* So, look: I’m not saying the Democrats are definitely going to blow it. But they’re more than capable of blowing it.
Posts Tagged ‘bullshit’
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018
17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP
— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:
2C of warming doesn’t mean “like now, but 2C warmer”.
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018
In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 28, 2018
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
Spartacus (1960)
Plot holeIn the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.
— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 2018, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, abortion, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air travel, Amazon, Amazon Prime, America, anarchy, ancient aliens, apocalypse, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, asteroids, astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, austerity, Bayeux Tapestry, Beach Boys, Bernie Sanders, Bigfoot, Bird, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, books, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Buffy, bullshit, California, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, cars, Case Western, cats, centrism, CFPs, Charles Stross, child abuse, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, communism, conspiracy theories, corruption, crisis, cyberpunk, David Foster Wallace, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, design, disability, Disney, diversity, doctors, Donald Trump, driving, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emoluments, EPA, Episode 9, ethics, Europe, evangelical Christianity, Facebook, fact-checking, fake news, Far Side, film, Flight of the Conchords, Flint, fossils, four-day work week, fracking, futurity, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, ghosts, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Greece, Groupon, Guantánamo, Guardians of the Galaxy, hacking, happiness, happy endings, Heaven, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, Infinite Jest, inflation, infrastructure, James Gunn, Japan, Jesuits, Joss Whedon, journamalism, justice, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kokomo, labor, leftism, libertarianism, Locke and Key, Lyft, machine learning, maps, mass transportation, McDonald's, Medicare, medicine, memes, Michigan, misogyny, Mizzou, Moby-Dick, moderation, Monopoly, moral panic, mortgage, motherhood, Mr. Rogers, MSNBC, music, my scholarly empire, New Jersey, New York, New York Daily News, New Zealand, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, oil companies, optical illusions, Orwell, our brains don't work, outer space, paleontology, Parable of the Sower, parenting, passports, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, philanthropy, philosophy, plastic, Plymouth State, politics, Portugal, postfeminism, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, QAnon, race, race culture, racism, rape, recycling, rich people, Roe v. Wade, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, Scandinavia, science fiction, scooters, security state, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, Shazam, Sheriff Clarke, Shuri, slave revolts, slaves, soccer, socialism, Sorry to Bother You, spiders, sports, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, surveillance society, survivalism, Sweden, Swiss army knives, Talking Heads, teaching, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the Devil, the discourse, the economy, The Hobbit, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, the stock market, Tolkien, Topher Grace, trans* issues, trillionaires, trolls, Tronc, Uber, USC, Utopia, Venezuela, victimization, voting, vulture capitalism, water, white supremacy, wildfires, wiretapping, women, work, Worldcon, writing
It’s Week One of Year Zero and I’m Declaring Total Tab Bankruptcy
* CFP: SFRA 2017. CFP: 14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference. CFP: Toxic Fans. CFP: Whiteness and the American Superhero. CFP: The Gibson Critics Don’t See. Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships. CFP for MLA 2018: Creative Economies of Science Fiction. And also at MLA 18, the science fiction panel I’ll be chairing: Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* This thread on Gene Roddenberry and Grace Lee Whitney makes some flat assertions that are actually just well-supported speculations, but is nonetheless is a shocking and dispiriting revisionist history of Trek that’s well worth considering.
* The part I was born to play.
* Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.
* The novel in the age of Obama.
* The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering in a Post-Apocalyptic World.
* Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries.
* From my colleague Rebecca Nowacek: Don’t Retreat. Teach Citizenship.
* Student evaluations: still bad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Alternative.
* I’m not normally one to defend college admin, but: Trade school fires president after he let homeless student stay in library during sub-zero weather.
* Without communism, there’s something missing from dystopian stories.
* Junot Diaz remembers Octavia Butler.
* Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and universities. Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s ‘Un-American.’
* The university as asylum. The university and the class system.
* The Changing English Major. The collapse of history as a discipline. A liberal arts college without English majors? Massive cuts at the University of Alberta.
* MLA Rejects Israel Boycott. MLA by the numbers (from the right).
* When a school hires adjuncts, where does the money go?
* UBI already exists for the 1%.
* 26, 171.
* Shockingly enough, legalizing murder means more murders.
* Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?
* Somali refugee in Milwaukee publishes book.
* When the homeless die, it’s up to forensic investigators to find their families.
* The End of the Rural Hospital.
* Secrets of my success: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent.
* The FBI has been using the Geek Squad as all-purpose informants.
* Trump Promised to Resign From His Companies — But There’s No Record He’s Done So. Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue. Mark Hamill, National Treasure. Searching for Time-Travelers on the Eve of the Trump Inauguration. Donald Trump, David Foster Wallace, and the hobbling of shame. A mere 34. It would be crazy not to impeach him. Keep America Great. Oh, you think? The DeVos Democrats. That’ll solve it. Here’s What You Can Do to Beat Trump. Preventing 2017 America from becoming like 1934 Germany: A watchlist. Philip K. Dick vs the Time of Trump. Here’s what Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Fascism. Stop making sense, or, writing in the age of Trump. The stories coming out of this White House are bananas. Watch this story. And this one! How jokes won the election. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. UPDATE: This is fine.
* But this one takes the cake.
* Meanwhile, the 2020 Dem frontrunner…
* But Jeet Heer thinks we can do even worse.
* Democrats in the Wilderness. Oh, they’ve got this.
* The Electoral College Is Even Worse Than You Think. But it can always be worse.
* What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After North Korea Nuked the United States?
* The Obama speeches. A politics that surrenders every level of government to its opposition cannot win the future. It has already lost the present. But this was good.
* Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (But Their Schools Probably Won’t).
* Teachers who drink and drinkers who teach.
* Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered.
* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.
* You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke.
* Thousands of Skittles end up on an icy road. But that’s not the surprising part.
* Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say. The people behind the AI curtain.
* Ha ha ha, he’s the sheriff of my county, what a character, this is not frightening at all.
* Lessons from Octavia Butler: Surviving Trump.
* I still think every adult who let this get to trial should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice. There’s no hyperbole in that declaration.
* Sherlock‘s bizarrely self-aware problem with women.
* About that biometric password you’re born with and will never be able to change.
* Women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies.
* Most primate species are now threatened with extinction.
* Neanderthals were people too.
* When a Video-Game World Ends.
* Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.
* Twilight of the cruelty factory circus.
* “We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone.”
* “Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram.”
* Disability and as-seen-on-TV.
* Wolf-Sized Otters Prowled the World Six Million Years Ago.
* Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.
* I still believe in Arrested Development Season Five.
* Your blast from the past: Prodigy Online’s MadMaze.
* Superheroes and the kids today.
