Escaped With His Life.
* This Probably Made Up Reddit Story About a Potato Is Incredibly Good.
* There’s nothing sweet in life.
* Lili Loofbourow takes the bait on the “is that all there is?” Mad Men and boredom thinkpiece. Also from Lili: You Should Be Watching ‘Fortitude,’ A Murder-Mystery That Makes Climate Change The Real Villain.
* Arrested Development returning for 17 episodes, according to Brian Grazer.
* A cheat sheet for figuring out where in the US you are by recognizing the background from movies.
* 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.
* And I really hope they catch him this time.
I Can’t Believe It’s June Links
* CFPs: MLA Subconference 2015 and Society for Utopian Studies 2014.
* Rebecca Schuman has the best my-thoughts-exactly rundown of the MLA Task Force report I’ve seen.
* Called psychylustro, German artist Katharina Grosse’s project is a large-scale work designed to distract Amtrak train riders from the dilapidated buildings and fallen factories of north Philadelphia.
* “But, Sergei,” I protested (I forget his actual name), “that didn’t happen because capitalists just decided to be nice. That happened because they were all afraid of you.” More Graeber: I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.
* Is my high school, Lake Area New Tech, a prison or school?
* School Guard Filmed Hitting Student, Dumping Him From Wheelchair.
* Translating Frozen into Arabic.
* Maya Angelou, Respectability Politics, and Sex Work.
* Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism.”
* The Way We Live Now: Faking Cultural Literacy.
* Just Following Orders: Thoughts on Agents of SHIELD‘s First Season.
In reality, after seven decades of growing into each other, it shouldn’t be so easy to separate out SHIELD from Hydra. On the one hand, Hydra should have so completely infested SHIELD as to taint all but the most minute of its good acts–as evidenced by the fact that even the good guys, who aren’t shooting at Captain America, were perfectly OK with SHIELD’s rampant trampling of privacy and civil rights before these escalated to mass murder. And on the other hand, SHIELD’s protocols and organizational culture are the ones that nearly all Hydra agents were trained in, which would shape their habits of thought even as they employ their training to evil ends. No matter who they swear allegiance too, SHIELD and Hydra agents should be pretty hard to tell apart, and the lofty or vile ideals that guide them should, in all but the most extreme cases of true believers, be less present in their psychological makeup than institutional culture.
* Ames notes the migration of rage massacres from the workplace (in the 80s) to the school (during the 1990s), a trajectory that followed the generalization of neoliberal principles into the US education system. In their suicide notes, school shooters also referenced prolonged bullying, as the entrepreneurial values of mainstream American culture found schoolyard expression in concentrated form, and the gulf between the school’s winners and its losers became more pronounced and more significant. Like the workplace gunman, the teenage killer embraced mass murder as a brutal and incoherent expression of social despair.
* In Florida City With Rampant Stop-And-Frisks, 11-Year-Old Deemed ‘Suspicous’ For Baggy Pants And Hoodie. If You’re A West Virginia Inmate, You Can’t Read This Story. LAPD adds drones to arsenal, says they’ll be used sparingly.
* Researchers Find Association Between Porn Viewing And Less Grey Matter In The Brain.
* 14 Bros Charged in Fraternity Hazing That Cost a Pledge One Testicle.
Lawrence actually defended his new brothers in a November interview, saying the ball-smashing was “not hazing.”
“It was a freak accident more than anything. It definitely wasn’t meant to happen, not hazing whatsoever,” Lawrence told WLWT.
* NC Senate amendment drops provision to close ECSU.
* AP History in the Less Magic Kingdom: “Snow White the False.” The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight.
* College football and basketball players have finalized a $40 million settlement with a video game manufacturer and the NCAA’s licensing arm for improperly using the likenesses of athletes, leaving the NCAA alone to defend itself in the upcoming Ed O’Bannon antitrust trial.
* Competitive yoga, because there’s nothing Americans can’t turn into a competition.
* A Brazilian Street Artist Has Created the World Cup’s First Viral Image.
* UC President Janet Napolitano said the university will lead research to develop an implantable device that will retrain the brains of the mentally ill. What could possibly go SARCASM OVERFLOW ABORT/RETRY/FAIL
* EPA rules may force Wisconsin utilities to reduce coal use. EPA Rule Will Cut Power Plant Emissions By 30 Percent By 2030. Well, that’ll fix it!
