Posts Tagged ‘democracy’
Ye Old Link Roundup!

- I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.
- Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
- Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.
- Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud. Officials increasingly alarmed about Trump’s power grab. Giuliani asks DHS about seizing voting machines. Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.
ok but can I just mention that being all the way down to the “is the military on board” gate on the flowchart is also alarming https://t.co/eQ2KG8dJPg
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020
American learned helplessness is evident not only in its inability to recognize what is happening as an attempted coup, but also in its failure to see this behavior as both illegal and illegitimate. https://t.co/MmKjpPBQfW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020
- Remember? Remember? We had fun, didn’t we?
- Panel: People over 75, essential workers next for vaccines. Some more details from the New York Times.
neoliberalism: celebrities, politicians, and other rich people should get the vaccine first
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 20, 2020
progressivism: because they are advertising the safety of the vaccine, celebrities, politicians, and other rich people should get the vaccine first
- New ‘worrying’ Covid strain found in South Africa is ‘more severe among young adults.’ Holiday Travel Breaks Pandemic Record Despite Dire Covid Warnings.
- At long, long last: gimme that stimmie.
Taking step back, some big picture things:
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) December 20, 2020
IN:
– $300/week UI
– $600/person checks
– $284B PPP for 2.0
– $82B for schools
– $27B for transit
– $25B for rental $, eviction moratorium
– $13B for hunger
– Vaccine distribution $
– Surprise billing legislation
– $10B for childcare
Pelosi explaining that $600 is actually good, rather than blaming McConnell or Trump, or saying you get more if the Democrats win in Georgia https://t.co/bjMw2vBxbJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 22, 2020
Democrats see their role as selling right-wing policy to liberals, while making sure no one ever gets too angry that the richest nation in human history is a human rights nightmare https://t.co/5koWcRVmTE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 22, 2020
- Congressional Deal Would Give Higher Ed $23B. Stimulus deal delivers billions in pandemic aid to colleges, but much more is needed, advocates say.
- Congress finally moves to stop surprise medical billing as part of spending deal.
- The COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Would Make Illegal Streaming a Felony.
- Unsanitized: Congress Again Taxes the Time of Benefit Recipients. 35% of Americans Could Lose Their Home in Next Two Months, Census Report Says.
- When do you think would be a good time?
- Dragonlance Writers End Lawsuit Against Dungeons & Dragons Maker. I was hoping for Dragons of Fifth Season Postnormality but someone on Twitter pitched prestige Dragonlance TV and now I’m all in on that.
- Kylo Ren Is the Real Hero of Star Wars, The Stand edition.
- The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.
- After 25 years, I’m retiring from ‘takes.’
- And they say love is dead: The Journalist and the Pharma Bro.
every so often you see a tweet that completely changes your worldview https://t.co/mwfESJjbPy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 21, 2020
- Early humans had the right idea I think.
- Chinese Jesus goes hard.
- Discovery roundup. Architecture roundup. Genre theory roundup. Email etiquette roundup.
- I never promised you an LCD factory.
- Divorce as a tool of class struggle.
- 19 years.
- Star Wars, explained.
- And the flood is gonna get here any day.

Written by gerrycanavan
December 22, 2020 at 9:59 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Amazon, Animal Crossing, architecture, Christmas, CIA, class struggle, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, death squads, democracy, divorce, don't mention the war, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, early humans, emails, fantasy, Foxconn, games, games studies, general election 2020, genre, hibernation, horror, How the University Works, Jeff Bezos, Jesuits, journamalism, Kansas City, language study, Marquette, Martin Shkreli, my media empire, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, pandemic, politics, propressivism, racism, science fiction, science fiction studies, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Stephen King, stimulus package, streaming, tax cuts, The Stand, trickle-down economics, unemployment, vaccines, Wisconsin
Just Some Normal Friday Night Links on a Perfectly Normal Friday Night
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2020
- Discharges, Demographics and Discipline: Marquette is eyeing deep faculty cuts. An undergraduate says she was targeted for discipline because she questioned the administration.
- Corporate Consultants Set Their Targets on American Universities.
- What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education.
- The College Degree Is Dividing America.
- Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting.’ Trump’s campaign and family boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count. Study Considers a Link Between QAnon and Polling Errors. QAnon Is Winning. The president has told allies he’ll never concede. How Fox News Saved America. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
- 2020 is 2010 redux. The permanent GOP apartheid.
- Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races. Okay but after that it’s socialism, right
- Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
- Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy. What It’s Like for a Voting Rights Activist to Finally See Georgia in Play. The Canavan Plan for Georgia Supremacy.
- If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority. If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people.
- The Cretaceous, US election maps, and you.
- It’s not you, Nate. It’s us. (And maybe a little you.)
- Like so many political prodigies before her, @AOC is about to destroy her career by gripping the last third rail in American life.
- How Conservatism Failed Its Women.
- ‘It’s Just a Slaughter’: Montana Goes From Purple to Deep Red.
- Two Louisville high schoolers just took down the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police. Let that sink in.
- From the archives: The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
- The unemployment crisis hiding in plain sight. Help is not on the way.
- Marquette professor settles 144-year controversy on invention of the telephone.
- Mysterious Radio Signal Is Coming from Inside Our Own Galaxy, Scientists Announce.
- Not joking: Is this eligible for every Oscar?
- Great, more work.
- And scientists discover bizarre hell planet where it rains rocks and oceans are made of lava. It’s called Election Night 2020 am I right
— Daigle (@Daigle) October 31, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
November 6, 2020 at 7:01 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, America, animal intelligence, animals, apartheid, class struggle, conservativism, conspiracy theories, coups, democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Douglas Adams, elections, ethics, film, Florida, Fox News, general election 2020, Georgia, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, How the University Works, Joe Biden, Kentucky, maps, Marquette, minimum wage, Montana, outer space, police, politics, QAnon, Republicans, run it like a sandwich, Stacey Abrams, telephones, the economy, the Senate, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, unemployment, voting, whales, women
And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too
- ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
- How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.
One of the things I see people perpetually getting wrong about the aims of various genre categories: science fiction, whatever it’s pretensions, does not do well at predicting the future. Because that’s horror’s turf.
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020
If I had to speculate further, it’s because science fiction has to follow some sort of rules explicable to the readers of its time. Horror is under no such constraint, thus is better able to reflect or at least dimly mirror a future we cannot grasp + would drive us mad if we did.
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) November 1, 2020
- Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
- Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.
“Liberals obsess over the polls while Republican judges throw votes in the trash” is a pretty solid explanation of how we got here and how even now two days before the end no one has learned anything
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020
Trump, Biden Trade Barbs on Absentee Ballots https://t.co/N0LLGJTbq3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020
- America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
- A Possible Majority.
- Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.
Marquette’s administration is now using the illegitimate, anti-demonstration policy it rammed through over student and faculty objections to punish students organizing against budget cuts. Just an outrageous abuse of their authority and complete abrogation of their duty of care.
— Our Marquette (@MarquetteUnited) October 31, 2020
This is really shameful. @PresLovell, please intervene and put a stop to this. https://t.co/7mMnIcvPHc
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2020
- Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
- Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
- U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
- KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
- Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
- White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.
A marker of how messed up American institutions are is that people are legitimately on pins and needles about the outcome of an election where one candidate is up by **12 points** https://t.co/fESg3xdi3q
— Maya Sen (@maya_sen) October 31, 2020
the ole “critical fail” https://t.co/L7ixI3eQQr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020
hard to believe there’s just three days until I’m shot dead in the street during post-election civil unrest
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020
there’s a HORSE loose in the HOSPITAL and tomorrow
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 2, 2020
WE
VOTE
THE
HORSE
OUT
- Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
- Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
- Respectfully disagree.
- Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
- Dibs.
- How Long Can Gyms Survive?
- And I’m listening…
weirdly, trying to podcast about Vonnegut’s Dr. Kevorkian novelette in the midst of an impending fascist coup has put me in a somewhat dour mood
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
November 2, 2020 at 9:40 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, America, apocalypse, asteroids, Bond, Canada, CBP, CDC, class struggle, climate change, comics, concentration camps, coronavirus, cruise ships, Dark Souls, democracy, deportation, don't believe the polls, Donald Trump, ecology, English professors, Facebook, failed states, futurity, games, general election 2020, graphic novels, gyms, Hitler, horror, ice, immigration, Joe Biden, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, Marquette, migrants, my media empire, Nazis, obituary, outer space, pandemic, podcasts, police brutality, politics, polling, science, science fiction, Sean Connery, Slaughterhouse-FIve, the Constitution, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, The Ministry for the Future, there's a horse loose in the hospital, undocumented workers, voting, whiteness
Saturday Night Links!
super normal system that allows the next 100,000 years of ecosystem sustainability for human life to be based on the date that a single elderly judge passes away
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 19, 2020
"hypocrisy isn’t the word…it applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to, not parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true."