* And RIP, Mark Fisher. A memorial fund for his wife and son. His piece on depression.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 24, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 2020 Democratic primary, A.J. Daulerio, academia, academic jobs, activism, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Affordable Care Act, alcohol, alcoholism, alt-ac, alternative facts, America, Andrew Cuomo, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, anti-Semitism, antibiotics, apocalypse, Arrested Development, artificial intelligence, asylum, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, bees, Betsy DeVos, Big Data, biometrics, bombs, books, boycotts, boys, Bruce Serling, bullshit, Cambridge, celebrities, centrism, CFPs, Christianity, circuses, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, Colby-Sawyer College, comics, communism, conferences, cows, cruelty, David Foster Wallace, Democrats, Dennis Hastert, depression, Disney, dominionism, Don't mention the war, Donald Trump, drinking, dystopia, ecology, education, Electoral College, emoluments, endangered species, English departments, English majors, EPA, Episode 8, espionage, ethics, fandom, fascism, FBI, film, games, Gawker, Geek Squad, Gene Roddenberry, Germany, Grace Lee Whitney, guns, health care, history, history departments, homelessness, How the University Works, humor, Hunger Games, ice sheet collapse, income inequality, Instagram, Israel, JCC, jokes, Junot Díaz, kids today, LEGO, livestock, MadMaze, Mark Fisher, Mark Hamill, Marquette, metafiction, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, Minnesota, misogyny, Missouri, MLA, murder, Mystery Science Theater 3000, national parks, NEA, Neanderthals, NEH, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, nipples, North Korea, novels, nuclear war, nuclearity, obituary, Octavia Butler, otters, Palestine, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Philip K. Dick, play, politics, pornography, preppers, primates, Prodigy, protest, PTSD, public health, race, racism, rationality, reality TV, refugees, Republicans, reverse development, rhetoric, rich people, Rick and Morty, Ringling Brothers, rural hospitals, Russia, satire, science, science fiction, sea level rise, segregation, sex, sexism, SFRA, shame, Sheriff Clarke, Sherlock, Skittles, Somalia, South Dakota, stand your ground, Star Trek, Star Wars, student evaluations, suburbs, superheroes, survivalism, teaching, tenure, The Joker, The Last Jedi, The Man in the High Castle, the Purge, theodicy, Third Way, time travel, Tolkien, Tom Gauld, true crime, universal basic income, University of Alberta, Utopia, UVM, vaccines, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, wealth, white people, whiteness, William Gibson, women, words, writing, Zootopia, zunguzungu
Monday Morning Links!
* Permanent addition to the sidebar: Resources for planning a trip to the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington. Send me anything I’ve missed!
* CFPs I have going: Women and Science Fiction Media (SFFTV Special Issue). Buffy at 20 (April conference at Marquette).
* My friend and colleague Dan Hassler-Forest has been composing a Trump Film Studies Syllabus: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus.
* So you think you elected an autocrat.
old and busted: am I stupid for using Twitter when it gets people fired a lot
new hotness: I think my Twitter probably won’t get me jailed
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2016
make art that Trump would demand an apology for
— JuanPa (@jpbrammer) November 19, 2016
* Dr. Strange and the Trump Presidency.
* Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office. Not even the same scandal: Donald Trump Pauses Transition Work to Meet with Indian Business Partners.
hottest take incoming: the only institution with even theoretical leverage for taking down Trump, aside from maybe NY AG, is the FBI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2016
aftershock hot take, guess which institution the Democrats despise now and have spent the last month demonizing
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2016
* Electoral College fan fiction getting good now.
* This seems fine. Disabled People Will Die Under Trump. Trumpwatch. Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular. @EveryTrumpDonor. Trump vs. neoliberalism, #whoeverwinswelose. Racism with No Racists. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Man in the High Castle. After Trump. Being Mike Pence.
also all corporations are Wolfram and Hart and the DNC is the Watchers Council
Slayers don't exist https://t.co/Y19xhnyDsp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2016
* It can’t happen here. It probably can’t happen here. It probably won’t happen here. Okay but that was a long time ago. George Takei.
* Successful propaganda, O’Shaughnessy argues, does not traffic in outright falsehoods, but trades on half-truths and innuendos and depends on “people’s ability to perform a great deal of selective perception, and to edit out the unpleasant.” So propaganda is bullshit — in the philosophical sense.
Are we really going to live through another 8 years where a fluke event no one saw coming becomes proof that They are always 10 steps ahead?
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2016
counterpoint: he is just constantly evil and constantly stupid https://t.co/uRWRqLOhuV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2016
People are buying into this 'Trump's twitter is a clever ruse' thing because the reality- Trump is an unhinged idiot- is way more terrifying
— Nick Spencer (@nickspencer) November 20, 2016
* Don’t normalize this. Don’t ever, ever normalize this.
* We’ll be talking about this question for a long time, whether we like it or not: The End of Identity Liberalism. Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies. And yet: Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class.
* Close Reading Hamilton: “What’d I Miss?” I only did two days on Hamilton in my class this time around and wound up focusing a lot on these two songs myself.
* Abolish Chuck Schumer. Abolish the Presidency.
Schumer running the Democrats now is like if Grand Moff Tarkin were the hero of Star Wars.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2016
"I don't always see eye to eye with His Excellence but I hope we can work together on improving hyperspace infrastructure in the Outer Rim."
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2016
* More than 100 campus leaders urge Trump to take more forceful stand against “harassment, hate and acts of violence.” Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election. Wesleyan declared sanctuary campus.
* It doesn’t matter how effective a deterrent it is — it’s cruel and unusual and we need to act.
* Only the superrich can save us… oh forget it.
* Meet the Professor Who’s Trying to Help You Steer Clear of Clickbait.
* Michigan fights court order to give Flint residents bottled water.
* Keep an eye on North Carolina.
* A Brief History of Fascism in the Pacific Northwest.
* When a Sibling Goes to Prison.
* The Limits of Gossip: Informal system of warning colleagues about senior scholars who engage in inappropriate behavior doesn’t really protect anyone, study finds.
* The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing.
* A Mere 12,000 US Schools Are Within a Mile of a Hazardous Chemical Facility.
* Science proves the rich really are different.
* We might be done with climate change, but climate change is not done with us.
* It’s official: NASA’s peer-reviewed EM Drive paper has finally been published.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Though sports culture continues to be a domain of intense patriarchal production and violence — rape jokes are just locker room talk, after all — these days jocks in the news are just as likely to be taking a knee against American racism in the image of Colin Kaepernick. The nerds, on the other hand, are shit-posting for a new American Reich. The nerd/jock distinction has always been a myth designed to hide social conflict and culturally re-center white male subjectivity. Now that the nerds have fully arrived, their revenge looks uglier than anything the jocks ever dreamed.
* And because you demanded it…
So never mind the darkness
We still can find a way
'Cause nothin' lasts forever
Even cold November rain https://t.co/FeZpsO7BA8— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
November 21, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Alien vs. Predator, Angel, AP classes, apologies, art, authoritarianism, autocracy, Axl Rose, Buffy, bullies, bullshit, CFPs, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, clickbait, climate change, college, colleges, comics, concentration camps, conferences, corpocracy, coups, Dan Hassler-Forest, democracy, Democrats, disability, Doctor Strange, Donald Trump, ecology, Electoral College, emoluments, environmental racism, equality, fascism, Flint, Frankenstein, gay rights, general election 2020, George Takei, get out the vote, gossip, Grand Moff Tarkin, Green Lantern, Guns N Roses, Hamilton, hate crimes, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, identity politics, improv, India, infrastructure, internment, It Can't Happen Here, John Maynard Keynes, Kanye West, kids today, Marquette, Merry Shelley, Michigan, military-industrial complex, money in politics, multiculturalism, musicals, my scholarly empire, Nancy Pelosi, neoliberalism, nerds, New York, normalization, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, only the super-rich can save us now, Planet of the Apes, political economy, politics, polls, pollution, prison, propaganda, race, racism, rape, rape culture, safe spaces, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, siblings, slavery, social media, syllabi, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the law, the Left, The Man in the High Castle, the Pacific Northwest, the presidency, the rich are different, Thomas Jefferson, totalitarianism, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Trump Tower, Twitter, university, voting, water, white people, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing
Please Enjoy Weekend Links!