* And finally it can be told: What was Rogue’s missing plotline in Days of Future Past?
Saturday Night Links!
* Chris Ware: The Story of a Penny.
* There’s nothing sweet in life: Daytime Napping Linked to Increased Risk of Death.
* So it’s come to this: the University of California is now arresting striking workers, their leaders and supporters for legally sanctioned labor activity.
* On the gender gap in academia.
* America’s total newsroom workforce dropped 17,000, from 55,000 in 2006 to 38,000 in 2012, according to the Pew Research Journalism Project.
* “D.C.’s homeless children deserve a great play space. Let’s build one.” End homelessness.
* Tasers out of schools, out of everywhere.
* The NSA has exploited Heartbleed bug for years, Bloomberg reports. The NSA denies it.
* EFF seeks student activists for campus network.
* Great moments in arbitrary government nonsense.
Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to a parent, the children’s money can be taken, no matter how long ago any overpayment occurred.
* And then, as always, there’s the LAPD.
* Albuquerque police have ‘pattern’ of excessive, deadly force, report says.
* Blogs to watch: http://carceralfeminism.wordpress.com/
* PETA unable to make cannibal Dahmer’s home a vegan restaurant.
* “May I play devil’s advocate?”
* Go on….
* Special bonus Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!
* Climate Change Drying Out Southwest Now, With Worse To Come For A Third Of The Planet. Extreme Weather Has Driven A Ten-Fold Increase In Power Outages Over The Last Two Decades. If We Don’t Stop Now, We’ll Surpass 2°C Global Warming.
* Jed Whedon explains why Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been so bad all this time.
* Kickstarter of the night: Geek Theater: Anthology of Science Fiction & Fantasy Plays.
* And of course you had me at “Game of Thrones in Space.”
Meanwhile, Some Links
* Marquette has a new president, the first lay president in its history. His farewell message to UWM.
In closing, I would like to thank everyone at UWM for your efforts to make this a great university. I have been proud to serve as your leader for the last three and a half years, and I am confident that UWM will continue to make significant strides to become a top-tier research university that is a great place to learn and work. I will continue to promote UWM and spread the word about the great things being accomplished by our campus even after I am no longer Chancellor. I will also work hard to strengthen and build partnerships between UWM and Marquette, as I believe that by working together, Milwaukee’s two largest four-year academic institutions will help address many of Milwaukee’s problems, drive growth within the region and increase the prestige of both universities.
* Dia/lectics of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
* It Seems More and More Certain That We Live in a Multiverse.
* Texas Congressman Wants National Parks Opened To Drilling. US House votes to allow dumping of coal mining waste into streams. Escape the Devastation of Future Earth on a Luxurious Space Mayflower.
* Roughly .02 Percent of Published Researchers Reject Global Warming.
* An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz. This is the army-as-utopia piece I was going on about last week, if you were curious about it.
* What Life Will Be Like for Girls’ Hannah at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
* What I’m Learning on a Simulated Mars Mission.
* Harvard University has discovered three books in its collection are bound in human hide. Come now, only three? Don’t be coy, Harvard…
* Amy Acker joins Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because of course she is.
* Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponised against us. And so it is likely to remain until the left, which claims to speak for labourers, begins to think seriously and strategically about what most labour actually consists of, and what those who engage in it actually think is virtuous about it.
* Inside UFO 54-40, the Unwinnable “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
* In sum, this so-called “data-driven” website is significantly less data-driven (and less sophisticated) than Business Insider or Bloomberg View or The Atlantic. It consists nearly entirely of hedgehoggy posts supporting simplistic theories with sparse data and zero statistical analysis, making no quantitative predictions whatsoever. It has no relationship whatsoever to the sophisticated analysis of rich data sets for which Nate Silver himself has become famous. The problem with the new FiveThirtyEight is not one of data vs. theory. It is one of “data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing. Nate Silver is a hero of mine, but this site is not living up to its billing at all.
* Why was Charlotte’s absurdly corrupt mayor doing the bag drops himself? Amateur hour. He’s going to be so mad when he finally gets around to seeing American Hustle.
* Clickbait publication says stop talking so much about clickbait.
* Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Jon Plus Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan.
* And nothing gold can stay: Bradley Cooper is rumored to take over Indiana Jones.
Thursday Links!
