Posts Tagged ‘conservation’
Easter Monday (Hardly Knew ‘Er)
* Marquette suspends McAdams through the fall 2016 semester. Marquette’s statement. McAdams has some interesting comments specifically with regard to the the apology requirement on his blog. What a mess.
* Alien vs. Predator: Connecticut Politicians Want to Tax Yale Endowment.
* Husband and wife HMS students seek treatment for her fatal disease. It isn’t Huntington’s, though it’s very similar, and Huntington’s research does play a minor role in the story.
* Good Friday in Middle-earth.
* Batman v. Superman: you know, for kids. But, honestly, at this point I almost feel bad.
* For 15 years, the superhero blockbuster has allowed American audiences to project an illusory dual image of its character, a fiction in which it’s at once helpless victim and benevolent savior, the damsel in distress and the hero coming to her aid. Where Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War strive and likely fail, Suicide Squad presents a much more honest, holistic image of America as superpower in the 21st century. It’s the conclusion to an argument whose articulation has been 15 years in the making. We’re neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn’t passing. We simply are the villains.
* Sanders had a strong week, and this has been a crazy year in politics. But there’s nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination. The Long March of Bernie’s Army.
* For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.
* These Are The Phrases That Sanders And Clinton Repeat Most.
* Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat. The links keep coming after the picture.
* The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors: The most unusual colors from Harvard’s storied pigment library include beetle extracts, poisonous metals, and human mummies.
* The woman who can see 100 times more colors than you can.
* Here comes pseudolaw, a weird little cousin of pseudoscience.
* The emergency managers Snyder imposed on Detroit and Flint had no chance of restoring those cities to solvency. Forced austerity can’t solve financial problems caused by a low tax base and a lack of revenue sharing. Meanwhile, in Illinois: How to destroy a state.
* Civic leaders in Portland, Oregon, want to start busing homeless people out of town. The city council there quietly set aside $30,000 to buy one-way tickets for certain homeless individuals last week, the Portland Mercury reports.
* Fighting over my vote: Who’s the Most UFO-Friendly Presidential Candidate? Related: Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs. And in local news: Aaron Rogers Describes Seeing a UFO in New Jersey in 2005.
* Sample Questions from the Trump University Final Exam.
* N.F.L.’s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry. Jerry Jones: Absurd to Link Football to CTE. Absurd!
* The True Story Behind the Legendary “Lost Ending” of The Shining.
* How 4chan and 8chan turned that chatbot racist. How Not to Make a Racist Bot.
* 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life.
* Happily ever after? Advice for mid-career academics.
* About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.
* Somehow I’d forgotten Netflix is actually doing Voltron, and that wasn’t just a joke about the creative bankruptcy of our times.
* This, however, I’m 100% in favor of.
* Mr. Speaker, this is not a perfect bill. I never said it was. I saw Hamilton, so now I’m going to orphan my son.
* With The Cursed Child, J.K. Rowling Shows Us Harry Potter’s Future Isn’t What You Expected.
* Tycoons plan base on moon by 2026.
* Harrowing tales of true crime.
* Secret history of the Clinton email scandal.
* They stole Shakespeare’s skull!
* To Boldly Go Provides a Rare Look Behind the Scenes of Star Trek.
* Bedrock City in Ruins: The rise and fall of the Flintstone empire.
* Just the thought every parent wants in their mind on the happy occasion of their daughter’s fourth birthday: I had a baby in my 40s. Part of my job is preparing my daughter for life without me.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Red Mars TV Series Now On Hold After Showrunner Suddenly Departs.
Make Mine Monday Links
* Classic SF magazines Galaxy and If are available at Internet Archive.
* …the American employee is increasingly no longer an employee at all, but someone granted the privilege to work by a network administrator, an opportunity just as easily revoked.
* The secret lives of Tumblr teens.
* Emerging Trends in African Speculative Fiction.
* The end of higher education in Illinois. In Pennsylvania.
* A nimble, effective nonprofit corporation must depend on experienced, independent directors able to govern without being compromised; however, it is difficult to justify the NCAA’s tax-exempt status when vast sums of revenue are siphoned off by coaches and athletic administrations. Instead, the NCAA must develop a governance model that is free from those with vested interests, including presidents.
* …because the stakes are so low: “A professor’s post last week to the PLANET Listserv (until now a respected place of discussion for scholars of planning, geography and related fields) set off a debate and led 118 professors to quit the forum on Friday.”
* How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini. Trump and nonsense debt. The Republican Party’s implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy has arrived. Don’t Assume Conservatives Will Rally Behind Trump. Bialystok and Bloom.
* John Oliver went after Donald Trump for 21 minutes last night.
* Understanding the global warming ‘hiatus.’