* Get your abstracts in! CFP: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. And a CFP for a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on “The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction.”
* The schedule of classes for Marquette English is up at Spring 2017. I’ll be on research leave, if you’re wondering why I’m not listed…
* Best Tumblr in forever: Sad Chairs of Academia.
* How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe.
* How Skin-Deep Judgments of Professors Might Influence Student Success.
* The extent to which Trump is floating absolute gibberish cannot be undersold. Even Costanza is superseded in his time. Once more with feeling: On Bullshit.
* What did Trump lie about at the debate, mondo-hugeo chart edition. Donald Trump’s first presidential debate confirmed he has no idea what he’s talking about. Prince Georging, Meflection, and Gobbing: A brief guide to Trump’s rhetorical tricks. A Trump Glossary. You’ll get ’em next time, buddy. What It’s Like to Be a Female Reporter Covering Donald Trump. This May Be The Most Horrible Thing That Donald Trump Believes. When Trump said that not paying taxes ‘makes me smart,’ undecided voters in N.C. gasped. How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media. How to bait Donald Trump. Gray’s. Sports. Almanac. How to evade your taxes the Trump way. More. Even more! Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money. Cuba! I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. Donald Trump and the truth about race and real estate in America. America is already great. There’s still heroes in the world. And then there’s what happened just this morning.
this might be the most undignified thing a politician has ever done to themselves with a phone and i'm including anthony weiner in this
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) September 30, 2016
The scariest thing about Trump isn't even Trump himself but how quickly elite Republicans fell into line. What wouldn't they support?
— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) May 27, 2016
* The most American-democracy thing that’s ever happened: But Republicans said the White House didn’t make a forceful case, putting themselves in the awkward position of blaming the president for a bill they enacted into law over Obama’s veto.
* Beyond Clinton or Trump: Nuclear Weapons and Democracy.
* Wisconsin Is Systematically Failing to Provide the Photo IDs Required to Vote in November. What a shocking and unexpected consequence of these well-intentioned, commonsense laws.
* Note: The original headline for this piece was “George W. Bush is Not Your Cuddly Grandpa. George W. Bush can rot in hell.”
* Five questions we need to answer before colonizing Mars. Elon Musk’s spectacular plan to colonise Mars lacks substance. Fun and exciting, not boring and cramped! Is Elon Musk’s Crazy Mars Plan Even Legal?
* What could possibly go wrong? UVM Medical College to Eliminate Lectures.
* No Punishment for ‘Run Them Down’ Tweet.
* Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby.
* Why New Jersey’s Trains Aren’t Safer.
* Nicholson Baker goes to school. Reader, I bought it.
* Another review of Alice Kaplan’s book on The Stranger.
* “Liberalism is working”: Teen accused of stealing 65-cent carton of milk at middle school to face trial.
* Measles are gone from the Americas.
* On Premier League Fantasy Football.
* How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School.’
* The 25 Best Superpowers in the Superpowers Wiki.
*Wonder Woman Writer Greg Rucka Says Diana Has ‘Obviously’ Had Relationships With Women. She was on an island of only women for millennia! So yeah.
* The world passes 400ppm carbon dioxide threshold. Permanently.
* And yet, looking back at The Jetsons intro sequence today, I wonder where the icecaps are in that little illustration of earth. Is some land missing from Central America? Has the North gained land mass? Such questions become more troubling in the context of current concerns about global warming and, once asked, open the floodgates for similar observations. In the intro sequence, flying cars convey the Jetsons and other families from their floating bungalow to other floating buildings like The Little Dipper School, Orbit High School, Shopping Centre, and Spacely Space Rockets Inc. What was once a cute innovation—why not live in floating cities?—becomes troubled by its energy costs and its purpose. Why do the Jetsons and other families live in orbit? What has happened below to force them into the skies?
* Today in on-the-nose metaphors: NASA Is Sinking Into the Ocean.
* Every society gets the post-apocalypse it deserves.
* There were no casualties in the landslide which occurred earlier this month, but the facility’s new rock climbing facility was completely wiped out. Yes, I suppose they would be.
* Codex Silenda, A Handcrafted Puzzle Book With Pages That Must Be Solved to Unlock the Next One.
* Cheating in school as communism.
* Today in neoliberal consumerism: Want to Make Ethical Purchases? Stop Buying Illegal Drugs.
* The Dark, Gritty Tick goes to series. Spoon! But like a dirty, chipped spoon, a spoon that really reflects the darkness of our society and our souls.
* Emulator lets you turn NES games 3D.
* U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel.
* Striking Prisoners Say Their Guards Have Joined In.
* The Longreads Reading List on Utopias.
* Die a hero, or… Has Whedon Changed, Or Have We Done Changed?
* It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave. I wonder how many are actually caring for or financially supporting un-, under-, and unable-to-be-employed parents and siblings.
* Let’s Stop Talking About Stranger Things Season Two Before We Ruin It. Friends, I have some terrible news.
* There’s bad luck, and then there’s: Man Bitten On Penis By Spider For The Second Time This Year.
* Today in terrible ideas I could not denounce more strongly: Is it time for Star Trek: The Next Generation to go Kelvin?
* And at least the kids get it.
amazing: two survive a wreck and got the attention of the navy by spelling out an unignorable sign with palm leaves pic.twitter.com/h2hdmvLC44
— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) April 21, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
September 29, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D, 9/11, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accidents, Alice Kaplan, Amazon, America, amusement parks, anxiety, apocalypse, art, Back to the Future, bad luck, Baltimore, Barack Obama, beauty pagents, Biff Tannen, Big, Bob Ross, books, Buffy, bullshit, Bush, Camus, Catholicism, CFPs, chairs, Charlotte, cheating, China, Chris Christie, class struggle, climate change, comics, communism, computers, consumerism, courage, Cuba, daycare, debates, disability, Disney, Disney World, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Elon Musk, embargoes, eugenics, fantasy soccer, fantasy sports, Fidel Castro, flipped classrooms, Freddie Gray, futurity, general election 2016, George Costanza, grading, Gray's Sports Almanac, Heroes, Hillary Clinton, Hoboken, horror, hot moms, ideology, infrastructure, Instapundit, Joss Whedon, journalism, Kelvin Timeline, kids today, liberalism, liberalism is working, lies and lying liars, LinkedIn, Mad Max, Marquette, Mars, mass incarceration, measles, medical school, millennials, misogyny, NASA, neoliberalism, NES, Netflix, New Jersey Transit, Nicholson Baker, nonprofit-industrial complex, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, outer space, parenting, penises, politics, Pope Francis, prison, prison strikes, protests, puzzles, race, racism, reading, real estate, religion, remember the 90s?, reparations, Republicans, rhetoric, rising sea levels, Saudi Arabia, school, science fiction, science in magic, Scott Walker, Seinfeld, sexism, Silicon Valley, slavery, spiders, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stranger Things, substitute teachers, superheroes, superpowers, tax evasion, taxes, the alibi of photocopying, the courts, the digital, The Jetsons, the law, The Stranger, the Tick, the veto, Thirteenth Amendment, TNG, Tom Hanks, total system failure, trains, transmedia, true crime, Trump Foundation, Umberto Eco, undecided voters, Utopia, UVM, vaccination, voter ID, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman
Monday Mega-Links
* Donald Trump Isn’t Going to Be President. Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken. Clinton Releases a Brutal Anti-Trump Ad. 5 not-totally-crazy electoral maps that show Donald Trump winning. Could Trump Put Georgia in Play for Democrats? Only a Democrat can stop Trump now. Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism. The six days of Carly Fiorina’s vice presidential campaign, ranked.