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 21, 2020
Trump as the guy in the zombie movie who tries to pretend he didn’t get bit is an unexpected but fitting end for the character https://t.co/eYC38BgCOI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 3, 2020
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
Wisconsin is hurtling toward becoming the new epicenter for coronavirus in America.
— Dan Shafer (@DanRShafer) September 23, 2020
It’s also the only state where the Legislature has control over the statewide covid response.
Since gaining that control 133 days ago, the Republicans running the Legislature have done NOTHING. pic.twitter.com/d9GXzH94Is
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
You can complain all you want about McConnell’s hypocrisy, shady strongarm tactics, etc, but the core issue that the Senate is a fundamentally illegitimate institution that enshrines white minority rule and nothing can fix it short of a new Constitution.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 19, 2020
That almost every election rule or norm we have is the poisoned fruit of a program of mass disenfranchisement of women, nonwhite people, and the poor that dates back to the founding is also extremely good https://t.co/zsOGE28JYi
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020
A few years ago I predicted that we were living in a historical simulation about the collapse of the American republic and I have to say I sort of nailed it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
[30 years into the future]
— tef e. birbs (@tef_ebooks) October 1, 2020
me: you know netflix used to send films by post
my amazon smart watch: 0.3% Productivity loss detected. Hourly rate reduced to $1.12 for 7m21s. Please refrain from talking on the packing line. Please say "Productivity" to acknowledge
me: productivity
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.

- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.

Written by gerrycanavan
October 3, 2020 at 8:42 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2020, AAUP, adjunctification, adjuncts, adminsitrative blight, admissions, America, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, austerity, autism, Black Lives Matter, Catholicism, CFPs, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, comics, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brin, decolonize everything, deep time, democracy, demographic cliff, depression, Donald Trump, ecology, endowments, English departments, enrollments, epidemic, extinction, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, genocide, Germany, gig economy, Harry Potter, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, hypocrisy, ICFA, incels, J.K. Rowling, Joe Biden, Jordan Peele, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, leftism, literature, Madison, Marquette, MCU, Milwaukee, Mitch McConnell, monuments, Nixon, Notre Dame, pandemic, political compass, politics, poverty, protest, QAnon, race, racism, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, schools, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, space junk, Star Trek, statement of teaching philosophy, stimulus package, suburbs, Super Mario, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching philosophy, the courts, the economy, the law, Uighurs, unions, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, voting, Walter Benjamin, WandaVision, Watchmen, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, zombies
Thursday Morning Links!
* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.
* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.
* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.
* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.
* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.
* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.
To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp
— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020
Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.
— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020
When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020
1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020
* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.
One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020
you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire
— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020
* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.
It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu
— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020
I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020
so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020
* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.
* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.
* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.
* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.
robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.
* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.
* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.
* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.
* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.
* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.
* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.
* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.
https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705
TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law
DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020
* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.
"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD
— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020
* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.
* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.
* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
* New York’s homeless students.
* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.
* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.
* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.
* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’
* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!
* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?
* When does a model own her own image?
* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.
* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.
Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020
someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020
* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”
* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.
* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.
* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.
* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.
* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.
* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.
Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing
It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?
Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL
Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU
— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019
* We stan.
* Time Travel as White Privilege.
* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.
* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.
* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?
* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.
* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 17, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, America, Ancillary Review of Books, animals, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Black Lives Matter, Bob Barr, California, capitalism, Caster Semenya, children, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, college, college football, college sports, Colorado, concentration camps, copyright, coronavirus, COVID-19, Darko Suvin, David Graeber, democracy, deportation, depression, DOJ, Donald Trump, Dune, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, education, epidemic, eugenics, Evo Morales, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, film, floods, food, Fort Hood, games, gender, Georgia, guns, heat ray, HHS, homelessness, How the University Works, ice, immigration, income inequality, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, J.K. Rowling, Jessica Krug, Joe Biden, John Cage, Journal of Science Fiction, kids today, Legend of Zelda, liberalism, Louis DeJoy, Marquette, Michigan, movies, Muppets, musicals, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, necroliberalism, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Octavia Butler, Oregon, Orlando, outer space, pandemic, paranoia, parents, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, photography, podcasts, politics, presidential election 2020, protest, QAnon, race, racism, reality TV, Rice, Robert's Rules of Order, science fiction, Scott Pilgrim, screen time, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, self-driving cars, serial killers, sperm donation, sports, teaching, Tenet, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, the Senate, the truth is out there, this is fine, time travel, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unemployment, universal basic income, Utopia, Venezuela, Venus, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Washington, West Coast, whistleblowers, White House, white privilege, white saviors, wildfires, Won't somebody think of the children?, wormholes, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, Zoom
Behold: MEGALINKS
* We had an amazing department retreat yesterday morning with a ton of really generative conversations, including a long discussion with Marquette’s Black Student Council about how their English classes failed them. Too many resources to link to, but here are some highlights: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. What If We Didn’t Grade? A Bibliography. How I Contract Grade. Teaching and the N-Word: Things to Consider. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop. Against Cop Shit.
* My essay on “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” from Paradoxa 31 is finally out! Read Ali Sperling’s introduction here!
* I was on Marquette’s COVID Conversations podcast this week, talking about rereading and Grad School Vonnegut.
* More Marquette news: Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. President Lovell’s son withdraws from university after posting racist, sexist remarks on social media.
* New MA program in Science Fiction and Fantasy at Richmond University.
* UNC has two clusters and classes began five days ago. University of Tennessee at Knoxville has 28 cases. Notre Dame has 44 cases on campus after one week. East Carolina University police shut down 20 parties, one with nearly 400 students, days into fall semester. A Mississippi town welcomed students back to school last week. Now 116 are home in quarantine. Students at school touted by Pence for reopening must quarantine due to COVID-19. Nine People Test Positive for COVID-19 at Georgia School That Went Viral Over Crowded Hallways. And 97,000 More. Its Plan Is Risky, Its Community Is Vulnerable, and Cases Are Surging. Why Is This University Reopening? So Georgia privatized its dorms and now they have to fill up the dorms so the company makes its money? Sounds totally normal. ‘The kids will forget’: Custodians, housekeepers and other support staff brace for college reopenings. Wisconsin colleges’ fall plans hinge on testing thousands of students for COVID-19. Will it be enough to keep campuses open? Worrying new research suggests children may be biologically similar to humans, could even carry some of the same diseases. Virus keeps spreading as schools begin to open, frightening parents and alarming public health officials. Mississippi teacher’s death during first week of school stokes COVID-19 outbreak fears. Within 11 days of schools opening, dozens of students and teachers have gotten COVID-19: ‘I truly wish we’d kept our children home.’ Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave. Lost Summer. Remember to think happy thoughts. And never stop the hustle.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1291717016907390976
* Massive COVID-19 outbreak hits Rutgers football team. The Big Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall football. CSU athletes, staff say athletic administration covering up COVID-19 health threat. Trump Is The Main Reason We Won’t Have College Football. #BigTenUnited.
This is a good rule that I’ve tried to informally follow for the past few years. “Student-athlete” is a term of art, created so the NCAA and its member institutions could dodge worker’s compensation claims. Sportswriters don’t have to use it. https://t.co/stZKzAjLIB
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) August 10, 2020
University of Pittsburgh withholding graduate student access to email until agreeing to assume risk of catching COVID pic.twitter.com/fHbH60iDoT
— Rachel C (@RCoombsScience) August 6, 2020
My [67m] unpaid college athletes [20m, 21m, 19m, 21m, 21m, 18m, 19m, 22m, 20m, 21m, 22m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 18m, 21m, 21m, 20m, 19m, 20m, 18m, 21m, 20m, 22m, 23m, 20m, 19m, 21m, 19m, 23m, 20m, 22m, 18m, 19m, 21m, 20m] are unionizing
— Trevin Flickinger (@trevin_flick) August 10, 2020
* The other crisis facing higher education. Fall’s Looming Child-Care Crisis. KSU employees told if they telework, they may have to prove they have childcare.
* Teachers Aren’t Sacrificial Lambs. No Essential Worker Is. Cancel College. Keep Campus Closed. The Biggest Cuts Need to Come from the Top. Making Remote Learning Relevant. Beyond the Neoliberal University. Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces. Not Expendable. On Refusal.
* Wild story of a hoax COVID death at ASU hits the New York Times.
