Posts Tagged ‘apartheid’
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 Links!
* The Department of English invites candidates holding the rank of Associate or Full Professor to apply for the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature honoring the department’s most celebrated graduate.
* Next week at Marquette: Cuban science fiction authors Yoss and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo!
* 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium: A Celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Inside The Octavia Butler Archives With L.A. Writer Lynell George.
* I am writing to apply for the job–or rather “fellowship”–advertised on your website. As a restless member of the creative class, I agree that secure employment, renewable year-to-year, can be a suffocating hindrance. And besides, you specify “tons of snacks and beverages” as part of your benefit package. As a job-seeker motivated by a combination of desperation and snacks, I am an ideal candidate for this position.
* The report finds that the cost of forgoing tuition revenue from two- and four-year public institutions could run into the billions for some states: $4.96 billion in California, $3.89 billion in Texas and $2.53 billion in Michigan.
* Pence and gaslighting. Kaine’s tactical defeat. A Con Man of Epic Proportions. Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for A Mere Two Decades. The mind-blowing scale of Trump’s billion-dollar loss, in one tweet. Trump Foundation ordered to stop fundraising by N.Y. attorney general’s office. I want to believe! This seems legitimate. If Donald Trump Published an Academic Article. If you want a vision of the future.
* Bananas possible endings to the election, New Mexico edition.
* The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Visions of the Future.
* All told, however, Xiberras feels Louise could have done better. “We hoped for more followers to take notice of Louise’s behavior,” he says. “There were a few people who sensed the trap—a journalist among others, of course—but in the end, the majority just saw a pretty young girl of her time and not at all a kind of lonely girl, who is actually not at all that happy and with a serious alcohol problem.”
* Here’s a piece we can all get mad about, regardless of our pedagogical inclinations: Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?
* The Luke Cage Syllabus. 15 Essential Luke Cage Stories.
* Teaching the controversy: The Identity of a Famous Person Is News. The outing of Elena Ferrante and the power of naming. Ars longa, vita brevis.
* Yahooooooooooo: Yahoo built email spying software for intelligence agencies, report says.
* Tracing the path of one of the world’s most in-demand minerals from deadly mines in Congo to your phone. More here.
* That’s a hell of an act! What do you call it? The Mets. Relatedly: in search of the Korean bat flip.
* Nostalgia for World Culture: A New History of Esperanto.
* Harvard loses a mere $2 billion from its endowment. My favorite part of these stories is always the comparison to passive management by an index fund.
* More running it like a sandwich: More than ever, college football programs are finding it difficult to draw and retain the young fans who grow up to be lifelong season-ticket holders. In many athletic departments, the reasons can practically be cited as catechism: high-definition televisions, DVRs, diffuse fan bases and higher ticket and parking costs.
* American University Student Government Launches Campaign in Support of Mandatory Trigger Warnings.
* Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School.
* Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today.
* The last days of Robin Williams, as told by his wife Susan Schneider Williams.
* ‘Killer Clowns’: Inside the Terrifying Hoax Sweeping America.
* No one knew then that Springsteen, like Smith, would provide a through-line for his fans as things got worse, shifted in unimaginable ways, shifted again. Springsteen has himself changed with the times, becoming more sensitive to the issues his most-adored music still raises. Born To Rundemonstrates that. The decency at the heart of his memoir is a balm. He’s not only survived a life in rock and roll; he shows how a true believer doesn’t have to get stuck within its illusions, no matter how much they also attract him. After all, to Springsteen, a worthwhile dream isn’t an illusion; it’s a form of work.
* Unusually Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates: You know, humans.
* One of the most important lessons of Ghosh’s book is that the politics of climate change must not tiptoe around the questions posed by colonial encounters. Issues of climate justice cannot be solved without first addressing questions of equitable distribution of power, historically rooted in imperialism. And therein lies Ghosh’s disagreement with those who find the source of the problem in capitalism itself (Naomi Klein, for example). For him, even if “capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action.”
