Posts Tagged ‘Coen Brothers’
Monday Links! Quite a Few!
* I had a review of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest in The Los Angeles Review of Books last week. Can’t wait for Death’s End.
* “Star Trek style teleportation would take billions of years.” Not if you reverse the polarity of the inertial dampeners, you nitwits!
* The same website has a piece hyping cryonics, so you know it’s legit.
* Meanwhile: AI ‘could leave half of world unemployed.’
* Trek at 50: The quest for a unifying theory of time travel in Star Trek.
* The Discovery of Gravitational Waves. Gravitational Waves and Neoliberalism.
* The Mount St. Mary’s situation is even more astounding than you’d think when you refocus attention back on the “culling” survey itself. A Violation of Trust. From embarrassing to appalling to surreal. Twenty-first-century legal paradoxes: You can’t re-hire me, I wasn’t legally fired.
* Cleveland Files Claim Against Tamir Rice’s Family For Unpaid EMS Bill.
* Fathers and Childless Women in Academia Are 3x More Likely to Get Tenure Than Women With Kids.
* The Crisis Facing America’s Working Daughters.
* For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications.
* Antonin Scalia, in memoriam.
* The end of SCOTUS. Laying out the recent vote totals like that really does give credence, alas, to the idea that Democrats started it and now Republicans are going to finish it.
* Term Limit the Supreme Court. Don’t Term Limit the Supreme Court. No, I Mean It, Term Limit the Supreme Court.
* The end of Louisiana. Worth it for, what, fourteenth place in the GOP primary?
* A Rallying Cry for A Second-Chance School: The Fight to Save Chicago State.
* Antitrust Case Against Duke and UNC May Move Forward.
* Schools Are Doing a Terrible Job Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming.
* Climate and Empire. (Sounds like a book Asimov would write today if he were still alive.)
* How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones.
* “Killing a million people was just the sort of thing a superpower had to do.”
* Bernie Sanders and Palestine. The Washington Post found a political scientists who thinks he wouldn’t get blown out. Could Superdelegates Really Stop Bernie Sanders? Clinton now managing exceptions in Nevada, and has shockingly few staffers in South Carolina. And it’s fine. It’s fine.
* Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department. To be fair, though, those don’t seem super hard to get.
* The skills gap: still a fraud to lower labor costs.
* The Internet ruins everything, even Jeopardy!.
* From the nice-work-if-you-can-get-it files: Concordia executive gets $235,000 in severance after 90 days on the job. No public bidding on major University of Nebraska contracts. Michigan Coach’s jet travel valued at more than $10,000 a day.
* Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina: They found BoShek. Hyperspace Maps, Graphs, and Trees.
* Are you an academic superhero?
* Adjuncts and/as freelancers.
* Why So Few American Indians Earn Ph.D.’s, and What Colleges Can Do About It.
* When Is Campus Hate Speech No Longer Protected Speech?
* The Coen Brothers and the defeat of the American left. I knew it was them.
* Marvel’s The Vision Is Telling a Story Unlike Any Superhero Comic I’ve Ever Read.
* Day late, buck short: Suffragette valentines.
* The EPA calls it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims, who are dying to know if it’s really possible to poison an entire town and get away with it.
* “I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy”: An interview with Margaret Atwood.
* And SMBC catches on to my philosophical method.
Thurs. 3
* Bart Stupak’s reign of terror may finally be over.
* “Christians urged to boycott Glenn Beck.”
* “Someone should not be able to walk into a restaurant and order a plate of an endangered species”: Whale sushi illegally sold in California. Like Tim I’m disappointed to find out this was only a misdemeanor.
* The good guys are losing the messaging war on climate climate. More on these unfortunate poll results from Peter Daou, Kevin Drum, Amanda Marcotte, and Aaron Wiener.
* And Star Wars, by the Coen Brothers.
Ecolinks!
Still working through a backlog of open tabs. First up: ecology and the environment.
* There’s no such thing as clean coal. Just ask the Coen brothers. Also at Grist: dealing with the fact of environmentalism’s soft public support.
As I have argued before, our attention to wide but weak public support is misplaced, leaving us vulnerable to the cycles of an ADD media and alienating our potential core. It is increasingly evident that the vast scale of climate risk provokes a number of numbing psychological responses — pre-conscience cognitive dissonance and buffering in various forms — which exacerbates the usual forces of diffusion.
The only means by which a worldview and solution that is significantly at odds with majority public opinion may be driven onto the public agenda is through the agency of “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” — in other words, a determined, partisan core.
* ‘Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?’ First up: a sunshield. I guess it’s true what they say: from the dawn of time mankind really has yearned to block out the sun.
* Sympathy for the Unabomber? Don’t open any packages from Kevin Kelly for a few days.
* Times Square and several blocks of Broadway are being shut down to cars for most of the year in the name of traffic management and pedestrian malls. Awesome.
* Nuke your city. Via BLDG BLOG (which has a lot of examples) and io9. Of course, we’ve already done Durham.
Late Night
Late night.
* ‘Our Phony Economy’: Why measuring GDP doesn’t tell us much of anything we need to know. In Harper’s, via MeFi.
The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.
* Springfield Punx Simpsonizes celebrities and superheroes. At right: Tobias Fünke.
* Al Giordano says Tim Kaine is growing on him for VP.
The number one rule in choosing a vice presidential nominee is “first, do no harm.” If you’re a presidential nominee, you don’t want a running mate that will distract from you, commit gaffes, speak off-message, or that secretly thinks he or she is too good to be number two.
And the second rule is, “then, do some good.” You want a VP that will reinforce your messages and make voters more comfortable with you.
Kaine is so far passing both tests with flying colors.
I’m not there yet—as I’ve mentioned before, just about everything I hear about Kaine turns me off—but Al’s instincts have never steered me wrong. I guess we’ll see.
* What are the essential reads in literary fantasy? Personally I’d have to start my list with heavy-hitters from the twentieth century (and my bookshelf) like Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, and Calvino…
* Mission accomplished, corporations! Wal-Mart employee voluntarily enforces her entirely false belief that “copyright lasts forever.”
* And will Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers comedy, be the new greatest movie of all time? All signs point to yes:
