Posts Tagged ‘Blackwater’
Four-Day-Weekend-Sized Links!
* CFP: Edited Collection on Ecohorror.
* Join English dept faculty, students, and alumni as we debate the question of our age: “Is GAME OF THRONES still good?”
* The five basic narrative conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. society, and New York vs. New Jersey.
* We are not as often reminded that homes and lives may have been saved if officials and policymakers had incorporated the recommendations of sound science in their outlook and preparedness plans. Which is why we need to add a third response to our evolving national post-catastrophic storm mourning ritual: Identifying and investigating the negligent officials who put the public in harm’s way by repeatedly ignoring crucial data and scientific evidence that can help prevent disaster.
* Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like. We’re Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming. How Washington Made Harvey Worse. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history. Texans to be hit with new insurance law making it harder to win contested claims, just one week after Harvey. Why Ordinary Citizens Are Acting as First Responders in Houston. From June. Stop snitchin’. The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that unfold for years. What the Harvey flooding would will look like where you live. How Humans Make Disasters Worse. Within and against capitalism.
* Hundreds dead in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, while millions have been forced from their homes and 18,000 schools shut down across the region. More Than 1,000 Died in South Asia Floods This Summer.
* Time to Decriminalize Pot in Wisconsin.
* Distracted-Boyfriend-Meme Photographer Tells All.
* New Gilded Age Watch: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. Read the thread.
* I try not to be a Pollyanna about these things but I seriously thought we were done with Erik Prince forever.
* Avengers assemble: Mueller taps the IRS and the State of New York to find crimes he can charge Trump and associates with that Trump can’t just pardon. Fascinating stuff: Legal Challenge to Arpaio Pardon Begins. And this one, wow: Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey.
* Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.
* ICE Is Abusing the ACLU’s Clients Because They are Fighting Trump’s Deportation Machine. ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody. Decorated Marine vet may be deported, despite likely U.S. citizenship. GOP lawmaker aims to force vote to protect Dreamers. Everyone can do their part: UK Government’s attempt to deport Afghan asylum seeker fails after pilot refuses to take off.
* Incredible video of a cop abusing a Utah nurse without justification.
* Never off-brand: Mnuchin Doesn’t Endorse Placing Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill.
* Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege.
* The Looming Decline of the Public Research University.
* AAUP: University of Tampa Should Immediately Reinstate Lecturer Fired Over Tweet. Online Harassment of Faculty Continues; Administrators Capitulate.
* The Strategy of Appeasement on Right-Wing Harassment. And from the archives: Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* If White supremacy has no place on an American college campus, then we cannot continue to provide safe harbor to its symbolism. If universities are going to be agents of change, then we must think about our role beyond promoting dialogue. Promoting dialogue is important. But if our primary response is to provide a space to have difficult conversations on sensitive topics, we are little more than pay-to-play community centers. In this moment, in this context, we need our universities to show ethical leadership, to promote the highest of human values through direct, affirming action. Ethical leadership means that Nazis and other White supremacists are not welcome on our college campuses because our universities recognize our right to dignity and personhood as more important than any poorly argued right to free speech.
* So you’ve just gotten tenure.
* Ideology at its purest: All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.
* Bucking FDA, Peter Thiel funds “patently unethical” herpes vaccine trial.
* Rare instance of the heirs doing what I said in Luminescent Threads they never do: destroying the author’s unfinished works. It’s a pleasing spectacle, but still, who wouldn’t be happy to know it was all an act and the work was still out there somewhere.
* It’s shocking, but somehow not at all shocking, that the pundit class — not to mention the FBI — has already convinced itself antifa is just as bad as these guys.
* The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of free speech.
* We’re Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR.
* A people’s history of the White Walkers.
* The enduring legacy of Zork.
* Your SF short of the week: Echo//Back.
* I bet this does really well: Drew Barrymore Will Produce a Female-Centric Horror Anthology Show for the CW.
* Facebook has been making people feel so bad lately they’ve even stopped using Facebook.
* Global warming everywhere but in my cold, cold heart.
* Trump is toxically unpopular. He still might win in 2020.
* No amount of Trump White House speculation is going to keep me from feeling happy Sheriff Clarke is out.
* Tired: Subprime mortgages. Wired: Nonprime mortgages.
* Collocations of ‘cock’: What corpus linguistics tells us about porn writing.
* I like my coffee like I like my ceaseless inner monologue.
Midweek Links!
* Another scene from the death of the university.
* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.
* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.
* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.
* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.
* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.
* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.
* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.
* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.
* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.
* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.
* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’
* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.
* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.
* California and the literature of water.
* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.
* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.
* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.
* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.
* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.
* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.
* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.
* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.
* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.
* Tech bubble about to burst again.
* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.
Tuesday Night
* Today in science: Australian scientists are describing “fat” as a taste. Those more sensitive to fat consume less and have a lower BMI.
* Today in science 2: Doctors are gross, not washing hands.
* Support for health-care reform growing as Obama gets more publicly involved? Quick, somebody please tell Congressional Democrats.
* Urban farming in Detroit and mall farming in Cleveland.
* Ana Marie Cox explains Washington as the Venn intersection of science fiction geeks, politicians, indie rock fans, and gay people.
* In short, this entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama’s speeches will start “connecting” and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become. Via Matt Yglesias.
* South Park Reenacts Actual Thing Blackwater Did.