* Wealth of people in their 30s has ‘halved in a decade.’ Probably definitely totally unrelated: Federal student loans facilitate a pernicious profit motive in higher education.
* Patent application for a method of curing kidney stones.
* I think it’s 50/50 at this point that the Purge is a real thing before I’m dead.
* So You Want to Adapt The Tempest.
* No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously. Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene.
* The secret lives of New Jerseyans.
* On our phenomenal (recent) accomplishments in space.
Do They Even Know It’s Wednesday Links
* Great visit yesterday to STS at Riverside! Really enjoyed it.
* For the black community in America, there has never been a “normal” baseline experience from which emergencies are exceptions: unfortunate but episodic deviations. Rather, it has been a rolling emergency, interrupted by brief windows of relative promise. And from this perspective, perhaps we can understand the enigmatic “real state of exception” that Benjamin calls for — because from the perspective of white power, those moments of promise are the true emergencies that must be shut down at all costs.
* Indicting A System Not A Man…. Indict the System, Not Just Darren Wilson. No more Missouri compromises.
* Apocalypse now: chocolate could disappear by 2020.
* Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
* Just a short rumination on the greatness of comics from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Marquette in the… sigh. Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign.
* The potential benefit for higher-earning graduate students is “a policy accident,” says Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. “And who’s going to figure this out? Probably people with graduate degrees.”
* Ladies and gentlemen, your rising Democratic stars: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
* New Project to Digitize 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines.
* Museum on slave trade planned for Episcopal cathedral in Providence.
* Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15. Here’s Marquette:
* Exciting untapped market in higher education: Colleges Encourage Graduates to Seek Second Bachelor’s Degrees.
* In recognition of the evening, Ms. Stamm’s husband, Arthur Stamm, made a gift of $100,000. At the time, it was the largest gift the college had received from a single donor in its 42-year history.
Since January alone, by contrast, Duke University, which educates 14,850 students on its 8,709-acre campus, has received gifts and pledges of $1 million or more on the average of every six or seven weeks. In those gifts alone, the university has already raised about $49 million this year. And yet, according to the latest ranking, its endowment of close to $6 billion in 2012 did not earn it a place among the country’s 10 richest schools, a list led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
* More scenes from the class struggle at elite universities.
* Karl Stefanovic’s sexism experiment: Today presenter wears same suit for a year.
* To remember Mandela is to remember Robben Island.
* Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.
* Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.
* What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism.
* No capital projects but the end of capital.
* The rich want everything. They even want to suffer most from inequality!
* To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
* At This Rate, The World Will Have To Cease All Carbon Emissions In 2040 To Stay Under 2°C.
* Just another average November, nbd: Buffalo, N.Y., area in the midst of a truly insane lake effect snow storm.
* Mark Fisher has one of the better anti-identity-politics pieces I’ve seen on the left: Exiting the Vampires’ Castle.
If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.
* It’s Not Your Kids Holding Your Career Back. It’s Your Husband.
* Academia for women: short maternity leave, few part-time roles and lower pay.
* Marriage, y’all, I just don’t know.
* I woke up this morning still black, still a woman, and still bothered by the Jezebel piece. So I’m here using my voice to encourage us all to speak up.
* The Most Popular Drug in America Is an Antipsychotic and No One Really Knows How It Works.
* Necro-streaming: Notes on Watching a Dead Show.
* The Biggest Lies About Science in the U.S. Government’s “Wastebook.” Just pure ressentiment.
* Actually existing government waste! White House announces push for next generation of hi-tech weapons.
* Twilight of the Indoor Mall.
* Secret Origins of the Black Panther. Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.
* Five ways to pander to millennials in 2016.
* I wanted a bigger, better Bayside more than anybody: Company Halts Plan To Frack 3,000 Feet From Pennsylvania School.
* Bill Cosby Is An Alleged Serial Rapist. So, Now What?