* Marquette makes Slate’s vaunted “ridiculous phrases universities have trademarked” list. Meanwhile, Danny Pudi’s Marquette-flavored entry in the 30 for 30 series is up at Grantland. Jesuit author featured on ‘The Colbert Report’ to speak at Marquette University commencement.
* The academic outrage of the year is Nazareth College rescinding an offer following a request for more salary, research accommodation, and “official” maternity leave. I’ve been ranting about this on Twitter (1, 2, etc) (and now MetaFilter) all day but I can’t see how people can see this as anything but naked gender discrimination. I hope she sues.
* I know there’s a whole secondary argument on Twitter about the propriety of Buzzfeed’s appropriation here, but I found @steenfox‘s thread incredibly powerful last night. What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?
* This is one of my favorite endlessly recurring Internet images: “Do colleges have to hire RED professors?” asks The American Legion Magazine in Nov. 1951.
* The Humanities Crisis Industry.
* Workers Sue McDonald’s For Wage Theft Violations In Three States.
* Chicago Police Cannot Keep Complaints Of Brutality Secret Anymore, Court Rules. Why could they ever?
* Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner walks free after 30 years.
* My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor.
* Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired.
* “Is it time to rethink the 40 hour week?” Yes, it’s time to think about bringing it back.
* University of California Credit Is Downgraded by Moody’s.
* I’ll give it to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this regard. I had, up until last night, found Ward to be one of the blandest characters on the show. But now he has my sympathies. Because that character is stuck in a world where terrible things happen and, when they happen to him, no one cares.
* Free markets! Disruption! Innovation!
* Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men. How To Make A Pundit. And I can’t wait to see how they voxplain this.
* I want to return to a thread I introduced in that earlier piece with much greater force: That those who write for free or very little simply because they can afford to are scabs. I don’t endorse this piece, honestly, because I think it significantly misunderstands the terms under which TT academics are employed — but I found it an interesting provocation nonetheless.
* WI school officials seize control over student paper after ‘rape culture’ article appears.
* I have never seen anything as utterly nihilistic as the position Andrew Napolitano proudly puts his name on here. It’s unreal.
* The Sheep Look Up: Radioactive ‘Oil Socks’ Found Illegally Stockpiled In Abandoned North Dakota Gas Station. North Carolina Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Links From Website. Panasonic First Multinational Company To Pay Air Pollution Hardship For Overseas Workers In China. NASA Study: Climate Sensitivity Is High So ‘Long-Term Warming Likely To Be Significant.’
* The economics of prostitution.
* The best TV show you may not be watching: Review from Andy Daly. Also starring another Comedy Bang Bang stalwart, Jessica “Marissa Wompler” St. Clair.
* Reuters auctioning off unpaid internships. My god.
* The only thing Americans care about less than climate change is race relations.
* “They cry because they are not allowed to be children at all.”
* Scott Aukerman explains BetweenTwoFernsGhazi.
* Teju Cole: @apieceofthewall.
It’s Always Mischief Night Somewhere Links
* You can now order the special Paradoxa issue on “Africa SF.” The testimonials indicate that Samuel Delany has at least heard of something I’ve written, so there’s that…
* Those who do not study history will have their wise decision ratified by bean-counting administrators: One of the 17 University of North Carolina campuses could stop offering degrees in physics, history and political science. If you read that sentence and thought to yourself, “gee, I bet that’s a historically black college,” give yourself a prize!
* MLA Reports Modest Decline in Job Ads Posted in 2012-13. The State of the Academic Job Market, by Discipline.
* ‘I Wish I Were Black,’ and Other Tales of Privilege.
* The Logic of Stupid Poor People.
* What The U.S. Would Look Like If It Mirrored The Main Characters On Prime-Time Network Television.
-Half the population would be white men.
-Five percent of the population would be black men.
-Just 1.9 percent of the world would be Asian or Latino men.
-Overall, 57 percent of the population would be men.
-34 percent of the world would be white women
-3.8 percent would be African-American women
-And 3.8 percent would be Latino or Asian women
-31.8 percent of the population would work for the police or some sort of federal law enforcement agency.
-9.7 percent of us would be doctors.
-2.6 percent of us would be criminals.
-1.9 percent would be supernatural creatures or robots.
* What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.