* Report: FBI Preparing to Interview Hillary Clinton About Email Thing.
* Wave of no-confidence votes sweeps Wisconsin campuses.
* Why graduate students should be allowed to see the letters we write on their behalf. I was in strong disagreement with the headline but was won over by the text.
* Recommendation for a quick, great read: Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti, an Afrofuturist space-age riff on Harry Potter with more than a little bit of Octavia Butler in there…
* Another thing I’ve been enjoying, which you might too: “Hardcore Game of Thrones” on howl.fm. (First three episodes available for free here.) It’s completely sold me on the viability of a prequel spinoff, and I may actually like it more than the actual series.
* Two Great Tastes: On Civil War and Hamilton. Meanwhile, a great review from Abigail Nussbaum asks whether Civil War (which I liked a lot) has ruined the MCU.
Some quickie CIVIL WAR thoughts: better job balancing the sides than the comic. Much better than BvS. Still should have never come to blows.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
And the choreography on the last bit of the last fight of CIVIL WAR is such a great, subtle character moment. Really stellar work there.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
Overall, deantastic, would dean CIVIL WAR deangain.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
socialistdefenseofsuperherofantasy.notreally.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
* The Norton Writer’s Prize will be awarded annually for an outstanding essay written by an undergraduate. Literacy narratives, literary and other textual analyses, reports, profiles, evaluations, arguments, memoirs, proposals, mixed-genre pieces, and more: any excellent writing done for an undergraduate writing class will be considered. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,500. Two runners-up will each receive a cash award of $1,000.
* “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
* Unable to analyze meaning, narrative, or argument, computer scoring instead relies on length, grammar, and arcane vocabulary to do assess prose. Should you trust a computer to grade your child’s writing on Common Core tests?
* A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism.
* Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.
* Why are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?
* Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight. This situation is absolutely untenable and I cannot believe the airlines are willingly participating.
* Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills.
* Maps of the end of the world. The post keeps going after the image!
* Why Refrigerators Were So Slow to Catch On in China.
* U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.
* Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees.’
One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.
* Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet.
* Happy Mother’s Day: Kids’ Screen Time Is A Feminist Issue. Keep scrolling!
A moment of silence for all of the fictional mothers that had to die in the name of tragic back story and character development.
— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) May 8, 2016
* Nonhuman Rights Project Chimpanzee Clients Hercules and Leo to Be Sent to Sanctuary.
* Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff.
* The modern banking system and zero-factor security.
* University of Oxford acquires rare map of Middle-earth annotated by Tolkien. There’s still more after the image!
* Here’s the Table Of Contents For Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Amazing Big Book of Science Fiction.
* The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies.
* Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
* Fullest House, A Never-Ending Stream of Daily ‘Full House’ Scripts Generated by a Neural Network.
* Before Hamilton, there was… An Oral History of Rent.
* Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship.
* Grimdark realism isn’t realistic: where is kindness on Game of Thrones?
* Twilight of The Antioch Review.
* Why we sued the American Studies Association.
* When Robinson Met Bacigalupi.
* Daredevils Jump Out of Plane, Play Quick Game of Quidditch Before Landing. Keep going.
* The Flight of the Navigator sequel/reboot just wrote itself.
* New J.M. Coetzee novel announced.
* Daredevil and the Problem of the Not Bad.
Ultimately, there’s not much you can say about Daredevil because its not-goodness derives from the fact that it doesn’t have anything to say. This makes it hard to say anything about the way it’s not saying anything. Based on the first season, I would have argued that the show uses the superhero genre tode-familiarize gentrification and the way crime plays into struggles over urban land use. Similarly, I would contend that Jessica Jones uses the superhero-detective genre to de-familiarize trauma and addiction. Coming out — dare I say, being flushed out — of Daredevil season two, I would say that it uses the Batman-genre to re-familiarize the Ninja-genre. And for all the violence it does to its characters and setting, the real problem is this reinvestment in the fetish of ninja violence. The show uses the spectacle ofliteral violence to render unnecessary the organic narrative flow of people just being people in the world. Instead of the hidden injuries and traumas of class, as they play themselves out across our lives, we get a story of a ninja fighting ninjas because, well, ninjas.
* CEI et al. argue that TSA’s final rule fails to consider one important factor related to the deployment body scanners: a potential increase in highway injuries and deaths. If that sounds crazy, let me explain. Past research suggests that post-9/11 airport security policies were so invasive that a number of would-be air travelers decided to drive instead. Given the fact that auto travel is far more dangerous than air travel,three Cornell University economists found that TSA’s invasive, time-consuming airport screening policies resulted in about 500 additional highway fatalities annually in the years following 9/11—more than a fully loaded 747 per year.
* Google is working on a computer that is literally injected into your eye. Hard pass.
* Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War.
* What I Gained from Having a Miscarriage.
* On women’s bodies in academia.
* Educated people are usually critical of absolute truths, no matter if they come from statistics or religious revelation. Facts need to be understood within a larger cultural context in order to be deemed plausible or implausible. Today, however, we see an increasing tendency to describe the world not in terms of cultural values, but in terms of fundamental truths. In the cases of fundamentalism and neoliberal education of excellence, as I’ve shown here, this “deculturation” takes the form of a dangerous combination of religion and pseudoscientific thought peddled as excellence.
* There’s a Sci-Fi Novel Secretly Unfolding in Reddit’s Comments.
* 78% of Reddit Threads With 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis.
* Sure, let’s clone Leonardo da Vinci. Things could hardly get worse.
* I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
* Historical memory is not about the past — it is about the future.
* And some scenes from the Anthropocene: Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There. Fort McMurray Wildfire: 80,000 Evacuated Over Out-of-Control Blaze. Fleeing Fire in Oil Country. Alberta Wildfires Expected to Double In Size and Burn for Months. The First Coral Reefs Are Starting to Permanently Dissolve. Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard. Have a great week, everybody!
