Posts Tagged ‘Comedy Bang Bang’
Weekend Links! Tabs Bankruptcy! All Links Must Go!
* Podcast: What is Irish Science Fiction? I’d also recommend a few new podcasts, Off Book (weekly improvised musical) and What Trump Can Teach Us about Con Law.
* Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again.”
* Researchers Just Launched a Prototype of Humanity’s First ‘Interstellar Spacecraft.’
* ‘Make It So’: Star Trek and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism.
* Star Trek: Discovery is the first Trek TV series in over 15 years. Here’s everything we know.
* Republicans don’t trust higher ed. That’s a problem for liberal academics.
* Three years after Steven Salaita lost a promised tenured position in American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the tone of his anti-Israel tweets, he’s leaving academe.
* How a New Field Could Help Save the Humanities.
* Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color.
* They’re still fighting at Hypatia.
* “If There’s an Organized Outrage Machine, We Need an Organized Response.” Recovering academic freedom in an age of social media mobbing.
* Any parent could have told you this: Ravens plan better than four-year-olds.
* How to raise an optimistic human in a pessimistic world.
* Among the dead was a so-called Dreamer, a migrant who had been brought to the United States as a young child. Frank Guisseppe Fuentes, 20, spent much of his life in the U.S. and had crossed the border in an attempt to reunite with family members living in Maryland after he was deported to Guatemala City, Jose Barillas, the Guatemalan consul general in Houston, told Univision. The Mothers Being Deported by Trump. Slain girl’s father, sister denied visas, miss her funeral. A Veteran Agent Speaks Out.
* New Jersey raised its smoking age to 21. The change will likely save lives. Honestly, just ban them outright, and soda too.
* Wisconsin is paying as much as $1 million per job, which will carry an average salary of $54,000. I’ve thought about it, and I think I’d rather have the iPhone.
* The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills.
* Don’t let your employer microchip you! Ever!
* A 21st-century form of indentured servitude has already penetrated deep into the American heartland.
* Woman turns home into museum after getting sick of black women being ignored by the art world.
* When there was a Lyme disease vaccine.
* Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle.
* North Dakota’s Norway Experiment.
* Reverse Robin Hood: The Historical Scam of Global Development.
* Dungeons and Dragons in America’s dungeons. Dungeons and Dragons and the Left.
* Hemingway just got beat by four words.
* Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child.
* The Sinclair Revolution Will Be Televised. It’ll Just Have Low Production Values.
* 110/111.
* The next Matt Groening series isn’t just a Futurama-but-fantasy but a joke Futurama already did. But fine I’ll give it a chance.
* A definitive mapping of the decline of The Simpsons. It’s just math, folks.
* The attack on Poland’s judicial independence goes deeper than you may think. Here are 5 things to know. Dodged that bullet. Coming soon to a collapsing empire near you!
* On 500 episodes of Comedy Bang Bang.
* When Pokémon Go defeated Milwaukee County.
* Et tu, Roomba? I trusted you.
* The World May Have Less Time to Address Climate Change Than Scientists Thought.
* And yet there’s more dicks around than ever before.
* The knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.
* #NotAllTVIsDarkAndFullOfTerrors.
* And July 30 can’t come fast enough.
And because Trump is a nightmare from which none of us will ever awake:
* We’re Approaching a Major Turning Point in Trump-Era Pop Culture.
* The Scariest Nuclear Threat Is Coming From Inside the White House.
After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
* Turtles all the way down: Scott Pruitt wants to hijack the peer-review process to push bad climate science.
At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.
* This guy is running communications now! Come on! COME ON!
* A Constitutional Crisis Is Inevitable. It’s not too early, or too nutty, to discuss grounds for impeachment. This presidency can’t be saved. A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly. Hot mic. 1 in 4. On the Brink of a Constitutional Crisis, the Nation Goes Numb.
* Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals. Sixteen years. We’ve long lost even the pretense that there is a rational reason for this.
* 64 years after Korean War, North still digging up bombs.
* William Regnery II, a man who inherited millions but struggled in business, tried for 15 years to ignite a racist political movement — and failed. Then an unforeseen phenomenon named Donald Trump gave legitimacy to what Regnery had seeded long before: the alt-right. Now, the press-shy white separatist breaks his silence.
* How Breitbart Media’s Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump.
* This is the tradition Ryan Alford sets himself against in Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law. It is from a position of deliberate disinterest in institutional personality, particularly presidential personality, that Alford builds his account of the lawlessness of US counterterrorism efforts since the 9/11 attacks and charts our country’s official passage across the “threshold between an imperial presidency and an elective dictatorship.”
* What if Trump Ordered a Nuclear Strike on China? I’d Comply, Says Admiral. Not great, Bob!
* When you’ve lost the Boy Scouts.
* Who Is Killing American Women? Their Husbands And Boyfriends, CDC Confirms.
* Trump administration is sitting on tens of thousands of student debt forgiveness claims.
* Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated.
* RIP CBO.
* There’s nothing he can’t ruin.
* How to put Trump on Mount Rushmore, something he’s never even thought about.
* #Actually Stubbs’s tenure as mayor was deeply problematic.
* John McCain Just Proved He Is the Senate’s Biggest Fraud (Again). Your enemies are human too.
The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.
* Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.
* Understanding skinny repeal.
* Don’t forget: they win because the system is rigged in their favor. Not that they don’t get a lot of help.