* Indian Point Leak Foreshadows the End of the Nuclear Age.
* Stephen Curry Is the Revolution.
* Maryland lawmakers consider banning police ‘rough rides.’ Reeeeeeeeally thinking that one over I guess.
* Now with 68 characters, Infinity War is finally starting to come together.
* The White House Wants To Use Science Fiction To Settle The Solar System. I’m in! Though I feel like maybe we’ve been reading different books.
* A Europe of city-states. I’d like to see a similar map of the U.S.
* Let’s give half the planet back to Nature.
* Evolution and polygamy, by way of Playboy.
* Title IX at the American Association of Law Schools.
* “Why Jean-Luc Picard Never Carried a Wallet.”
* And now, 15 minutes of Worf’s ideas getting shot down by everyone on The Next Generation.
Sunday Morning Links!
As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…
* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.
* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.
* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.
* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.
* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.
* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.
* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.
* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.
* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.
* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.
* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.
* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.
* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.
* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.
* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.
* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.
* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.
* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!
* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.
* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.
* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”
Center for the Advancement of Saturday Links
* Some unexpectedly big news at President Lovell’s inauguration today: Marquette will be developing a new Center for the Advancement of the Humanities as a result of a multimillion dollar gift from an alumna.
* The Science Fiction Working Group at the University of Florida.
* Cost of living map: What is $100 worth in your state?
* Does Louisiana have a future? Bobby Jindal says it’s an open question about which reasonable people can disagree.
* Working With Quentin Tarantino On The Django Unchained Sequel, Django/Zorro.
* Couple Who Let Homeless People Sleep On Their Porch Threatened With Daily Fine.
* Pennsylvania High School Suspends Student Editor For Refusing To Print The Word ‘Redskins.’
* Nightmares: In 2010, a teacher’s aide and the assistant principal at Sparkman Middle School in Huntsville, Alabama carried out a plan to use a special needs student—a 14-year-old girl—as “bait” to catch another special needs student who was sexually violent. The plan failed, and the 14-year-old girl was raped in the school’s bathroom. Earlier this year, that assistant principal got promoted.
* More horrors: Fraternity Allegedly Used Color-Coded System to Roofie Girls.
* It’s been [hastily switches sign] 0 days since the last fact-free trend piece on paying for college through sex work.
* Meticulous Visual Recreation Of Moon Landing Shows It Wasn’t A Hoax. OR SO THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE
* How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Ohio Supreme Court: It’s OK To Strip Mine State Wildlife Areas.
* And 9/19/1984: Never forget.
So Many Wednesday Links It Is Guaranteed to Make You Sick
* Brian Thill on academia, labor, and the prestige economy.
* Freddie de Boer on the unbearable wretchedness of higher education journalism.
* The only situation in which one would treat free speech as an end would be one in which there were no fundamental problems: no iniquities, immiseration, exploitation. No need for free speech as means. So we might say Dirks is speaking from the position of campus-as-utopia, a campus of nothing but speech, where the sun always shines and all other issues have been resolved happily for all. A campus wherein there was no privatized public education, no massive debt- and labor-loads for students, no shitty working conditions for campus workers, no cops being called in to beat or pepper-spray students and faculty into the hospital. No struggle over BDS, no systematic racism, no burying of rape statistics and accompanying leniency for perpetrators — struggles in which the administration is an aggressive antagonist, a side.
* Remember the other day when I linked to that piece about colleges recruiting lacrosse players as a proxy for wealth? Totally and absolutely unrelatedly, colleges are now giving out athletic video game scholarships.
* Steven Salaita has now spoken publicly at UIUC about his firing by UIUC.
* The New Inquiry 32: Back to School.
School is the alibi for class society. Passage through it is supposed to be what makes the unequal distribution of violence and luxury in the bourgeois world a fair outcome, what makes the bodies it disposes of earn their disposal. It is also the house of knowledge and so a powerful node of induction into the mysteries of this bloody society. Those who want to approach the knowledge held there must also internalize its mechanisms. Some go on to help it reproduce itself, as teachers. Unexpected success in this self-transformation is sometimes called class mobility, but to celebrate those who are capable of moving admits that the majority are fixed in place.
* How long will we have to wait for the poll finding that most Americans “regret” having supported this new war in Iraq and Syria and view it as a “mistake”, as they prepare, in a frenzy of manufactured fear, to support the next proposed war? Even the liberal Kevin Drum hopes Obama can stop Obama before Obama invades Iraq.
* Against TFA: “I am, I am asking you to quit.”
* Crisis for the crisis in the humanities. The full report is here.
* Scalia wept: Death penalty fans reel as one of their go-to examples for the necessity of capital punishment turns out to involve two innocent men.
* Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields.