Written by gerrycanavan
May 9, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #accelerate, academia, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, air travel, airport security, Alberta, America, American Studies, American Studies Association, animal personhood, apocalypse, Aristotle, banking, Barack Obama, bathrooms, Big Book of Science Fiction, Binti, blogs, Book of Revelation, books, boycotts, bullshit, Canada, Captain America 3, Carly Fiorina, chimpanzees, China, Chris Matthews, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, cloning, Coetzee, common core, coral reefs, cultural preservation, Daredevil, Democrats, diabetes, diets, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, Elsa, emails, espionage, excellence, Facebook, FBI, feminism, Flight of the Navigator, Fort McMurray, France, Frozen, Frozen 2, Fuller House, Fullest House, fundamentalism, futurity, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, Georgia, Godwin's Law, Google, grading, graduate students, Hamilton, Harry Potter, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, howl.fm, iPads, Israel, Jeff Vandermeer, journalism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindness, lab-grown meat, Lauren Lapkus, Leicester City, Leonardo da Vinci, letters of recommendation, literature, Lord of the Rings, Madison, maps, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marxism, math, memory, MFAs, Middle-Earth, miscarriage, misogyny, Mother's Day, musicals, Nazis, neoliberalism, Nestle, Netflix, ninjas, Nnedi Okorafor, no confidence, North Carolina, ocean acification, Octavia Butler, oil, Palestine, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, philosophy, podcasts, politics, postdocs, pregnancy, pseudoscience, Quidditch, Reddit, refrigerators, Rent, Republicans, Russia, science fiction, security, sexism, skydiving, spies, standardized testing, sugar, superheroes, tenure, the Anthropocene, The Antioch Review, theory, Tolkien, trans* issues, transphobia, trolling, TSA, typing, University of Wisconsin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, wearable tech, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, writing
Week-Old Links at Two-Weeks-Old-Link Prices
* The San Bernardino mystery. Disband MSNBC. The story of the first mass murder in U.S. history. From the archives: The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. Your tweets are not helping.
* The story, called “The Princess Steel,” was discovered by scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, who write about it in the new issue of the Modern Language Association journal. We May Have Just Found W.E.B. Du Bois’ Earliest Science Fiction Story.
* Crank watch: What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity.” The Philanthropy Hustle.
* Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 11.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: The Transformation of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
* I teach practical, marketable skills that will serve my students their entire lives.
* Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.
* Are most academic papers really worthless? Don’t trust this worthless statistic.
* College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money.
* The future is a nightmare, and Purdue is ready.
* Self-driving cars will be the worst. Hopefully this particular problem is mostly solved by the elimination of private car ownership altogether.
* Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism.
* Sports Corner: Stephen Curry Is The Revolution.
* Meanwhile it is stunning to have my prejudices confirmed so wholly: New Study Finds ‘Surprising’ Correlation Between Degenerative Brain Disease And Amateur Athletics.
* Cruel Optimism and the NFL, or, Life in the Factory of Sadness.
* Let us be precise: Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.
* Leaked Documents Show Alabama Police Department Planted Drugs On Black Men For Years. Meanwhile, in Chicago. UPDATE: There may be less to that Alabama story than meets the eye.
* Spoiler Alerts: Three Books on Trash.
* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.
* Assuming a round figure of two and a half billion years of beak-sharpening, and assuming (a BIG assumption, to be sure) about three days per iteration of the Doctor, you can figure, based on a solar year of 365.25 days, that there have been approximately three hundred and four billion, three hundred and seventy-five million and twelve Doctors.
* And speaking of the Doctor: I’m not even sure who #2 would be.
* Behold the Jessica Jones backlash.
* Study suggests Type 2 diabetes can be cured by weight loss — specifically the loss of half a gram of fat from the pancreas.
* What they give with one hand they take with the other: Research Points To Mental Health Risks Associated With Meatless Diet.
* This is neat: The Third Amendment to the Constitution — the one that bans the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner’s consent — is sort of the Pete Best of the early American legislative experiment. While the other amendments have had all sorts of play at the highest levels of legal rulings, there has never been a Supreme Court decision primarily based on the Third Amendment. Clearly the Founders had a goal, wrote it down, and we haven’t had too many questions about the matter since. Nice work, Founders. Anyway, there’s an idea bubbling among legal theorists to use the Third Amendment to counteract domestic spying from the NSA — a branch of the Department of Defense — and while it may not be 100 percent there, it’s interesting.
* Our bad: U.S. Holds Yemeni Man at Guantanamo Bay for 13 Years in Case of Mistaken Identity.
* Starting work before 10am isn’t just soul crushing, this scientist says it’s equivalent to torture.
* Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.
* Of One and the Other: Humans and Animals.
* Know your branches of economics.
* State sues prisoners to pay for their room, board.
* “This is the best declining mall review I’ve ever read.”
* Teach the controversy: Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
* Magnifique! In Photos: Anarchists Clash With Riot Police During Climate Summit Protest in Paris.
* When the Onion goes dark, there’s still no one better: Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic.
* Female-Authors-Only Philosophy of Science Syllabus.
* There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds.
* Florida Woman’s Car Turned Her in for a Hit-and-Run.
* Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.
* General election watch: Democrats are fiercely committed to the proposition of nominating a perhaps fatally compromised candidate whom basically no one likes. And from Amber A’Lee Frost: My Kind of Misogyny. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Philosophy Corner: Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you?
* Was Star Wars’ Empire on the brink of financial ruin?
* This company believes it can resurrect humans in the next 30 years.
* Kill the Santa Claus in your head.
* From Climate Crisis to Solar Communism. World’s Most Vulnerable Islands Are Hoping Paris Will Bring an Impossible Climate Miracle. India Holds the Planet’s Fate in Its Hands. That’s Great News.
* Def Sec Carter To Open All Combat Jobs To Women In Historic Change.
* How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
* Soviet erotic alphabet picture book, 1931.
* There but for the grace of God go we: Man arrested with 51 turtles in his pants.
* And of course you had me at Rare 40-Year-Old Star Trek Comics Are Finally Being Released In the U.S.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 5, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, academic journals, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, alphabets, America, anarchism, animals, anticapitalism, apocalypse, art, basketball, Bill of Rights, brain damage, brains, breaking news, Bruce Springsteen, bullshit, cars, Catholicism, charity, Chicago, CIA, climate change, clowns, college sports, comics, counterintelligence, cruel optimism, Democratic primary 2016, diabetes, Doctor Who, domestic surveillance, Donald Trump, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, economics, education, Episode 7, Facebook, fan fiction, feminism, games, Guantánamo, guns, Hillary Clinton, history, How the University Works, human capital contracts, hustles, India, Jessica Jones, juries, jury duty, kids today, labor, lies and lying liars, Lord of the Rings, malls, Mark Zuckerberg, Marvel, mass murder, medicine, Milwaukee, misogyny, MSNBC, museums, my scholarly empire, NCAA, Netflix, NFL, NSA, Oakland, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, Ozymandias, parenting, Paris, pedagogy, philanthropy, philosophy, philosophy of science, photography, Planned Parenthood, police corruption, porn, Porn Studies, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, Purdue, race, rape, religion, resurrection, rising sea levels, ruins, San Bernardino, Santa Claus, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sleep, solar power, Soviet Union, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stephen Curry, surveillance society, teach the controversy, teaching, television, terrorism, the Constitution, the cosmos, the courts, The Force Awakens, the humanities, the law, The Onion, there but for the grace of God, Third Amendment, TIAA-CREF, Tolkien, torture, trans* issues, trash, true crime, turtles, Twitter, vegetarianism, Vulcan, W.E.B. DuBois, war on terror, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, work
Weekend Links!
* We have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively — they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. But in this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction.”