* And yet! Sometimes they don’t. Good for Collins, Murkowski, McCain, and literally every Democrat in Congress, and remember that Trumpcare isn’t truly dead (no matter how many bullets you put in it) until Democrats get a veto point back…
Written by gerrycanavan
July 28, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic writing, actually existing media bias, brains, capitalism, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Comedy Bang Bang, concussions, cultural preservation, debt, delicious Coca-Cola, deportation, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, education, emergency rooms, football, Foxconn, Futurama, gifted children, globally, health care, Hemingway, high fives, How the University Works, immigration, improv, indentured servitude, Ireland, kids, Lyme disease, Matt Groening, meritocracy, Milwaukee, mobbing, museums, musicals, NASA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Dakota, Norway, Octavia Butler, optimism, outer space, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, parenting, pessimism, philosophy, podcasts, Pokémon Go, Poland, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, ravens, Republicans, robots, Roomba, science fiction, short stories, Sinclair, smoking, social media, socialism, soda, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Steven Salaita, television, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Simpsons, trans* issues, vaccines, Wisconsin, work
Monday Morning Links!
* Coming soon: Adam Kotsko’s long-awaited book on the devil, The Prince of This World. And from Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.
* Important White House petition: “Include Adjuncts in Loan Forgiveness Program.”
* But here’s the rub: I am able to afford this faux middle-class life on $40,000 a year because I live around poverty. I didn’t write this, but basically anyone with a job like mine in a city like Milwaukee could have.
* Marquette University John McAdams and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty announced Monday that they have filed suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court against the university for what the plaintiffs describe as “illegally suspending” McAdams more than a year ago.
* Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.
* Scientists Warn All Plant Life Dying Within 30-Yard Radius Of Ted Cruz Campaign Signs.
* Clinton is the second-most disliked general election candidate in modern history. Guess who is #1. Using this approach, the probability that Trump can catch up by November is 9%, and the probability that Clinton will remain ahead of Trump is 91%.
* Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year.
* “Uber for MBAs Is a Worrying Sign.”
* How Gender Confirmation Surgery Actually Works.
* But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.
* Suing? What for? The coffee was too cold. It’s supposed to be cold. Not THAT cold.
* Pop culture moment: we’ve been watching The People vs. O.J. Simpson and have been completely floored by how good it is. Thanks Lili Loofbourow for the rec!
* This month is also the Comedy Bang Bang live tour — with each date appearing on howl.fm the next day — so my pop culture dance card is kind of filled right now.
* I can’t decide if the White House Correspondents Dinner becomes more or less obscene when Obama is so good at it.
* Monkey bars alert: Playground concussions are on the rise. I’m really surprised parental use of cell phones isn’t suggested as a possible aggravating cause.
* Understanding epigenetic. Forgotten lessons of the American Eugenics movement.
* Andrew Sullivan is back, and he says your precious democracy is doomed. Doomed!
Wow, I can't believe Melisandre was able to raise Andrew Sullivan from the dead
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) May 2, 2016
* And tell my kids I’m sorry: Scientists find more reasons that Greenland will melt faster. World on catastrophic path to run out of fresh water. And in case you’ve forgotten.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 2, 2016 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #Lemonade, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, adjuncts, alcohol, alcoholism, America, American Crime Story, Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Bay View, Beyoncé, Canada, capitalism, class struggle, climate change, coffee, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, concussions, crisis, debt, democracy, digital humanities, disability, Donald Trump, ecology, epigenetics, eugenics, Game of Thrones, gender confirmation surgery, general election 2016, genetics, Greenland, guns, Hillary Clinton, ice sheet collapse, imbeciles, John McAdams, kids today, maps, Marquette, May Day, MBAs, Milwaukee, neoliberalism, outer space, parenting, places to invade next, podcasts, politics, polls, pop culture, Premier League, segregation, soccer, Socrates, Socratic dialogue, Starbucks, student debt, Ted Cruz, television, the courts, the Devil, the law, The Onion, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, theology, toddlers, trans* issues, true crime, tyranny, Uber, water, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
So Many Weekend Links!
I’ve been thinking all day about the “value of the humanities” and I really think it’s just that it’s good to know stuff.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015
Is there serious case that the humanities advance job skills or informed citizenship? Maybe. But it’s really mostly just good to know stuff.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015
#humanities RT @dg22727: @ayjay @gerrycanavan Well-worn, but: pic.twitter.com/l6YfmjGH7T
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015
* I’ve seen this movie: Marquette working with firm to humanely manage seagulls.
* Best game I’ve played in a really long time: Rymdkapsel.
* The academic community has talked itself into a very strange corner with regards to adjunctification. “Respect” is just not a good rallying point: unquantifiable, unsatisfiable, turns political struggle into emotional one. The focus should stay on the system that produces adjunct jobs instead of full-time permanent ones.
* This report that administration and construction are not significant factors in rising tuition seems totally off to me. You’re dividing by different denominators in 2001 and 2011; that masks the magnitude of the change, but also hides new spending in real terms. The last student you add should be your cheapest student: all the infrastructure is in place, you’re just adding one more. But these numbers show the opposite trend: spending at colleges is increasing even given efficiencies gained by adding more students.
* ‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising.
* If you, like us, lusted after the art deco tiling and rose-colored lighting of the Grand Budapest Hotel lobby, or drooled over the yellow Parisian hotel room in Hotel Chevalier, here’s some enchanting news: Wes Anderson has designed a bar.
* NSA mass phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal.
* Andrew Cuomo, pretty corrupt.
* An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty.
