Posts Tagged ‘arms trade’
Break v. Spring: Dawn of Thursday Links
* Coming up in two weeks! “After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction” will be the topic at the 2016 Robert W. Hamblin Lecture April 6 at Southeast Missouri State University.
* CFP: “Queers Read This!”: LGBTQ Literature Now, a Special Issue of GLQ. And a stray thought not-really-apropos of that:
* UWM introduces plan to cut $41.25 million from budget. That includes the end of the Center for Urban Initiatives and Research. But there’s always money in the job security stand:
“We have a fundamental tension between job security and the ability for this university to continue to be viable,” Mone said. “Those are inherent tensions. The reality is, when I talk about numbers, when I talk about budgeting, what we’re really talking about is people. And we’re talking about the ability to continue to operate as effectively and as efficiently as possible given the environmental changes that we have.”
* California Regents Reject Broad Condemnation of Anti-Zionism as Discrimination.
* Twitter creates ‘new academic hierarchies’, suggests study.
* Shock of shocks: The NFL has been lying about concussions.
* Batman vs. Superman is apparently in that delicious category of film so terrible that the critics compete to deal it the cruelest blow. FilmFreak. GQ. BMD. AV Club. Deadpan. The Guardian. Village Voice. And the rest! But I give the round to A.O. Scott:
For fun there are shots of the heroes shirtless and of Lois Lane in the bath. But the point of “Batman v Superman” isn’t fun, and it isn’t thinking, either. It’s obedience. The theology is invoked not to elicit meditations on mercy, justice or sacrifice, but to buttress a spectacle of power. And in that way the film serves as a metaphor for its own aspirations. The corporations that produce movies like this one, and the ambitious hacks who sign up to make them, have no evident motive beyond their own aggrandizement. Entertainment is less the goal than the byproduct, and as the commercial reach of superpower franchises grows, their creative exhaustion becomes ever more apparent.
* But it sounds like Justice League will somehow be even worse.
* Garner (not really) v. Affleck. This is actually a really interesting longread on the crafting of celebrity persona, despite your assumptions to the contrary.
* As a child I was unsatisfied with the world, already looking for ways out. I read some online pamphlet about Advaita Vedanta and decided I believed in it; I made myself a little diagram of the cosmos, within and without Māyā, dotted lines connecting Brahman to Atman to my own confined and unhappy self far across the limits of observable reality; I was weird. I liked things that weren’t really real; not pure fantasy but all those lenses that made the world bearable in its new capacity to be somehow otherwise, that gave me a kind of conceptual power to change things that I didn’t have in daily life. Conspiracy theory, pseudohistory, socialism, faith. I think it wasn’t long after my grandfather died that I found a collection of alternate histories, little stories told by pop-historians about what might have happened if one battle or another had gone the other way, a prism of worlds that never were. I don’t remember the title; it was actually a fairly stupid book (one account described the result of Lenin’s assassination on the way to St Petersburg: the Bolsheviks are effortlessly sidelined and we get a happy, prosperous, liberal-democratic twentieth century). The cover was utterly inevitable: a black and empty sky, and a swastika flag on the Moon. But that really did happen. The space programme that sent the first people to the Moon was the Nazi space programme, all those scientists snatched up in Operation Paperclip, effortlessly swapping Hitler for Washington. Watch the dialectic at work, preserving what it negates, proceeding as always by its bad side. It’s not that the Nazis are another example of Benjamin’s defeated of history; how could they be, when putting a swastika on the cover is still the best way to sell a book? But the litter that chokes our planet remains, all the bones remain, and one day we are promised the resurrection. This is why utopia is always melancholic, the refusal to simply mourn, the tight grip of the living to the dead.
* Obama legacy watch: How can a man who has weaponized the planet at a historic rate be championed as a purveyor of peace?
* A Conversation on Title IX, in the Yale Law Journal. First up: Nancy Gertner’s “Complicated Process.”
* Miracles and wonders: Controlling diabetes with a skin patch.
* Lead ink from scrolls may unlock library destroyed by Vesuvius.
* Should Parents of Children With Severe Disabilities Be Allowed to Stop Their Growth?
* North Carolina in ruins, again. Abolish the states.
* STEMJ: Researchers have long noticed that an oddly large number of jihadists have engineering backgrounds. Recently two social scientists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, scrutinized the numbers and concluded that, yes, the proportion of terrorists who are engineers far outpaces expectations.
* Elsewhere on the terrorism and statistics beat: American Mormon, 19, left with burns and shrapnel injuries in Brussels attack also survived Boston and Paris bombings.
* On the Origin of “African Proverbs.”