* Yet in spite of these lofty commitments and goals, not everyone is impressed with the proposed solutions that are surfacing ahead of the Paris talks. This includes the leading climate scientist James Hansen, who published an editorial on Friday in which he derided an Obama-led climate initiative as “unadulterated 100% pure bullshit.”
* The Wampanoag Side of the First Thanksgiving Story. What Really Happened at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag Side of the Tale. The Secret History of the Pilgrims and Beer.
* My Favorite African Science Fiction and Fantasy (AfroSFF) Short Fiction of 2015. I liked both “Discovering Time Travel” and “Last Wave” a lot.
* The story of the first Black Friday.
* 40 maps and charts that explain sports in America.
* Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, applauds President Obama who signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R. 2262) into law. This law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.
* How The House Of Representatives Voted To Make Refugee Resettlement Impossible.
* Assassinating Terrorists Does Not Work.
* Dinosaurs in Science Fiction.
* “Bad News For The Planet,” Says The World Meteorological Organization.
* The circle of life at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
* For a thousand years, the societies of the Western world transmitted and preserved much of their written cultures on and between the skins of beasts. Cows and calves, rams, ewes, and lambs, camels, deer, and fauns, goats, gazelles, and horses, seals and walruses, perhaps cats and dogs on occasion were rendered into scrolls and codices, bindings and booklets, charters and mezuzot. A large part of our written inheritance survives as a great mass of animal remains.
* Scientists just caught a black hole swallowing a star — and burping a bit back out.
* Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control.
* “false testimony occurred in hundreds of trials, incl. 32 death penalty.”
* Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.
* How Did Doctor Who Manage To Waste a Companion Like Clara Oswald Actress Like Jenna Coleman? However they did it, they certainly did…
* I’ve seen this movie. Though this one is intriguing: We Still Don’t Know Why the Heck There Are So Many Blue Tarantulas.
* It’s Time to Change Your Amazon Password.
* The case for letting children vote.
* Star Wars as its own genre. The Heartwarming Story Behind R2-KT, And How She Joined Star Wars Canon.
* A Unified Theory of the Rocky Movies.
* And now they tell me: Childless adults are generally just as happy as parents.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 29, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, alcohol, aliens, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, asteroids, Barack Obama, beer, Black Friday, black holes, bullshit, cancer, charts, circle of life, climate change, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, early childhood education, ecology, FBI, film, Hawaii, James Hansen, Jessica Jones, kids today, labor, maps, Marvel, Medical College of Wisconsin, murder, Native American issues, outer space, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Pilgrims, police, property rights, R2-KT, rape, rape culture, refugees, robots, Rocky, Rojava, science, science fiction, short stories, spiders, sports, Star Wars, Supreme Court, tarantulas, teaching, terrorism, Thanksgiving, the courts, the law, time travel, true crime, unions, Utopia, Wampanoag, war on terror, Won't somebody think of the children?
Tuesday Links!
* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.
* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.
* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.
* An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.
* The Church of Science Fiction.
* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just nightmarish.
* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.
* Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.
* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.
* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.
* Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.
* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.
* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.
* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.
* How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.
* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.
* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.
* Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.
* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”
* The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.
* The rise of the noncompete clause.
* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”
* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.
* If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.
* Review getting picked up: five stars.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 10, 2014 at 8:35 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, #YesAllWomen, academia, actually existing media bias, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, America, Andy Daly, austerity, Barack Obama, Benjamin Kunkel, bullshit, children, class struggle, climate change, Clone High, college sports, digital humanities, domestic terrorism, ecology, Eduardo Galeano, English, Five Thirty Eight, food service, Fox News, gender, George Will, graduate student life, guns, homelessness, How the University Works, human trafficking, immigration, income inequality, jerks, John Oliver, kids today, Levar Burton, linguistics, maps, Marxism, mass shootings, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, MLA, mothers, movies, my media empire, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nixon, noncompete clauses, Octavia Butler, Orange is the New Black, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, paternity leave, police state, politics, prison-industrial complex, pronouns, race, rape culture, religion, Review, Robert Heinlein, science fiction, sex work, sharing economy, singular they, soccer, space libertarians, student debt, Tea Party, television, the courts, the humanities, the law, tipping, Title IX, tourism, University of Oregon, Utopia, Vietnam, Waffle House, We're screwed, Wikipedia, words, World Cup, xkcd
Friday Links
* Mother Jones on “the White House’s private outrage at former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu’s impromptu decision to talk about climate change while visiting an island nation uniquely threatened by it.” How dare he…
* Six women filed a federal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday alleging that Vanderbilt University, a prestigious school in Nashville, has failed to adequately respond to incidences of sexual assault on campus.
* Boston Adjuncts Ask: Is There Life After Bentley U.?
* Contingency and the Psychic Wage.
* Baby Sent to Foster Care for 57 Days Because Parents Are Blind.
* Here come the ACA scammers. Meanwhile, in Obamacare follies: the “administrative fix.” The shorthand explanation for what’s going on here is that everybody — the insurance companies, members of Congress, and Obama — is bullshitting.
* There is plenty of violence in the world of hunter-gatherers, though it is hardly illuminated by resorting to statistical comparisons between the mortality rates of a tiny tribal war in Kalimantan and the Battle of the Somme or the Holocaust. This violence, however, is almost entirely a state-effect. It simply cannot be understood historically from 4000 BC forward apart from the appetite of states for trade goods, slaves and precious ores, any more than the contemporary threat to remote indigenous groups can be understood apart from the appetite of capitalism and the modern state for rare minerals, hydroelectric sites, plantation crops and timber on the lands of these peoples. Papua New Guinea is today the scene of a particularly violent race for minerals, aided by states and their militias and, as Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism shows, its indigenous politics can be understood only in this context. Contemporary hunter-gatherer life can tell us a great deal about the world of states and empires but it can tell us nothing at all about our prehistory. We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.
* Should your child play football? Poll: 40 Percent Say Tackle Football Should Be Banned Before High School. Former KU fullback Chris Powell sues NCAA over head trauma.
* The Eighth Doctor finally gets his sendoff in a prequel to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special.
* Malcolm Harris against the unpaid internship for credit. I think there’s still a place for educational internships, but at nothing like the rates we see today, and it should never be used to displace waged workers or make the company money.
* The lives and deaths of hard drives.
* Shocked that Google Books is fair use. College and university administrators, take note!
* How to Talk to Your Daughter About Her Body.
* And I took so long posting this link dump the latest Andy-Kaufman-is-alive hoax has already fallen apart.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 15, 2013 at 10:09 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, administrative fixes, Andy Kaufman, Barack Obama, blindness, bodies, bullshit, class struggle, climate change, college football, college sports, computers, contingency, Doctor Who, ecology, football, gender, girls, Google, Google Books, health care, high school football, high school sports, hoaxes, How the University Works, internships, islands, Jared Diamond, kids today, NCAA, parenting, politics, primitivism, rape culture, science fiction, slavery, Steven Chu, television, the Cabinet, Vanderbilt, violence, Won't somebody think of the children?
Thursday Links!
* Gasp! The MOOC ‘Revolution’ May Not Be as Disruptive as Some Had Imagined.
* Scenes from the class struggle in New York: CUNY and SUNY bigs get chauffeurs as tuition soars.
* The job skills employers crave!!!