* The Poverty Capitalism Creates.
* As investigation enters fifth month, Tamir Rice’s mother has moved into a homeless shelter. Online activists raised $60K for Tamir Rice’s family — so where did all that money go?
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Secret Lives of Homeless Students.
* The Hater’s Guide To Avengers: Age of Ultron. Are you Over the Avengers Yet? Ultron Has Always Been a Dumb Character, and That’s Okay. Even Whedon isn’t into it.
* Leaked Email From Marvel CEO Is A Listicle About Why Women Can’t Be Superheroes.
* Reading the Black Captain America (both of them).
* Joss Whedon Didn’t Quit Twitter Because of All the Mean Feminists.
* In defense of the Mommy Track.
* Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.
* ‘Comedy Bang-Bang’s’ Scott Aukerman: From ‘Screwing Around’ to a Podcast Empire.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably.
* The Pink and Blue Projects: Exploring the Genderization of Color.
* I really liked TNI’s “Trash” issue, though it gets Oscar the Grouch all wrong.
* Did a study find men’s beards are filled with poop?
* We Accidentally Turned The Entire Statue Of Liberty Into A Battery.
* Halo Players Spent Five Years Trying To Get Into An Empty Room.
* I’m glad that Facebook is choosing to publish such findings, but I cannot but shake my head about how the real findings are buried, and irrelevant comparisons take up the conclusion.
* A comics Kickstarter some of you might be interested in: Bizarre New World.
* Lawmakers drop Walker’s plan to spin off UW governance.
* Art Institute of Wisconsin to stop enrolling new students.
* Remember when Gerber tried to market “baby food for teens?”
* What Was the Venus de Milo Doing With Her Arms?
* Joan Would Have Lost Her Sexual Harassment Suit Against McCann Erickson. Assholes of Mad Men’s McCann pay dividends for real-life McCann.
* Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
* Health Insurance Companies Are Illegally Charging for Birth Control.
* Report: Most College Football Concussions Happen in Practice.
* Nothing gold can stay be allowed to just be a good thing that happened one time.
* Essential Reading: “I Am Error” Brings New Insight to the History of the NES.
* From graduation to garbage job (literally): One twentysomething’s struggle.
* The source of strange radio signals that have left astronomers at Australia’s most famous radio telescope scratching their heads for 17 years has finally been discovered. It turns out that it was a microwave oven.
* “My father felt the U.S.S.R. treated him better than America,” said Tynes-Mensah, a former university chemistry instructor who was born in the Russian town of Krasnodar and now lives mainly in the United States, spending summers in Russia. “He was happy here.”
* How to lie with statistics, Nicholas Kristof edition.
* Portrait of a suicide at UPenn.
* You Oughta Know Dave Coulier Will Be On Fuller House.
* Woman Who Tweeted ‘2 Drunk 2 Care’ Before Fatal Crash Gets 24 Years.
* Galadriel, Witch-Queen of Lórien.
In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs,” I suggested that the basic humanity of Tolkien’s inhuman creatures proved them to be more worthy of our sympathy than the elves, “whose near-perfection marks them with a profound otherness.” As immortals, elves are always playing a long game in which we finite beings cannot ever hope to be much more than pawns. The characters who seem most aware of this fact in The Lord of the Rings are, in fact, the orcs, as is tellingly revealed in the dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat. They lament having to work for “Big Bosses,” remember the “bad old times” when elves besieged them, and make hopeful plans for a postwar future in which there are “no big bosses.” In their fear and loathing of aristocrats and high powers, these orcs express thoroughly modern, even vaguely democratic sentiments. The Witch-Queen of Lórien, much like the dark Lord of Mordor, champions a different social order entirely. I am not entirely sure that Galadriel’s vision for how the world system should be organized is necessarily the better one. For those of us who are in favor of changing the world, Galadriel and her coterie of hereditary aristocrats represent the enemy, a power to be overcome, and her “long defeat” cannot come soon enough.
* The Magicians is coming to SyFy.
* Sheriffs Threaten Retaliation If The Price Of Prisoner Phone Calls Is Regulated.
* Starving the beast: The UNC system in 2015.
* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.
* Meet the original patent troll.
* The vanishing of Molly Norris.
* Empty, Lonely Nothingness. Forever: Understanding the Fermi Paradox.
* A Cancer Survivor Designs the Cards She Wishes She’d Received From Friends and Family.
* Get my checkbook! Original drawings depicting iconic Martians from HG Wells’s sci-fi masterpiece The War of the Worlds are on sale for £350,000.
* Edit of the Day: Footloose Without the Music Turns Kevin Bacon Into a Maniac.
* Deleted Scenes of Women in Disaster Movies Written by Men.
* Get me Thomas Pynchon: Aide to Kamala Harris arrested for pretending to run 3,000-year-old rogue police force.
* Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot.
* Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water. More North Carolina Residents Warned Of Contaminated Drinking Water. Horribly bleak study sees ‘empty landscape’ as large herbivores vanish at startling rate. A future without chocolate.
* Only the super-rich can save us now.
* McDonald’s to reverse declining sales with more attractive Hamburglar.
* These Suburban Preppers Are Ready for Anything.
* Bill Clinton has an exciting new greatest regret of his presidency.
* Someone made Game of Thrones into a Google map, and it’s amazing.
* Native Americans Say This Man Enslaved Them. Pope Francis Wants To Call Him A Saint.
* Which President Greenlit A Trip To The Center Of The Earth?
