Posts Tagged ‘Comcast’
Tuesday Links!
* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.
* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:
Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”
* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:
October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction
October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)
October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference
* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.
* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).
* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?
* The Humanities at the End of the World.
* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.
* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.
* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.
* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.
* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.
* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.
* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.
* A Centre for Laziness Studies.
* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.
* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.
* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.
* The politics of the campaign mixtape.
* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.
* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”
* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.
* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?
* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.
* First, they came for my assault rifle.
* Nihilistic password security questions.
* The end of the Perkins loan.
* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.
* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.
* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.
* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.
* If it’s good enough for Zappos…
* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.
* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.
* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.
* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.
* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.
* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.
* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.
* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?
* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”
* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.
* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.
* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.
* Hydrofracking ruins everything.
* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”
* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.
* End zero-tolerance school discipline.
* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.
* The law, in its majestic finality…
* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.
* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.
* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?
* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.
* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.
* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.
* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.
* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”
* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.
* What’s the most American ______ ever made?
* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”
Olbermannia
MSNBC has caused a stir by suspending Keith Olbermann indefinitely without pay for making political donations to Democratic candidates (lated amended to “without prior permission”). The Wall Street Journal reported that Nation editor Chris Hayes was also being punished for donations (these made before Hayes was even under NBC contract), but Hayes denied this. Joe Scarborough made similar donations, as has Pat Buchanan—but as with most such things, it’s okay if you’re a Republican.
It’s likely that the Comcast merger was a factor.
Late last year, Comcast — the nation’s largest cable provider and second largest Internet service provider — inked a deal taking over NBC Universal, the parent company of MSNBC. Comcast moved swiftly to reshuffle MSNBC’s top staff. On September 26th of this year, Comcast announced perhaps the most dramatic shift, replacing longtime MSNBC chief Jeff Zucker with Comcast executive Steve Burke. Burke has given generous amounts to both parties — providing cash to outgoing Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) as well as to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and other top Republicans. But as Public Citizen has noted, Burke has deep ties to the Republican Party. Public Citizen’s report reveals that Burke served as a key fundraiser to President George Bush, and even served on Bush’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology:
Comcast – the country’s largest provider of cable TV and broadband Internet services – has increased its political giving along with its mergers and acquisitions. CEO Brian Roberts was a co-chairman of the host committee at the 2000 Republican Convention. Comcast Cable President Stephen Burke has raised at least $200,000 for Bush’s re-election campaign. […] Comcast’s political giving has increased along with its mergers and acquisitions. The company was a “platinum sponsor” at the 2000 GOP convention, and Roberts was a co-chairman of the host committee at the Philadelphia event. Burke was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology in 2002.
Why would Comcast be interested in silencing progressive voices? Historically, Comcast has boosted its profits by buying up various telecommunication and media content companies — instead of providing faster Internet or better services (overall, American broadband services are far slower than in many industrialized nations). Many of these mergers, as Public Citizen and Free Press have reported, have been allowed by regulators because of Comcast’s considerable political muscle. Comcast’s latest regulatory battle has been to oppose Net Neutrality — a rule allowing a free and open Internet — because the company would prefer to have customers pay for preferred online content.
More on that here. There’s also rampant speculation on Twitter and elsewhere that Comcast may be attempting to curry favor with the incoming GOP-run Commerce Committee, which still has to approve the NBC merger.
I don’t watch Olbermann, but I won’t watch Maddow clips online until he’s back.