* From the archives: Almost everything in Dr. Strangelove was true. Capitalism Whack-a-Mole.
* Almost All the Books People Say Influenced Them Were Written for Children.
* Steve Almond on quitting football.
* Segregation forever: Share of white kids attending majority white schools. More links after the map.
* UC Berkeley police have obtained more than a dozen M16 rifles via the 1033 program, as of June 2014. That’s outrageous. I can’t imagine them needing more than four or five tops.
* The Economist Has a Slavery Problem. Reagan reviews Roots, 1977.
* A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder. No! No! I simply won’t believe it!
* Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints.
* Cuomo (and de Blasio) after Teachout.
* Where MacArthur fellows were born and where they lived at the time of the award.
* How Much Carbon Dioxide Is in the Atmosphere? A Massive Increase in 2013 Sets a Record. “We are running out of time.”
* Milwaukee wept: Meteorologists Predict Record-Shattering Snowfall Coming Soon.
* Almost Half Of North American Bird Species Are Threatened By Climate Change.
* Amazon Indian Warriors Beat and Strip Illegal Loggers in Battle for Jungle’s Future.
* Louisiana doesn’t look like Louisiana anymore.
* The oceans are acidifying at the fastest rate in 300 million years.
* Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal. People Who Live Near Fracking More Likely To Become Sick, Study Finds.
* Twilight for alumni donations. As someone remarked on Twitter, this piece seriously undercounts the rise of student debt and twentysomething un- and underemployment as factors here.
* Dystopia now: Airlines have never been better at making certain your flight is full.
* Forty Percent of Police Families Experience Domestic Violence.
* Peacekeepers Sexually Exploited And Abused Women And Girls In Somalia.
* Video Shows NYPD Officers Taking Turns Beating Man After He Asked Why He Was Being Searched.
* Cops Are Sorry They Keep Losing Cool Guns That the Military Gives Them.
* “Driving while black” is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon. Look, if we’re going to make this about facts…
* BREAKING NEWS: Gambling is terrible city planning.
* License to kill: CBP Requests Federal Court Keep Identity of Border Patrol Agent Who Killed Teen Secret.
* Court rules Yelp has no obligation to publish positive reviews.
* For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. Turns out you actually have to teach the kids to get results. Crazy.
* And on the complete other end of the positivity spectrum: Teacher Allegedly Locked Kids in Closet to Teach Them “How to Survive.”
* Millennials aren’t using credit cards, and it might come back to haunt them.
* Now that I’m a parent, it’s hard for me to understand how roller coasters are allowed to exist.
* Silicon Valley’s Cult of Male Ego.
* The service, which launches September 16 in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, works with a fleet of women drivers and will only be available to female passengers. Drivers are hailed with an iOS app—like Uber or Lyft—and arrive wearing “hot pink pashmina scarves,”according to the New York Times.
* Marriage counseling before feminism.
* Today in the voter fraud fraud.
Striking down Pennsylvania’s voter ID law in January, its state court found “no evidence of the existence of in-person voter fraud in the state.” Plus, the state failed to establish any connection between photo identity cards and the integrity of elections. Courts in Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas ruled similarly.
Wisconsin federal district court Judge Lynn Adelman in Aprilstruck down that state’s voter ID law for violating the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Adelman found about 9 percent of registered voters – about 300,000 – lacked the government-issued ID required for casting a ballot under the Wisconsin law, enough to change election results.
* ‘Unprecedented’ Outbreak Of Rare Virus Strikes Hundreds Of Children In The Midwest.
* The Leaky Nuclear Waste Dump and the Town That Loves It Anyway.
* The kids are all right: LEGO Is Now the Biggest Toymaker on the Planet.
* 8 Things We Can Do Now to Build a Space Colony This Century.
* And Harvard has received a record $350 million donation. So glad those guys will be able to keep the lights on.
First, Let’s Kill All the Wolves
One of the planned essays for our Green Planets book (from the brilliant Christina Alt) is about the prevalence of animal extinction and extermination fantasies in turn-of-the-century utopias like Wells’s. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this link from Lawyers, Guns, and Money to this Prospect story on current plans to wipe out the gray wolf (again).
The reintroduction, he told me, had been one of the epic wildlife-recovery stories in U.S. history; in little more than 15 years, the number of wolves in the Northern Rockies had gone from 66 to roughly 1,600. Yet concerns about the threat posed by the wolves to cow, sheep, and elk populations had led to a stark reversal. After spending upward of $40 million studying the animals—then capturing, collaring, tracking, and protecting them—the federal government last year scheduled wolves to be killed in huge numbers across the Northern Rockies. In April 2011, following a series of lawsuits and an unprecedented intervention by Congress, canis lupus was removed from the endangered species list.
Gerry Canavan 