* And a dark, gritty Sliders I wish had gone to series: Parallels. By one of the creators of The Lost Room, which I also wish had gone to series!
Written by gerrycanavan
May 8, 2015 at 8:08 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, advertising, Age of Ultron, aliens, America, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, art, austerity, Avengers 2, baby food for teens, Baltimore, banned books, bars, beards, Bill Clinton, birth control, Bizarre New World, Black Widow, blue, Bobby Jindal, books, California, cancer, capitalism, Captain America, cartooning, catastrophe, Catholicism, CFPs, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, color, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, concussions, corruption, cut it out, design, doomsday preppers, drunk driving, ecology, Edward Snowden, emigration, English departments, extermination, Facebook, Fermi paradox, film, football, Footloose, for-profit schools, Freddie Gray, freemasons, Fuller House, Galadriel, Game of Thrones, games, garbage, gender, Gerber, Google Maps, Great Filter, Great Recession, H. G. Wells, Halo, Hamburglar, haters, health insurance, HERDI, hollow Earth, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrofracking, if you want a vision of the future, Indiana Jones, Islam, it's good to know stuff, Joss Whedon, juvenile, Kevin Bacon, kids today, Knights Templar, labor, LEGO, Lev Grossman, lies and lying liars, Lord of the Rings, Lousiana, LSU, Mad Men, many worlds and alternate universes, maps, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, mass incarceration, McCann Erickson, McDonald's, Milwaukee, Molly Norris, moms, Native American issues, neoliberalism, NES, Netflix, New England Patriots, New York, nonprofit-industrial complex, nothingness, NSA, only the super-rich can save us now, orcs, Oscar the Grouch, outer space, Parallels, patent trolls, patents, pink, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, poop, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, Pynchon, race, racism, research, riots, Rymdkapsel, saints, science, Scott Aukerman, Scott Walker, sculpture, seagulls, SETI, sexism, sexual harassent, Shakespeare, slavery, Sliders, social media, statistics, Statue of Liberty, Stephen Colbert, Steven Salaita, street lit, students, suburbia, suicide, superheroes, surveillance society, surveillance state, Tamir Rice, tenure, texting, the humanities, the ind, The Lost Room, The Magicians, the Pope, The Sheep Look Up, the sublime, the Sudan, The Wire, there's no such thing as bad publicity, Tolkien, trash, UIUC, UNC, University of Wisconsin, UPenn, urban fiction, USSR, Venus de Milo, War of the Worlds, war on education, water, Wes Anderson, white people, Wisconsin, work, YouTube, Zelda
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
Every cop, judge, and public official who knew about this Chicago “black site” should be fired, banned from public life, and arrested.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 24, 2015 at 7:35 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alejandro González Iñárritu, algorithms, America, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, Batman, Birdman, black sites, books, Catholics, CFPs, chance, cheese, Chicago, climate change, clopenings, college, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, Cops, democracy, denials, diversity, drugs, ecology, education, England, English majors, European Union, fellowships, film, first contact, free speech, Genghis Khan, genocide, Glenn Reynolds, God, Golden Girls, Greece, guns, Harris Wittels, hate speech, housework, How the University Works, Hugh Jackman, hydrofracking, Idaho, Instagram, Instapundit, Jeb Bush, Joseph Kahn, Kentucky, kids today, labor, libertarians, Lord of the Rings, majors, male privilege, Marc Maron, Marquette, Mars, men's rights, meritocracy, microstates, misogyny, music, my scholarly empire, National Adjunct Walkout Day, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Octavia Butler, orcs, Oryx and Crake, Oscars, photography, playlists, police brutality, police state, police violence, poverty, Power Rangers, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, privilege, public authority, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, reboots, recycling, right to work, Robert Heinlein, robots, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexism, Silk Road, sitcoms, sperm donation, Starbucks, Starship Troopers, states of exceptions, STEM, Steven Spielberg, strikes, superheroes, Superman, Syriza, tech economy, television, Tetris, the courts, The Ecstasy of Order, the humanities, the law, the Left, the Singularity, Title IX, Tolkien, torture, Twitter, Two and a Half Men, UNC, unions, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, welfare state, Wes Anderson, white privilege, Wisconsin, Wolverine, work-life balance, WTF, Žižek
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
February 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird
Weekend Links!
* The commentators calling $3,000 salaries evil a century ago would have an aneurysm at the sight of coaching contracts today. Deadspin found last year that college football coaches were the highest-paid state employees in twenty-seven states. (Basketball coaches held that status in another thirteen.) The salary inflation is a direct product of increasing college sports revenue, thanks in large part to massive television deals. Because the colleges and their athletic departments are nonprofit, they need to spend the money they bring in, and since they can’t pay players, there are only so many places that money can go. Head coaches and other athletic staffers are direct beneficiaries.
* My Favorite Graph of 2014: The Rise and Rise of the Top 0.1 Percent.
* Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion.
* Elsewhere in the richest society ever in the history of the world.
* David Harvey and Leo Panitch: Beyond Impossible Reform and Improbable Revolution.
* North Korea, Sony, and stenography.
* The successful attempt to reduce fat in the diet of Americans and others around the world has been a global, uncontrolled experiment, which like all experiments may well have led to bad outcomes. What’s more, it has initiated a further set of uncontrolled global experiments that are continuing. Editorial in the British Medical Journal.
* A new study from Stanford looks at what happened in Italy, when a 1961 law doubled the number of students in STEM majors graduating from the country’s universities.