* In other words, it may be that cheating rates are so high because too many university curriculums and courses are designed for cheating. Indeed, I’ve often felt that one of the principal skills—and it is a skill—imparted by the American educational system is the ability to bullshit your way through assessment with minimal effort.
* Dolphins can recognize whistles from old tank mates from over 20 years ago, study finds.
* Man charged with stealing “entire road.”
* The faces of Manhattan Project.
* Being Unemployed For Over Nine Months Is The Same As Losing Four Years Of Experience.
* Most 2013 job growth is in part-time work, survey suggests.
* NIH Reaches Pact With Family of Henrietta Lacks.
* Brutal review of DC’s missteps since the Nu52 debacle.
* “You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo.”
* Just about the only thing that could get me excited about Man of Steel 2: Bryan Cranston Tapped to Play Lex Luthor?
* Monsters are real: Louisiana parish claims incarcerated 14-year-old consented to be raped by a corrections officer.
* And I am just completely horrified every time I come across statistics on Greece’s economy. Jesus.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2013 at 11:39 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, animals, Batman v. Superman, Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, bullshit, cheating, college majors, CUNY, DC Comics, dolphins, English majors, genetics, Great Recession, Greece, Henrietta Lacks, How the University Works, kids today, Louisiana, Man of Steel, Manhattan Project, MOOCs, nuclearity, pedagogy, personhood, rape, rape culture, rich people, SUNY, Superman, teaching, the economy, true crime, unemployment
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* “We need to hire a 22-22-22,” one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year. Perhaps the middle figure is an exaggeration, but its bookends certainly aren’t. According to a 2011 Pew report, the median net worth for householders under 35 dropped by 68 percent from 1984 to 2009, to $3,662. Lest you think that’s a mere side effect of the economic downturn, for those over 65, it rose 42 percent to $170,494 (largely because of an overall gain in property values). Hence 1.2 million more 25-to-34-year-olds lived with their parents in 2011 than did four years earlier. “Willing” is certainly doing an awful lot of work in that first sentence. Welcome to the age of the permanent intern.
* The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations: Capitalism as Evil AI.
* “Have prisons and jails become the mass housing of our time?”
* New York Times shuts down its Green blog. In other news, every spectator sport has its own blog at NYT.
* The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has isolated twelve criteria for determining if individuals qualify as legally “hopeless.” The following pamphlet is a brainstorm: it considers what steps a debtor might take in order to persuasively claim the mantle of hopelessness. Rather than examine softcore options, we explore the potential of self-inflicted tragedy.
* Massively Open Online Test Proctoring. MOOC as “mass psychosis.”
* Shockingly, saving the world usually involves using Silicon Valley’s own services.
* Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel. Wow.
* UCLA medical school and Herbalife.
* Marvel Comics presents The Life of John Paul II.
* New Study Finds ‘The Onion’ Has Never Been More Popular, More Beloved, Or More Respected.
* “On the development of companion robots in Japan.”
* And Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing will close out the Wisconsin Film Festival. I’d really, really like to make this.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 3, 2013 at 10:35 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing media bias, America, Argo, bullshit, capitalism, Catholicism, class struggle, comics, ecology, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, film, for-profit schools, Herbalife, housing, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, internships, Iran, Japan, Joss Whedon, kids today, legally hopeless, love, Marvel, MOOCs, Much Ado about Nothing, multi-level marketing, neoliberalism, New York Times, politics, post-Fordism, prison-industrial complex, prisons, pyramid schemes, rape culture, robots, scams, sex, Shakespeare, sports, student debt, the dark side of the digital, The Onion, the Pope, the Singularity, war on education
Midweek Links
* Erik Loomis is being targeted by prominent figures on the right in what has to be the most ludicriously unfair, bad-faith attack I have ever seen.
* Walker declares state of emergency in Wisconsin due to snowstorm.
* Guide to Answering Academic Job Interview Questions.
* Argument Over Sandy Hook Shooting Ends in Gunfire. Why Won’t We Talk About Violence and Masculinity in America? Gun Violence In American Schools Is Nothing New. Top Conservative Publication: Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School. Weaponize the husky twelve-year-olds. Virginia Republican Legislator Actually Wants To Require Concealed Weapons In Schools. The Arms Race of Stupid.
* I can’t help wondering if the bullets of Sandy Hook Elementary will be for Obama what the snarling dogs and high-pressure fire hoses of Birmingham, Alabama, were for John F. Kennedy in 1963: the human tragedy that will force him to take a political risk, simply because it is right.
* Conservative Historian Warns Obama and Democrats are ‘Much More Radical’ than Marxists. So much more radical. So much more.
* Best Astronomy Images of 2012. (Keep scrolling past the image for more links.)
* Wayne State faculty gives OK to union leadership to call strike if necessary.
* Terrible person to teach terrible class at terrible university.
* News from Nerdistan: What Frodo would have looked like as Gollum. Joss Whedon wanted the Wasp and an extra villain in The Avengers. Tolkien vs. technology. Someone at Disney is already trying to lay the groundwork for a second sequel trilogy after Star Wars 7-9. Nearby Tau Ceti may host two planets suited to life. Netflix Instant Adds a Bunch of Fake ‘Arrested Development’ Shows and Movies. LEGOs run the world now.
* It’s time to start asking serious questions about the safety of lube.
* Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
* Petraeus Scandal 2.0. Nothing about sex, so no one will care.
* Matt Yglesias has the most logical incoherent “think piece” you’ll read on Society Security today. Money doesn’t magically become not-money when it’s spent by retirees.
* Plans to avoid the fiscal cliff cut government more than the fiscal cliff. Why, it’s almost as if this whole debate is total bullshit!
* Shale Oil Might Be Less Awesome Than We Think. From a personal perspective, I doubt that’s possible.
* Top 20 most valuable college football programs all made at least $24 million in profit last year, according to Forbes. $200K Average Salary for Asst. Football Coaches in Major Programs. Bill Introduced for IRS to Collect Student Loan Payments.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said he supported the bill, arguing it could “nearly eliminate student loan default.”
* But the reinvention conversation has not produced the panacea that people seem to yearn for. “The whole MOOC thing is mass psychosis,” a case of people “just throwing spaghetti against the wall” to see what sticks, says Peter J. Stokes, executive director for postsecondary innovation at Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies. His job is to study the effectiveness of ideas that are emerging or already in practice.
* The Wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon is Emitting a Mysterious Substance Into the Gulf of Mexico.
* Quentin Tarantino Says Drug War, Justice System Are Modern Day Slavery.
* Apocalypse and Revelation Are the Same Word.
* And life’s not all an endless series of miserable atrocities: Found: Whale Thought Extinct for 2 Million Years.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2012 at 9:34 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, aliens, apocalypse, Arrested Development, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, bad faith, Barack Obama, big pictures, blizzards, bullshit, college football, David Brooks, Deepwater Horizon, Disney, energy, Episode 7, fiscal cliff, Gollum, Gulf of Mexico, guns, How the University Works, humility, husky twelve-year-olds, JFK, Joss Whedon, LEGO, Lord of the Rings, lube, Marxism, masculinity, MLA, MOOCs, narrative, NCAA, Neil Gaiman, Netflix, Newtown, NRA, oil, pedagogy, Petraeus, photographs, places to invade next, politics, race, sex, shale oil, slavery, Social Security, Star Wars, story, strikes, student debt, Tarantino, Tau Ceti, technology, tenure, The Hobbit, Tolkien, violence, war on drugs, Wayne State, whales, Wisconsin, Yale
Sunday Links
* I left for Thanksgiving travel in a rush and wasn’t able to post a link to my traditional Thanksgiving post.