* Winning fifteen-year-old arguments: Clintons cleared in FBI Filegate.
While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs’ allegations that their privacy had been violated–and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act–after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode–about which they do have cause to complain–was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.
* Continental Will Cancel Flights To Avoid Fines For Late Takeoffs. I’m sure their customers will understand.
* The 10,000th Glenn-Beck-related outrage of the day: The Census Is The Government’s Attempt To ‘Increase Slavery.’
BECK: Why were they asking the race question, you said when, in 1790? … Right, they want to know, do you count as three-fifths? Do you count at all? So, you have to know how many slaves did you have? People find that offensive today because the idea was, if we’re going to count, we want to know how many are here for services etc. etc. and slaves would get less. Well that’s not right. One. One. ‘I’m not three-fifths, I’m one. Whites are not worth than me.’ Now reverse it, why are they asking this question today?
CO-HOST: Because minorities are worth more than whites.
BECK: Exactly right. So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a monitory. Well there is no difference. The reason you don’t answer the race question is because one, everyone counts as one. All men are created equal. If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery and that everyone should count the same, do not answer the race question. How dare you. How dare you. At least in 1790, they were doing it to slow the South down on slavery. To try to stop it as much as they can. Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery. Your dependence on the master in Washington. No way, don’t answer that question.
Nisour Square
A judge has dismissed all charges against Blackwater/Xe employees with regard to the 2007 Nisour Square massacre.
Friday Links
* Good job numbers suggest the recession could be bottoming out
. Of course, you can’t please everyone.
* BREAKING: Ben Bernanke is kind of a douche.
* Ted Kennedy may be gone, but John Kerry still won’t support the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound.
* In a new piece in Vanity Fair, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater/Xe, turns out to have been CIA. Via MeFi. What’s next for this real-life Bond villain?
For the time being, however, Prince contends that his plans are far more modest. “I’m going to teach high school,” he says, straight-faced. “History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”
* New Jersey to pave million-year-old dinosaur footprints to put up parking lot. Okay, actually condos.
* Can humans reproduce in zero gravity?
This finding casts into doubt the science fictional notion that human beings can survive in zero gravity or in the microgravity environment of large asteroids.
* Could a super-advanced civilization live inside the acretion disk, the super-dense area around the black hole at the center of a galaxy?
* The headline reads, “Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex.”
Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings.
The other thing that struck me about her interview was her contention that she didn’t go after Obama enough during the election, and namely, that avoiding the birther thing was a mistake. I suppose she could have gone completely off the deep end during the campaign, and certainly it seems she wanted to but was held back by McCain, but good god, who in their right mind thinks she wasn’t enough on the attack? She accused Obama, through implication, of being a terrorist. She did so in a way that maximized the anti-Muslim insinuation, even though neither Barack Obama nor Bill Ayers (who is the excuse for this rumor-mongering) is Muslim, making the whole thing not only racist but incoherent. She went out of her way to imply that anyone who was not white or lived in a city was not a Real American. She red-baited Obama. She did everything but tell jokes about his mom. Her entire campaign strategy was to attack Obama. I fail to see how she could have done more, honestly. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
* And science proves Rousseau was right: God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
Friday Friday
Friday!
* The ping-pong match in the press over the public option continues. Nobody can figure out whether or not Pelosi has the votes, whether or not Obama supports an Olympia-Snowe-style trigger, or just what will happen with the cloture vote in the Senate. Ezra Klein compares the likely House and Senate bills, which leads Matt Yglesias to suggest a best-of-both-worlds approach. Meanwhile a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that public support for the public option remains steady at around 60%, which would be important if the Senate were a properly representative body.
* Lots of buzz today about Neill Blomkamp’s next film after District 9, described by SCI FI Wire as a balls-out sci-fi epic.
* ‘A Mid-Atlantic Miracle’: Keeping public university costs down in Maryland.
* A judge has ruled the war crimes case against Blackwater/Xe will go forward.
* ‘Living on $500,000 a Year‘: Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns. John Scalzi compares Fitzgerald’s income and lifestyle to a writer’s today.
* Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for president? This would take “fair and balanced” to a whole new level.
* And your entirely random chart of the day: The Population of Rome Through History. Via Kottke.
Blackwater v. Fred Chappell
Two book reviews from my household in the Indy this week: my review of Master of War: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince and the Business of War and Jaimee’s review of Fred Chappell’s latest book of poems, Shadow Box.
In a related sidebar, Lisa Sorg asks: “What’s the difference between Daniel Boyd and Blackwater’s Erik Prince?”
Monday Night 2
Monday night 2!
* 61 Essential Postmodern Reads: An Annotated List. (Absalom, Absalom!? Hamlet? Really?)
* Nature’s right to exist comes to Shapleigh, Maine. Via MeFi.
* The Harvard Crimson reports that Henry Louis Gates was apparently arrested yesterday for trying to break into his own home. Post-racial America is awesome. (via SEK)
* Also from SEK: scientific proof Powerpoint sucks.
* Inside Blackwater, the corporation so evil they forgot to give it a non-evil name.
There Was Only One Catch
“That’s some catch, that catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
If it weren’t for Keith Olbermann’s excellent Milo Minderbinder reference, this Countdown segment on the granting of Catch-22-esque immunity to Blackwater would be one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen. It makes me feel, well, like this dog.
Gerry Canavan 