* …when people claim that the “free market” system outproduced Soviet Communism, what they are saying is that markets more effectively produced discipline. It was more successful at imposing patterns of human action and restriction conducive to military and economic production than a command economy was capable of imposing.
* “Why Is My Curriculum White?”
* If Tom Joad is alive after 1945, what is his future? Am I the only who sees him becoming a conservative like most of his fellow ex-sharecropper migrants and voting for Goldwater in 64? Grapes of Wrath fanfic at LGM.
* Neill Blomkamp’s Secret Alien Movie Looks So Good We’re Furious.
* Math Suggests Most Cancers Are Caused By “Bad Luck.”
* Florida: We’re The Worst. Arizona: Not So Fast.
* And then there’s Wisconsin. Pregnant woman challenging Wisconsin protective custody law.
At the clinic, a urine test showed Loertscher was pregnant, and also revealed her past drug use. Another test confirmed she had a severe thyroid condition.
Medical officials shared the findings with the county social services personnel, who subsequently went to court and had a guardian ad litem appointed for Loertscher’s 14-week-old fetus.
Social workers asked Loertscher repeatedly to release her medical records to county officials, and said that if she didn’t, she would be jailed until she had her baby, which would then be put up for adoption.
* Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?
* UNC-Chapel Hill Firing Professor Over Academic Fraud Scandal.
* Lines mankind was never meant to cross: LEGO Awarded 3D Printing Patent, May Allow Users to Print Own Bricks.
* The NYPD is Ironically Proving that Most of Their Police Work is Completely Unnecessary. The Benefits of Fewer NYPD Arrests.
* And Traci Reardon and J.W. Stillwater have a good old fashioned New Year’s Sentiment Off.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 3, 2015 at 8:53 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, Alabama, Alien, America, Arizona, austerity, bad luck, Barry Goldwater, Bill Gates, cancer, class struggle, Coach K, college basketball, college football, college sports, Comedy Bang Bang, David Harvey, democracy, diets, ethnic studies, film, Florida, food, free markets, Gates Foundation, hacking, Handmaid's Tale, health care, homelessness, How the University Works, Italy, just raise taxes, kids today, LEGO, low fat, Margaret Atwood, marriage equality, math, military-industrial complex, NCAA, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, New York, North Korea, NYPD, Okies, pedagogy, podcasts, police, police state, politics, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, revolution, riots, scandals, science fiction, sentiment off, Sony, STEM, syllabi, teaching, the courts, The Grapes of Wrath, The Interview, the law, the rich are different from you and me, the richest nation in the history of the world, the wisdom of markets, Tom Joad, Twitter, UNC, Wisconsin
Friday Links!
* I’ve pointed out before that even as academic institutions are more and more distrusted, professors oddly retain a good deal of public respect. We have it because we’re free: free to say the unpopular thing, free to teach the passionate course, free to study what we think needs studying. To be free means we have to occupy the whole possibility space that waits for our explorations, and take not just our students but our publics along for the ride. We have to keep a trust as well as walk the paths we see before us.
* Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist.
* On Campus, Grenade Launchers, M-16s, and Armored Vehicles.
At least 60 institutions have acquired M-16s through the program. Arizona State University holds the most, with 70 in its arsenal, followed by Florida International University and the University of Maryland with 50 M-16s each. Central Florida received its grenade launcher in 2008; Hinds acquired its in 2006.
* The Islamic Roots Of Science Fiction.
* Here’s How Global Warming Is Already Worsening Extreme Deluges In The U.S. Trees Are Dying From ‘No Obvious Cause’ In Rocky Mountains, Report Says. A Major Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change.
* On ISIS: Where Is Obama’s Exit Strategy?
Once again our country is invited to support the “long war” described by key Pentagon officials as lasting as long as 50 to 80 years. It’s probably both unwinnable and unaffordable, but no president and few politicians have the political ability to acknowledge failure and end it.
So they escalate enough to pass it along to their successor. War on an installment plan.
* Every American President in the past quarter century has now gone on television during prime time to tell the nation and the world that he has decided to bomb Iraq. Last night was Barack Obama’s turn, and it was a vexing performance.
* What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? We cannot champion Network Neutrality without admitting that the Internet is no Utopia.
* Reddit made over $100,000 off stolen celebrity nudes.
* U2, Apple and rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail. There’s really only one cure.
* Update: All Clear. The suspect has been located and the reported weapon has been identified as an umbrella.
* A Brief History of Typographic Snark and the Failed Crusade for an Irony Mark.
* The kids are all right: Millennials Are Reading More Books Than You Think They Are. Why Indie Bookstores Are on the Rise Again.
* Congressional Hearing Slams Feasibility Of Commercial Asteroid Mining. “The American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space Act.” You dicks.
* Everyone Knows Hedge Funds Are a Ripoff.
* Scientists warn of faulty Wisconsin wolf estimates. Learn to count, wolves!
* “Why English Majors are the Hot New Hires.”
* What Is Hope? Alex Trebek Is Bringing Back His Mustache.
* Dutch Girl Fakes a Trip to South East Asia.
* Archaeologists Have Made An Incredible Discovery At Stonehenge.
* The Cold War University is back! The Real Story Behind Canada’s Sudden Interest In Arctic Archaeology.
* The Soviets sent stray dogs to conquer space. This is what happened next.
* China Is Mass-Producing Islands To Extend Its Strategic Borders.
* What Happens to “Holdouts” Who Refuse to Sell Their Homes to Developers?