Students whose parents pay tens of thousands for SAT tutors to help their child take the test over and over compete against students who struggle to pay the fee to take the test once. Students who spend afternoons on “enrichment” activities compete against students working service jobs to pay bills – jobs which don’t “count” in the admissions process. Students who shell out for exotic volunteer trips abroad compete with students of what C Z Nnaemeka termed “the un-exotic underclass” – the poor who have “the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting”, the poor who make up most of the US today.
* …a recent Twitter thread started by a popular feminist blogger examines a dark side of that cliché in real-life academe, one in which professors’ advances – intellectual and otherwise – feed a need for validation and flattery, and at times cross the line into sexual harassment.
* By the numbers: Sex crimes on campus.
* The New York Times spends 36 hours in Milwaukee.
* Colorado Counties Ban Sale of Marijuana, Want Share of Proposed State Sales Tax Anyway.
* Obama’s going to be super-mad when he finds out about the nonsensical security state procedures his administration has been using in lieu of actual oversight. And breaking into Yahoo! and Google? Why didn’t anyone tell him!
* Ripped from the pages of Philip K. Dick! Pentagon weighs future of its inscrutable nonagenarian futurist.
* Pennsylvania law protects pregnant women from unwanted belly rubbing.
* The Chronicle follows up on last year’s PhD-on-food-stamps, who is now in a TT position at Martin Methodist College.
* How Not To Take The GRE With a Non-Standard-English Name.
* The richest country in history: The Number Of Homeless Students In The United States Hits A Record.
* “Riots always begin typically the same way”: Food stamp shutdown looms Friday.
* Perry Anderson accidentally writes a whole issue of New Left Review.
* 20th Century Headlines, Rewritten to Get More Clicks.
* How the Koch Brothers laundered illegal campaign contributions.
* They’re marketing the Veronica Mars movie as a love triangle. This is my skeptical face.
* Sesame Street parodies Homeland.
* The chart that explains the world.
* What’s W.R.O.N.G. with ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’? A.L.M.O.S.T. E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
* No accidents, comrade: The New Inquiry considers Cold War nostalgia and Twilight Struggle.
* People Who Live Downwind Of Alberta’s Oil And Tar Sands Operations Are Getting Blood Cancer.
* BREAKING: Student Debt Is Making All Your Life Choices Worse.
* Matt Zoller Seitz completes his series on video essays on Wes Anderson films. Bring on The Grand Budapest Hotel!
* PRINCETON, N.J., Nov. 27: Princeton’s freshmen again have chosen Adolf Hitler as “the greatest living person” in the annual poll of their class conducted by The Daily Princetonian.
* The coming Terry McAuliffe landslide as proof the GOP brand is in serious disrepair.
* And it looks like they’ve finally (almost) proved that Darth Vader wasn’t always going to be Luke Skywalker’s father. Gotcha Lucas! You can run but you can’t hide.
Thursday!
* It seems likely to me that at some point in the postwar era, the world had actually collectively created something like “the material conditions for full communism” — but powerful people made choices that led to a voluntary continuation of the logic of scarcity even when we were no longer physically constrained by actual-existing scarcity. The result has been a squandering of those resources in such a way as to set up environmental catastrophes that will almost certainly return us to a condition of real scarcity.
* Adjunct Professors at Tufts Organize with SEIU.
* Dumb, pointless boondoggle halted after obvious thing happens.
* What’s going on in Colorado is an outstanding case study in what happens when a black market becomes a legal one, and it’s something we probably won’t see again in any of our lifetimes.
* America’s three biggest jail systems, with more than 11,000 prisoners under treatment on any given day, represent by far the largest mental-health treatment facilities in the country.
* The United States of Shame: What Is Your State the Worst At?
* Choose Your Own Adventure Books Based on Breaking Bad.
* Seusstastic Park, A Jurassic Park/Doctor Seuss Mashup.
* ObamaCare List Hits 313 As 54 Colleges Cut Adjunct Hours.
* At the University of Toronto, students have created their own exchanges where they can pay students who are enrolled in a class which is full to drop out, thus opening space for themselves. In other words, a secondary market in class spaces has spontaneously emerged (as markets do).
* Marissa Alexander has been awarded a new trial.
* What happens when calling 911 could cost you your home.
* Randolph County Board of Education backs down.
* ABC teases exciting Agents of Shield post-credits gimmick.
* And even Joss Whedon thinks his work for Marvel is kind of a bummer.
Gerry Canavan 