Posts Tagged ‘crayons’
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* SFFTV CFP: “Stephen King’s Science Fiction.”
* To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel. And now everyone’s super mad.
* From the archives! Radical Socialist Movement Ends After Three Semesters.
* University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth.
* The Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association has recommended that the organization ban psychologists from taking part in interrogations conducted by the military or intelligence services, a prohibition long sought by critics of the APA’s involvement with a Central Intelligence Agency program, widely viewed as practicing torture, under the administration of President George W. Bush.
* The book argues that media theory (like science fiction) is often theology by other means, and my insistence on deep technicity, like all basic visions of the human estate, inevitably has religious resonances.
* Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.
* Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years.
* So here’s the challenge for women’s professional tennis: is it a sport, or is it a modeling agency?
* Robots Might Save the Humanities. Probably not though.
* That ‘Volunteer Professor’ Ad.
* Fear of a Scott Walker presidency.
* “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.”
* The paradox of the underperforming professor.
* These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of March 14, 2005.
* Here’s the crayons you shouldn’t let your kids draw with if you don’t want them to eat asbestos.
“Children’s playtime should be filled with fun, not asbestos,” the two senators said. “We need greater access to information about where asbestos is present in products children and families use every day.”
And this used to be a free country.
* Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School. I was nauseous reading this, on behalf of all parties.
* Bad Math and a Coming Public Pension Crisis.
* Well, that’s not allowed: Undocumented Moms: Texas Is Denying Birth Certificates To Our U.S.-Born Kids.
* The FBI targeted MAD magazine.
* “US pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on flight to Germany.”
* The Hopeful, Heartbreaking Ads Placed by Formerly Enslaved People in Search of Lost Family.
* Its website was created by Career Excuse, a service which, for a fee, provides job-seeking customers with verifiable references from nonexistent companies. While the companies have phone numbers, websites and mailboxes manned by Career Excuse, they don’t conduct any actual business, besides verifying the great work done by employees they’ve never really had.
* Washington Post Writer Who Accused Amy Schumer Of Racism Never Saw Her Standup or TV Show.
* Firefly spawns its own Galaxy Quest.
* Probably the darkest thing I’ve ever posted: “More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald.”
* A Lego-Friendly Prosthetic Arm Lets Kids Build Their Own Attachments.
* Point: “The green case for fracking.”
* Counterpoint: California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds.
* Double Counterpoint: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise.
* The rule of law is the glue that holds society together: President Obama says he can’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom.
* Also in the rule of law files: That Time Scott Walker Defined What A “Sandwich” Is In A Bill.
* I’m amazed that not even Robin Williams’s death could protect us from this.
* Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?
* If you haven’t watched Kung Fury yet, it’s time.
* Hear him out! Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World.
* Punishment Park is on YouTube.
* How privilege became a provocation.
* I’ll allow it, del Toro, but you’re on very thin ice.
* At first, there was soccer, but then we fixed it.
* The League of Regrettable Superheroes.
* A new survey puts the incidence of male rapists in a campus population at over 10%. That’s higher than I ever could have thought, to the point where I find the survey results difficult to accept.
* Think of it as needing more space in your house, so you decide you want to build a second story. But the house was never built right to begin with, with no proper architectural planning, and you don’t really know which are the weight-bearing walls. You make your best guess, go up a floor and… cross your fingers. And then you do it again. That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.
* And they all lived happily ever after.
Links from the Weekend
* Slate devotes a column to criticizing the U.S. military-based approach to Haitian emergency relief. There’s some attempts at push-back, with varying success, in the MetaFilter thread, particularly about the specifically helpful capacities of the ships that have been sent there, but what can you say about facts like these:
Air-traffic control in the Haitian capital was outsourced to an Air Force base in Florida, which, not surprisingly, gave priority to its own pilots. While the military flew in troops and equipment, planes bearing supplies for the Red Cross, the World Food Program, and Doctors Without Borders were rerouted to Santo Domingo in neighboring Dominican Republic. Aid flights from Mexico, Russia, and France were refused permission to land. On Monday, the British Daily Telegraph reported, the French minister in charge of humanitarian aid admitted he had been involved in a “scuffle” with a U.S. commander in the airport’s control tower. According to the Telegraph, it took the intervention of the United Nations for the United States to agree to prioritize humanitarian flights over military deliveries.