* Here’s What’s Becoming Of America’s Dead Shopping Malls.
* Wearable tech as triumph for bosses.
* Interview With a Time Traveler.
* So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights.
* Another roundup of all the many things that are more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
* And Comedian Joe Mande remembers brands remembering 9/11. Never forget.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 12, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, activism, Alex Trebek, America, apocalypse, Apple, archaeology, asteroids, Barack Obama, books, brands, Canada, capitalism, China, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college, Comedy Bang Bang, concentration camps, cosmonauts, Don't mention the war, don't tell me the odds, Earwolf, ecology, empire, Facebook, FEMA, finance capital, forever war, Google Glass, guns, hedge funds, How the University Works, Iraq, irony, ISIS, Islam, iWatch, Jeopardy, Laika, malls, military-industrial complex, millennials, mortality, mustaches, National Science Foundation, never forget, outer space, podcasts, police state, police violence, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Reagan, real estate. America, Reddit, Russia, science fiction, Scott Aukerman, short film, social media, Stonehenge, tenure, the Arctic, the Internet, time travel, trees, typography, U Talking U2 2 Me?, U2, war on terror, We're screwed, wearable tech, Wisconsin
Sunday Links!
* With the newborn and the consequent sleep deprivation I’ve been in sort of a weird place mentally, but if you find yourself in a similar state of consciousness I can recommend Andy Weir’s The Martian, April Richardson’s Go Bayside! podcast, and Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-Men as just the thing. I’ve also been going through the Comedy Bang! Bang! DVD Season 1 and 2 extras, which are truly prodigious — essentially a few bonus weeks of the podcast hidden as episode commentaries. The Martian will be a movie in 2016 and I suspect it’ll be a good one.
* Marquette team heads to RoboCup — the World Cup for robots.
* Kacy Catanzaro winning American Ninja Warrior is the best thing I’ve seen in weeks.
* The Sawyer Seminar at UCR: “Alternative Futurisms,” which will launch in September 2015, will bring together African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American scholars, artists and writers to examine the colonial roots and legacies of science fiction and the power of speculative fiction as a tool for social change.
* Cli-Fi watch: Mother Jones reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.
* Superpower as disability: Fantastic Four could be either really great or really, really awful.
* …a black superhero who just does the superhero thing of fighting criminals or anti-American spies or traditional bad guys can seem like a capitulation. Fighting against crime in the U.S. means, way too often, putting black men behind bars. Will a black Captain America serve as a kind of “post-racial” justification for that law-and-order logic? Or will he, instead, open up a space to question whether law, order, and superheroics are always, and for everyone, a good?
* Black Internationalism as a Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy.
* Today in police brutality: Man Dies After Being Put In Choke-Hold By NYPD.
* Federal Judge Blasts ATF For Luring Man With No Criminal Record Into Trafficking Cocaine.
* The tanks, which serve as the heart of the assault force, received an order to open fire at anything that moved. “Self-genocide” is not a thing. Unanimous consent. What if Iron Dome is a bluff?
* Twenty-five years ago today, a plane went down in Sioux City. Nobody was expected to survive. Somehow, 184 people did.
* Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.
* “People need to understand,” he says, “that there’s tons of money in nonprofits, first of all. Second, nonprofits can kind of become containers for for-profit organizations . . . and a lot of that is tax money going into rich people’s pockets.” Pushed into the marketplace, higher education managers pay themselves vast sums for wrecking one of the UK’s few globally respected sectors.
* Terminator: An Oral History.
* Results from a study published in the latest issue of Cognitive Science suggest that 5- and 6-year-old kids from religious backgrounds judge fact from fiction differently than those with non-religious upbringings.
* And is it possible that man was not meant to ingest infinite quantities of mozzarella sticks? Of course, Andy Daly was there first.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 20, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Afrofuturism, air travel, airplanes, all you can eat, America, American Ninja Warrior, Andy Daly, Andy Weir, apocalypse, austerity, baby brain, Barack Obama, Bitcoin, black superheroes, books, Captain America, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, Cthulhu, culture, digital currencies, disability, drill baby drill, dystopia, ecology, Fantastic Four, fantasy, film, free fire zones, futurity, Gaza, genocide, H.P. Lovecraft, Hollywood, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, Iron Dome, Israel, Kacy Catanzaro, kids today, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, mental illness, military-industrial complex, misogyny, money, neoliberalism, NYPD, oil, Palestine, pancakes, parenting, plane crashes, podcasts, police brutality, police state, police violence, prison, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, psychology, religion, Review, robots, Russia, Saved by the Bell, schizophrenia, science fiction, self-genocide, sexism, Sioux City, superheroes, Terminator, terrorism, TGI Friday's, The Martian, the Senate, UC Riverside, Ukraine, unanimous consent, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on education, war on terror, X-Men
Thursday Links!
* Marquette makes Slate’s vaunted “ridiculous phrases universities have trademarked” list. Meanwhile, Danny Pudi’s Marquette-flavored entry in the 30 for 30 series is up at Grantland. Jesuit author featured on ‘The Colbert Report’ to speak at Marquette University commencement.
* The academic outrage of the year is Nazareth College rescinding an offer following a request for more salary, research accommodation, and “official” maternity leave. I’ve been ranting about this on Twitter (1, 2, etc) (and now MetaFilter) all day but I can’t see how people can see this as anything but naked gender discrimination. I hope she sues.
* I know there’s a whole secondary argument on Twitter about the propriety of Buzzfeed’s appropriation here, but I found @steenfox‘s thread incredibly powerful last night. What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?