* The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn’t just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.
* Gorbachev Tried To Get George Bush To Spoil Who Killed Laura Palmer.
* Has Uber Ubered an Uber too Uber this Uber?
* What’s most troubling about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is not the music per se but the way it insinuates itself — and “us” — into a story about “them” and yet can’t be bothered to get even the most basic facts right.
* The uncomfortable origins of “Afrofuturism.”
* I have an idea for a mature, adult, fantasy roleplaying game.
* In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist.
* Some days you just need http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com.
* And, finally, MTV is ready to tell my story.
Wednesday Links!
* What we’re talking about in my cultural preservation class today: Jyotsna Kapur’s “Capital limits on creativity: neoliberalism and its uses of art.” I’d actually suggest the adjunct herself functions as “the model worker of the new economy” alongside the freelancer.
The results of the Creative Culture Industry policy have already started to come in. Kate Oakley, among others, has shown that in the case of Britain these policies have exacerbated rather than eliminated inequality. They have led to gentrification and pockets of wealth in the midst of disintegrating social infrastructure. At the same time, work in the creative industries has become increasingly precarious — that is, temporary, project-based, and competitive, putting artists and media people in a constant in search of work (2006). As Richard Shearmur has indicated, calling upon local governments to modify their policies, planning, and budgets in order to respond to the preferences of the creative class boils down to reinforcing and subsidizing elites to a kind of ‘talent welfare’ that is reminiscent of ‘corporate welfare’ (2006-7, 37). In the process, art’s entire social role is undergoing a profound transformation. From being considered an imaginative and critical outsider or a participant in social transformation, the artist is now presented as the model worker of the new economy.
* New, privatized African city heralds climate apartheid.
* The bad conscience of empire: Historic papers about the slave trade are among the enormous cache of public documents that the Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded in a secret archive, the Guardian has learned.
* Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.
* Pollution from Chinese factories is harming air quality on U.S. West Coast!
* The chemical spill that contaminated water for hundreds of thousands in West Virginia was only the latest and most high-profile case of coal sullying the nation’s waters.
* Only You Can Discover Oil Pipeline Spills, Since 80 Percent Of The Time The Companies Miss Them.
* Train Derailment In Philadelphia Leaves Crude Oil Car Dangling Over Schuylkill River.
* UWM sued over dissolution of student government.
* New York’s Mayor Is Snow Plowing the City Along Class Lines Again.
* Campus shootings have become so common they barely make the news anymore.
* Good Guy with a Gun shoots self with gun, for second time.
Connersville, Indiana police chief David Counceller’s most recent self-inflicted wound occurred when his sweatshirt jammed against his 40-caliber Glock’s trigger as he attempted to holster the weapon. He was examining a new Glock at a gun shop at the time.
* ‘Pregnant Sims Can No Longer Brawl’ And Other Amazing Sims Patch Notes.
* Good Jersey / Bad Jersey: New Jersey Will Protect Pregnant Workers From Discrimination And Unsafe Conditions. Christie declines to sign bill requiring public notice of raw sewage overflows.
* Former Virginia Governor Indicted on Corruption Charges.
* The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard.
* “To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence,” he wrote to Ó Méalóid. “It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”
* Once we had the Sideways House, now we have the Upside-Down House.
* Legalizing murder still working out great.
* What Grantland Got Wrong. When mainstream media is the lunatic fringe.
* How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor.
* The headline reads, “Pubic Hair Grooming Injuries Have Quintupled.”
* If A then B: How the World Discovered Logic. The golden age of female philosophy.
* Back to the Future fan wants to make sequel accurate by releasing tons of Jaws movies.
* Don’t ever spoil Homeland for Jennifer Lawrence.
* If you eat the yellow pill, you will know all things. If you eat the green pill, you will know nothing but happiness.
* How to win a Best Actress Oscar.
* And never let them say our civilization never accomplished anything.