* What happens to turkeys that are pardoned?
“The birds are then, in proverbial fashion, said to live happily ever after. In reality, however, they are usually killed within a year and stand-in turkeys are supplied. This goes on year after year. The chosen birds are killed because they have been engineered and packed with hormones to the point that they are unfit for any other purpose than their own slaughter and consumption. They are fast-forward turkeys. Presidential turkey caretakers have explained that most succumb rather quickly to joint disease—their frail joints simply cannot bear the weight of their artificially enhanced bodies. The sturdiest survivors may live a little more than a year. But the birds are always finally put out of their growing misery. Then they are buried nearby in a presidential turkey cemetery—the ritualistic significance of which remains to be explored. (May the archaeologists of the future excavate it!)”
The reason that these turkeys are so ill suited for their lives of freedom is that they are supplied by the National Turkey Federation. They are products of industrial farms, bred to grow fat quick rather than live long. Much could be said about the fact that corporate lobby’s interests trumps even the symbolism of the ceremony, making even the pardon itself a lie within a lie.
* David Mitchell on how they filmed his unfilmmable novel.
* What Would Combat in Space Be Like?
* All about Münchausen syndrome.
* Farmers Told To Buy Insurance If They Don’t Want To Get Sued By Monsanto.
I am very reluctant to speak of “climate change adaptation” in this connection, because I feel that that phrase is a seized term, like “sustainable development,” and both are coded ways of saying “business as usual” or “capitalism must endure no matter the damages.” Because of that I think we should still be insisting on “climate change mitigation” as the appropriate task for our time. Ultimately, however, the entire biosphere will be adapting to the new physical conditions we are creating by our impacts, and we are going to have to get involved with that adaptation to make the best of it, meaning keeping the number of extinctions to a minimum, and trying to steer the biosphere toward best outcomes for all the species on the planet. This is necessary, because all the species together form one single supra-organism, and the health of all together determines the health of any individual species, including ourselves. Because of that reality, inhabiting the Earth successfully in the centuries to come will necessarily be a utopian project. It’s become a case of utopia or catastrophe.
* Year-to-date Temperature Anomalies for Contiguous US.
* Outstanding achievements in bullshitting: John Podhoretz.
* Chevy Chase Is Leaving Community, Effective Immediately. Bring back Dan Harmon? It’s not too late!
* Alicia Keys Sings the Gummi Bears Theme Song.
* Action Philosophers has a digital exclusive issue 13 at Comixology.
* And finally: Zissou vs. the whale.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 25, 2012 at 7:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Action Philosophers, Africa, Alicia Keyes, bullshit, Chevy Chase, climate change, Cloud Atlas, community, Dan Harmon, David Mitchell, ecology, farms, genetically modified organisms, gummi bears, Hostess, insurance, justice, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Münchausen syndrome, Moby-Dick, Monsanto, outer space, pardons, science fiction, space combat, Thanksgiving, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, turkeys, Utopia, Wal-Mart, William S. Burroughs
Friday!
* There’s opposition research, and then there’s Chicago-style opposition research. This story prompted some interesting conversations and confessions with other bullying-concerned academics on my Twitter feed yesterday.
* Picture of the Day: North Carolina, Gay Marriage, and Education.
* I want to suggest that the readers of the Chronicle are almost entirely irrelevant to Riley’s purposes. Her post was not written for us. That it pissed us off is, more-or-less, gravy. Rather, Riley wrote her post to provide raw material for conservative pundits and editorialists, state legislators, and wealthy university trustees–the people who are publicly leading the charge to defund higher education. Riley’s piece wasn’t written to be read as much as it was written to be used. And a piece in a respected, serious publication like the Chronicle is really useful. Publishing an essay in the Chronicle is legitimizing, in a way that publishing the same essay in the National Review is not. In National Review, a call to defund African American Studies looks predictably reactionary; in the Chronicle, the same call looks like a topic that’s worthy of debate. Even as I write this sentence, I have no doubt that, using Riley’s post as an impetus, hack editorialists are working up their outrage, state senators are planning hearings, and trustees are calling university presidents to demand reports on African American Studies.
* In 2011, NYPD Made More Stops Of Young Black Men Than The Total Number Of Young Black Men In New York. And yet somehow crime persists! We need more stop-and-frisks!
* Facts are stupid things. We must be rid of them.
* Here’s a website that helps you visualize deep time.
* New York City Street Corners Then and Now.
* Joss Whedon apologizes to his fans for making something successful.
* How much would it cost to clean up after The Avengers?
* “Sextuple Jeopardy: The Groundhog Day of capital murder trials.”
* California eats its children seed corn.
* And our long national nightmare is delayed for six months: Community has been renewed for a fourth season. Still no word on the movie.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 11, 2012 at 7:42 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, African American Studies, anti-intellectualism, bad faith, bullshit, bullying, California, Chronicle of Higher Education, community, deep time, gay rights, hacks, homophobia, How the University Works, Joss Whedon, know-nothingism, marriage equality, Mississippi, Mitt Romney, Naomi Schafer Riley, New York, North Carolina, NYPD, police state, politics, race, Republicans, stop-and-frisk, television, The Avengers, the Census, the courts, the law, true crime, whiteness
Tuesday Links
* There’s very high turnout in Wisconsin today. Probably good news, but who can say.
* Nick Mamatas says to understand libertarians, we should forget Ayn Rand and read Robert Heinlein.
* The last time CNN polled party approval, the GOP had 44% approval, 43 disapproval. In today’s poll the picture is slightly different: 33% approval, 59% disapproval. This is worse than their numbers during Clinton’s impeachment. So at least Americans have noticed what’s going on.
* Of course, two years later Republicans (kind of) won the presidency anyway. And it could easily happen again.
* A liberal is just a conservative who’s given birth: Fox’s Megyn Kelly comes out in favor of maternity leave. A little sad that this is noteworthy, but there you are.
* Chart of the day: Women Have to have a Ph.D. to Make as Much as Men with B.A.s.
* Life here began out there? NASA Proves Building Blocks Of DNA Come From Space. Naturally, the actual text of the story is a lot less definitive than the headline.
* In Wire news: Felicia “Snoop” Pearson has pled out, and will avoid jailtime if she doesn’t violate a three-year probation.
The model they’re using in that effort was transported whole cloth into the climate debate. And some of the exact same people — I can go down a list of their names — are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: “This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.” Bullshit! “It may be sun spots.” Bullshit! “It’s not getting warmer.” Bullshit!
* Meanwhile, Fox News Responds To Record Heat Waves By Predicting Global Cooling. Over to you, Al…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 9, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1990s, abiogenesis, actually existing media bias, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, biology, bullshit, charts, climate change, ecology, elections, equal pay for equal work, feminism, Fox News, global cooling, impeachment, libertarians, lies and lying liars, life, maternity leave, Megyn Kelly, morally odious morons, NASA, outer space, politics, polls, recalls, Republicans, Robert Heinlein, science fiction, The Wire, war on drugs, Wisconsin