* On the Politics of Marvel’s Black Panther.
* The politics of failure have failed! We must make them work again!
* I guess the Singularity really is near: Microsoft’s ‘teen girl’ AI turns into a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours.
* The latest in the letting-the-superintelligent-AI-out-of-the-box subgenere: ANA.
* And, from the archives, some change we can all believe in: Abolish Caillou.
Saturday Night Links!
* I’ve had a nice bit of professional good news: I’ve been asked to join Extrapolation as an editor beginning with their Spring 2015 issue.
* “Crutzen, who is not a geologist, but one of the modern great scientists, essentially launched a small hand grenade into the world of geological time scales,” Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the ICS’s anthropocene working group, told the Guardian. “The word began to be used widely, well before geologists ever got involved.”
* That old-time religion: Now that science fiction is respectable, it’s lost almost all of the conceptual craziness and dubious sexual politics that made it both fanboy bait and of genuine interest.
* From AfricaIsACountry: Ebola and neo-imperialism. And from Jacobin: The Political Economy of Ebola.
* The arsenal of, well, let’s say democracy: The U.S. sold $66.3 billion in weapons last year –- more than three-fourths of the entire global arms market.
* Richest 1% of people own nearly half of global wealth, says report.
* Climate change: how to make the big polluters really pay.
* Of Collaborators and Careerists.
* Whites are more supportive of voter ID laws when shown photos of black people voting.
* Meritocracy watch: Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.
* The 21st century university: women’s only colleges and trans identity.
* Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers.
* The Milwaukee police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park is believed to be the first officer in the city fired as a result of a fatal on-duty shooting in at least 45 years.
* More back-and-forth on carceral feminism from Amber A’Lee Frost and Freddie deBoer.
* Pieces like this are enough to make you nostalgic for the quietly understated narcissism of “job creators.”
* An oral history of The Wonder Years.
* New Scrabble Dictionary Disrepects The Game.
* Stop worrying about mastermind hackers. Start worrying about the IT guy.
* And just for fun: How to die in the 18th century. Watch for for evil, and for the purples…
I May Have Assigned ‘Libya Quote of the Day’ Too Early in the Day
In 2009 alone, European governments – including Britain and France – sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.
Crooks & Liars: Instead of Bombing Dictators, Why Don’t We Just Stop Selling Them Bombs?
Two Great Tastes: Chris Christie on This American Life
My love of New Jersey and my love of This American Life collide in this week’s replay of a TAL episode I’ve mentioned before about Hemant Lakhani, controversially arrested and sentenced to decades in jail for selling one U.S. government informant a fake missile provided to him by a different U.S. government informant. Turns out the U.S. attorney in the case and interviewed on the program is Chris Christie, currently leading the polls against Jon Corzine for governor of New Jersey. The case is misleadingly highlighted on Christie’s Web site as one of his “cases that made a difference”:
Obscure businessman and British citizen, Hemant Lakhani, came on the radar screen of the FBI because of his desire to broker the sale of shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down American passenger jets. His independent efforts to find an arms buyer and his persistence in completing a deal that would result in a terrorist attack in the United States sealed the image of someone predisposed and motivated to follow through with terrorist acts.
Chris Christie led the team that prosecuted Mr. Lakhani, ultimately securing a conviction and putting him behind bars for the rest of his life.
If you listen to the episode you’ll see almost none of this is correct; in particular, the “deal” would certainly not have resulted in a terrorist attack on the United States because everyone involved but Mr. Lakhani was working on behalf of the United States government. Lakhani is a fool, but almost certainly not an arms trader and probably no danger to anyone—and to all appearances the Lakhani case is an debacle and an embarrassment for the DOJ, making no “difference” at all in the context of the larger prosecution of al Qaeda and highlighting the danger of career prosecutors who seek convictions over just results.
Sports Sports Sports Guns
I won’t even mention what happened to the Mets, because I’m sure it’s still a little too real for people, but I will take a break from my usual ban on sportsblogging to say that the situation with the Patriots reads to me like an interesting non-political example of what happens when the media sees its interests (i.e., its profit) aligned with those organizations that it’s supposed to be independent of and in some ways oppositional towards. ESPN loses money, too, when people become disgusted with the NFL—and so what by all rights should be a huge scandal is swept entirely under the rug. (A fine of $500,000 is nothing. I’m no expert, but sounds to me like Belichick and maybe others in the Patriots’ head coaching staff should be banned from the sport.)
So good on the Jets ticket holder class action lawsuit.
And in lighter news, the U.S. is once again the top dealer of arms to the developing world. (Via my brother and Frinibarf)
Gerry Canavan 