Monday Morning Links
* There’s always money in the banana stand: After closing 50 schools, Chicago Public Schools has proposals for 31 new Charter Schools. This is how much your kid’s school’s budget has been cut (state-by-state averages). “The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students.”
* Fiduciary duty: Shareholder sues IBM for spying on China, wiping $12.9B off its market cap.
* Can Science Fiction Survive in Saudi Arabia?
* Incarceration rate per 100,000 Black males in South Africa under apartheid (1993) 610: 851. Incarceration rate per 100,000 African-American males in the United States under George W. Bush (2001) 611: 4,848. The Bush tag is such a redding herring there. This is a bipartisan consensus.
* What crimes did prisoners commit?
Almost two-thirds of court admissions to state prison are for property and drug offenses, including drug possession (16 percent), drug sales (15 percent), burglary (9 percent), and auto theft (6 percent).
Then, she says, the prosecutor began rattling off names and showing photographs of people, asking about their social contacts and political opinions. Olejnik guesses he asked “at least 50 questions” in that vein, compared to the four about May Day. That’s when she shut down, refused to answer, was found in contempt of court, and was sent to SeaTac FDC.
* Texas Judge Who Resigned After Allegedly Colluding With Prosecutor Now Running For Prosecutor.
* If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We’d Ground Our Fleet. How NY Times Covers Yemen Drone Strikes.
* A Tale of Two Cities: America’s Bipolar Climate Future. New York City and New Bern, North Carolina both face the same projected rise in sea levels, but while one is preparing for the worst, the other is doing nothing on principle.
* Scientists Turn Their Gaze Toward Tiny Threats to Great Lakes.
* Iowa Republican’s 2-year investigation finds no statistically significant evidence of voter fraud.
* There’s always money in the banana stand, part two: Highest paid college presidents.
* Two House Democrats Lead Effort to Protect For-Profit Colleges, Betraying Students and Vets.
* Son of a: A New Study Suggests That People Who Don’t Drink Alcohol Are More Likely To Die Young.
* The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder.
* Postscript on the Societies of Control, life insurance edition.
* I’ve been saying this for years: Online advertising has a fraud problem. Millions of ad impressions are being served to bots and non-human traffic, and ad tech companies are doing little to stop it.
* The Kellers are caught up in a little-known horror of the U.S. housing bust: the zombie title. Six years in, thousands of homeowners are finding themselves legally liable for houses they didn’t know they still owned after banks decided it wasn’t worth their while to complete foreclosures on them.
* True crime: 100 cited in Wisconsin probe of illegal ginseng harvesting.
* The Walker miracle: The U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday that 4,420 people in Wisconsin filed initial unemployment claims during the last week of November. That is more claims than the next two highest states combined: Ohio with 2,597 and Kentucky with 1,538.
* Israel, BDS, and delegitimization. ASA Members Vote To Endorse Academic Boycott of Israel.
* The Pope: Not a Marxist!
* What does it mean to be privileged? It means not having to think about any of this, ever.
* Public Influence: The Immortalization of an Anonymous Death.
* And how Arthur C. Clarke responded to crackpots.
Friday End of the Semester Why Aren’t I Already Sleeping Links
* Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then. Apartheid’s Useful Idiots. History Needs to Be Honest. The National Review, American Conservatism, and Nelson Mandela. Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About. The Island. Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Some reservations about non-violent resistance. Mandela and the Pistons. The inevitable Žižek. Be Nelson Mandela.
* The 130 cities where fast-food workers struck Thursday.
* Graduate students and labor organizing after NYU and UAW.
* Many New Ph.D.’s Emerge Deeper in Debt Than in the Past, Survey Shows.
* It’s Not Just Football: Other college athletes are actually more likely to suffer concussions.
* Great moments in legal absurdism: Unarmed Man Is Charged With Wounding Bystanders Shot by Police Near Times Square.
* The climate of Middle Earth.
* And the US has drawn an epically bad World Cup group. Well, there’s always 2018…