Meanwhile, much of the aid that was arriving remained at the airport. Haitians watched American helicopters fly over the capital, commanding and controlling, but no aid at all was being distributed in most of the city. On Tuesday, a doctor at a field hospital within site of the runways complained that five to 10 patients were dying each day for lack of the most basic medical necessities. “We can look at the supplies sitting there,” Alphonse Edward told Britain’s Channel 4 News.
The much-feared descent into anarchy stubbornly refused to materialize. “It is calm at this time,” Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, admitted to the AP on Monday. “Those who live and work here … tell me that the level of violence that we see right now is below pre-earthquake levels.” He announced that four—four, in a city of more than 2 million—aid-distribution points had been set up on the sixth day of the crisis.
* Some good news: the IMF claims it is “pursuing” the total elimination of Haiti’s foreign debt. And some terrible news: by one estimate (highlighted by Marginal Revolution) a full 8% of Haiti’s population may be orphaned children.
* 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History.
* From the comments: The Five Dials tribute to David Foster Wallace.
* David’s Cross’s The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret has been picked up by the BBC. My friend Bill posted a clip from the pilot not long ago, which he played at his recent show at Raleigh.
* Fan art gone terribly wrong/terribly right: Seinfeld Star Wars.
* Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic: a case report. (Thanks Neil!)
* Via Ezra Klein, I see Tom Toles has somehow gotten hold of the Democratic playbook.
* Glenn Greenwald has a balanced piece largely in favor of the Citizens United v. FEC. Others are saying this decision may give foreign multinational corporations the right to participate in the American political process. Citizens United is by all appearances the first major domestic political crisis of the ’10s, and it came early; if I had sway in the progressive blogosphere I would suggest we devote ourselves to demanding the introduction of a constitutional amendment that reverses this decision by modifying or eliminating corporate personhood. That fight would not be easy—as Matt points out the total spending on Senate campaigns in 2004, $400 million, was just 17% of the marketing budget of a single American bank, which means our already corporatist ruling class would have every possible incentive to ignore such a campaign—but I don’t see much choice; it’s hard to imagine any sort of functional democracy existing in America while Citizens United remains in full effect.
* Republicans believe that Obama’s problem is that he’s pushing so much government intervention in the economy. That’s undoubtedly part of the story. But Obama’s larger difficulty is that he’s pushing so much change at a time when filibuster threats are so common that it requires 60 Senate votes to pass almost everything — and the minority party won’t provide the president votes on almost anything. We are operating in what amounts to a parliamentary system without majority rule, a formula for futility. Steve Benen has a post on the filibuster reform recently proposed by Tom Harkin here.
* Are Republicans “irrationally exuberant” about November? God, I hope so.
* For what it’s worth Obama’s poll numbers continue to match Reagan’s, and he beats nearly all comers in 2012. The one possible exception is the affable, if politically odious, Mike Huckabee, who beats Obama 45-44 in a PPP poll. And it was Huckabee himself who predicted just this week Obama will win again in 2012.
* NASA says 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record. Good thing climate change is a myth.
* The immortal Neil Gaiman is profiled in the New Yorker.
* The last days of Philip K. Dick.
* And if my estimates are correct, we could hit Peak Crayola as soon as 2018.
Karl Marx Visits the Crayola Factory
Karl Marx visits the Crayola factory. Via Boing Boing.
Try to imagine how wide the splatter pattern would be when Karl Marx’s head explodes at the idea of a privately held corporate marketing theme park that performed a simulacrum of the labor-alienating process of industrialized manufacturing; in order to approximate a distant childhood experience of watching a television show which romanticized the original, actual alienating manufacturing process; which nostalgia is induced to stimulate consumption of the corporation’s product; which is, in fact, an endless array of craft supplies for children, the very embodiment of the much-praised artisan and the educational ideal of creativity and self-expression; which all happen to be available for sampling and experimentation right here at the theme park, which by now is revealed to be a sprawling demand generation engine, and damned if you’re gonna drive this far and not get something to take home besides memories and a couple of gloppy paintings made with giant rubber fish…
Gerry Canavan 