* This is one of my favorite endlessly recurring Internet images: “Do colleges have to hire RED professors?” asks The American Legion Magazine in Nov. 1951.
* The Humanities Crisis Industry.
* Workers Sue McDonald’s For Wage Theft Violations In Three States.
* Chicago Police Cannot Keep Complaints Of Brutality Secret Anymore, Court Rules. Why could they ever?
* Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner walks free after 30 years.
* My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor.
* Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired.
* “Is it time to rethink the 40 hour week?” Yes, it’s time to think about bringing it back.
* University of California Credit Is Downgraded by Moody’s.
* I’ll give it to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this regard. I had, up until last night, found Ward to be one of the blandest characters on the show. But now he has my sympathies. Because that character is stuck in a world where terrible things happen and, when they happen to him, no one cares.
* Free markets! Disruption! Innovation!
* Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men. How To Make A Pundit. And I can’t wait to see how they voxplain this.
* I want to return to a thread I introduced in that earlier piece with much greater force: That those who write for free or very little simply because they can afford to are scabs. I don’t endorse this piece, honestly, because I think it significantly misunderstands the terms under which TT academics are employed — but I found it an interesting provocation nonetheless.
* WI school officials seize control over student paper after ‘rape culture’ article appears.
* I have never seen anything as utterly nihilistic as the position Andrew Napolitano proudly puts his name on here. It’s unreal.
* The Sheep Look Up: Radioactive ‘Oil Socks’ Found Illegally Stockpiled In Abandoned North Dakota Gas Station. North Carolina Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Links From Website. Panasonic First Multinational Company To Pay Air Pollution Hardship For Overseas Workers In China. NASA Study: Climate Sensitivity Is High So ‘Long-Term Warming Likely To Be Significant.’
* The economics of prostitution.
* The best TV show you may not be watching: Review from Andy Daly. Also starring another Comedy Bang Bang stalwart, Jessica “Marissa Wompler” St. Clair.
* Reuters auctioning off unpaid internships. My god.
* The only thing Americans care about less than climate change is race relations.
* “They cry because they are not allowed to be children at all.”
* Scott Aukerman explains BetweenTwoFernsGhazi.
* Teju Cole: @apieceofthewall.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 13, 2014 at 9:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., air pollution hazard pay, Andrew Napolitano, Andy Daly, Barack Obama, Between Two Ferns, capitalism, cars, Chicago, China, Chris Christie, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, college sports, Comedy Bang Bang, communism, communists are everywhere, crisis, Danny Pudi, death penalty, discrimination, don't work for free, ecology, electric cars, Ezra Klein, Facebook, feminism, financialization, FMLA, forty hour week, free speech, futurity, gender, grading, How the University Works, internships, iPads, Jessica St. Clair, Jesuits, kids today, letter grades, Life After People, Lincoln, Louisiana, Marquette, Marvel, maternity leave, math, McDonald's, minimum wage, misogyny, NASA, Nazareth College, negotiation, New Jersey, nihilism, North Carolina, Occupy Cal, Paul Ryan, police violence, politics, polls, pollution, prostitution, punditocracy, race, racism, rape, rape culture, retail, Review, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scans, Scott Aukerman, Seinfeld, sex work, sexism, slavery, social media, student debt, Teju Cole, Tesla, the future is terrible, the humanities, The Sheep Look Up, there is no such thing as a free market, trademarks, Twitter, University of California, Vox, wage theft, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, worst persons in the world, writing
Saturday!
* Features, not bugs: America Is Raising A Generation Of Kids Who Can’t Think Or Write Clearly.
* Former NFL Tight End Wins Concussion Grievance Case Against Cincinnati Bengals.
* Onondaga Public Library in Syracuse, New York, has an enormous collection of roughly 1,100 vintage books in science fiction, mystery and “other genres.” But apparently, there isn’t enough interest to keep them in circulation. So they’re asking people to propose what should be done with them.
* None of this means that the GOP couldn’t win Florida in 2016. But there should be serious doubts about whether there’s room for another round of big, additional gains among Florida whites. And once those doubts are raised, the GOP route to victory in Florida looks tough. They’d need a lot to break right in order to squeak out a victory in 2016, let alone afterward. There’s the scary possibility that Florida goes the way of Nevada: the next Democrat would win Florida by 9 points if they merely did as well as Kerry among Florida’s white voters.
* Remaking the University v. Napolitano: Meritocracies define “being qualified” for the biggest job in a field as requiring prior experience in other jobs in the field.
* A Synopsis of Tim Burton’s Batman Based Only on the Prince Soundtrack.
* Just for the Comedy Bing Bong fans: When Reddit asked Scott Aukerman anything.
* xkcd’s “Time” has now been running for over one hundred days, and is now more than 2500 panels long.
* And Gawker presents some hard-hitting reporting on The Pizza Belt. I’m a native. This is all 100% accurate.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 13, 2013 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with America, Batman, California, class struggle, Comedy Bang Bang, concussions, film, finally my life story can be told, Florida, football, general election 2016, Hispanic voters, Janet Napolitano, John Kerry, libraries, meritocracy, New Jersey, New York, NFL, No Child Left Behind, Occupy Cal, pedagogy, pizza, politics, Prince, pulp novels, race, Reddit, Republicans, science fiction, Scott Aukerman, the humanities, Tim Burton, time, web comics, xkcd
Thursday Already?
* List of children killed by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.
* Adam Kotsko calls for more specificity and rigor in discussing the student loan crisis.
It is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that the sensationalism surrounding the “student loan bubble” stems from the fact that the majority of writers for progressive publications are either relatively recent college graduates or people with vivid memories of their own student debt. Hence they jump on the issue, making themselves and people like them the center of attention — while ignoring the vast wave of proletarianization that is beginning to make the United States a major competitor in the global sweepstakes to attract capital with low wages (and in fact, many self-styled progressive writers seem to buy into Obama’s incoherent view that greater access to college will in itself somehow help with inequality and wage stagntation).
* A comprehensive new Harvard University report on Americans under 30, the so-called Millennials, shows that the economy is having a crushing impact, with just 62 percent working, and of those, half are toiling at part-time jobs.
* Malcolm Harris reviews Haneke’s Amour, in the new TNI.
* This Tumblr post does a good job explaining what’s appealing about the Harmontown podcast while unhappily bracketing the racism and misogyny that can sometimes make the show a challenging listen.
* Also in Community news: Alison Brie and Gillian Jacobs hype the new season of Community, starting tonight. Gillian Jacobs on Comedy Bang Bang. Yvette Nicole Brown on the Nerdist podcast, where she reveals her secret past as a member of the East Coast Family.
* Walter Bishop as the villain in Star Wars 7? Oh, all right.
* Airline mergers seem hard, y’all.
* Stephen King points out a Shining prequel is a really dumb idea. Alas, his Shining sequel doesn’t sound great, either.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal vs. Valentine’s Day.
* Of course you had me at time travel web comic: Paola-4.
* And spotted on Facebook: Postcolonial Space Explorer.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 7, 2013 at 9:27 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, American Airlines, Amour, Barack Obama, class, class struggle, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, community, Dan Harmon, drones, Dungeons & Dragons, East Coast Family, Episode 7, euthanasia, film, Fringe, Gillian Jacobs, Great Recession, Harmontown, How the University Works, J.J. Abrams, John Noble, love, Michael Haneke, millennials, misogyny, Nerdist, outer space, Pakistan, Paul F. Tompkins, podcasts, postcoloniality, prequels, race, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sequels, sexism, Star Wars, Stephen King, student debt, suicide, the economy, the kids aren't all right, The Shining, time travel, unemployment, Valentine's Day, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, web comics, Won't somebody think of the children?, Yemen, Yvette Nicole Brown
Wednesday Wednesday Wednesday
* Read the article on professor-mothers that set Twitter aflame. Guaranteed to be the worst thing you read this week!
* No one can figure out how Borislav Ivanov is cheating in chess. Via Boing Boing.
* The rise and fall of the American arcade.
* The intentional fallacy: Kathryn Bigelow says Zero Dark Thirty’s fine because she’s a lifelong pacifist.
* Single charts that explain everything.
* #nodads: California convicts twelve-year-old boy for murdering his neo-Nazi father at ten-years-old.
* Finally, proof that all movie trailers use the same color palette.
* Todd Glass looks back on a year since “the Marc Maron thing.”
* Here Are Obama’s 23 Executive Actions on Gun Violence. 11. Nominate an ATF director. That’ll solve it!
* You can carry a loaded firearm into national parks and can tuck your rifle and ammunition into stowed luggage on Amtrak trains. Federal product-safety law subjects everything from toys to toasters to safety inspection and recalls, but exempts guns. Little-known laws shed light on NRA influence.
* I know people will believe anything, but I have to believe Sandy Hook Trutherism is almost entirely a media phenomenon.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 16, 2013 at 12:06 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #nodads, academia, arcades, Borislav Ivanov, charts, cheating, chess, color, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, denialism, Earwolf, fathers and sons, film, fiscal cliff, games, guns, How the University Works, income inequality, Kathryn Bigelow, kids today, Koch brothers, Marc Maron, maternity leave, misogyny, monocausotaxophilia, mothers, movie trailers, Nazis, NRA, pacifism, pinball, Republicans, Sandy Hook, standup, the choice fallacy, the debt, the deficit, the law, Todd Glass, torture, WTF, you're doing it wrong, Zero Dark Thirty
Impossibly, Even More Thursday Links
* The rich are different from you and me: The New York Times reports this week that megabank HSBC has escaped criminal prosecution for money laundering that probably funded terrorists and narcotics traffickers. Why? Because regulators and prosecutors were petrified that an indictment would undermine the entire financial system. The Times quotes anonymous government sources who confessed fears about bringing formal charges because doing so would be a “death sentence” for the bank. So they let it off the hook.
* Scientists plan test to see if the entire universe is a simulation created by futuristic supercomputers. I really feel as though nothing is more likely to make them pull the plug on us. Let’s just take a step back here.
* Scott Aukerman picks his favorite Comedy Bang! Bang! episodes.
* The Charlie Brown School of Dance.
* ‘The Hobbit’ To Feature 53-Minute-Long Scene Of Bilbo Baggins Trying To Figure Out What To Pack.
* Prison Guard Beats Up 15-Year-Old Inmate On Camera, Keeps Job.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 13, 2012 at 10:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with America, Are we living in a simulation?, banking, capitalism, Charlie Brown, Comedy Bang Bang, dance, feminism, film, HSBC, kleptocracy, money laundering, Peanuts, prison-industrial complex, race, Return of the Jedi, right to work, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Scott Aukerman, The Hobbit, The Onion, the rich are different from you and me, the wisdom of markets, true crime, violence