* Advice for teaching this fall.
* The Reality of Covid-19 Is Hitting Teens Especially Hard. Coronavirus Turmoil Raises Depression Risks in Young Adults. CDC: One quarter of young adults contemplated suicide during pandemic. What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Hitting the Wall.
* Scientists Say Lithium Should Be Added to Drinking Water to Prevent Suicides.
* The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. Winter is coming: Why America’s window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 is closing. How COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
* I said this on this Slate podcast, but perhaps it’s worth saying here, too. Fall and winter will be bad. So give yourself a mental and social break now, socialize outdoors responsibly, and build up stamina again for the long road ahead.The Winter Will Be Worse.
* Another illegal Trump administration policy, and yet another premature Trump administration victory lap. Trump aides exploring executive actions to curb voting by mail. The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election. Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. What a Mail Carrier Is Seeing on the Ground Right Now. You’ve Got No Mail. What Democrats Have to Do to Save the Postal Service in Time for the Election. The George W. Bush Administration Lives on in Donald Trump. Team Trump Isn’t Even Hiding Its Support for QAnon Kooks Anymore. Makes the Kanye thing seem almost quaint. Thank God for Elizabeth Warren.
* The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked. Getting from November to January.
* QAnon as alternate reality game. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. Mt. Rushmore is the final level.
* Meanwhile: Census to stop counting Americans a month early amid growing fears of an undercount.
NEW: @jacobbogage got USPS data showing at least 671 USPS mail sorting machines have been removed across the country since June. Represents a reduction in national mail sorting capacity of 21.4 million pieces of mail per hour. https://t.co/6lOGfByZBC pic.twitter.com/FGV1nto0kn
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) August 14, 2020
Photo taken in Wisconsin. This is happening right before our eyes. They are sabotaging USPS to sabotage vote by mail. This is massive voter suppression and part of their plan to steal the election. pic.twitter.com/QXLWGIHTrz
— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) August 15, 2020
It has been conceded by everyone of all parties that the majority of Americans who will attempt to vote in November will vote for Joe Biden, and our election is now some sort of mass game show where we will see if the majority of Americans complete the physical challenges or not
— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) August 10, 2020
This is all going to get worse before it gets even worse
— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) August 15, 2020
The Wisconsin State Assembly gerrymander is arguably the most effective partisan gerrymander in the country. Nothing, and I mean nothing, not even if Biden wins by double of what he's polling at now, will break that Republican majority. https://t.co/p9iZTfh7Fp pic.twitter.com/QeyXnjDesC
— Chaz Nuttycombe (@ChazNuttycombe) August 2, 2020
This is the worst gerrymander the country, change my mind. pic.twitter.com/HVS7rYB4sO
— Kiran 🗳 (@MichiganKiran) August 10, 2020
* Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon. A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus. The Odds of Catching Covid on a Flight Are Slim. What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway. The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back. Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation. Bad News About Those COVID-Sniffing Dogs. ‘Everyone tested positive’: Covid devastates agriculture workers in California’s heartland. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works. Scientists Uncover Biological Signatures of the Worst Covid-19 Cases. Candyland and the Polio Wards. Abolish nursing homes.
* Masks May Reduce Viral Load. Homeless people not getting coronavirus in the disastrous waves experts had feared. The Virus Is Killing Young Floridians. Race Is a Big Factor. If You Love Your Family, Stay the Hell Away From Them.
* Coronavirus shutdown causes new risk at CDC: Legionnaire’s disease.
* ‘This is unstoppable’: America’s midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge.
* First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak.
* One death every 80 seconds: The grim new toll of COVID-19 in America. Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States.
* The coronavirus has laid bare the flaws in our economy. Can we remake it to be more inclusive of all Americans? Wave of evictions expected as moratoriums end in many states. How The Eviction Crisis Could Compound Voter Suppression Come November. America Could Have ‘Great Depression’ Levels of Homelessness by Year’s End. One-Third of American Renters Expected to Miss Their August Payment. Bring on Trump’s Half-Baked Executive Orders. An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right. ‘Economic tsunami’: US cities and states hit by Covid-19 face dire budget cuts. The Covid-19 Crisis Has Wiped Out Nearly Half Of Black Small Businesses. In the meantime, gimme that stimmie. No Relief in Sight. The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package. The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives. R Is for Recession Unless We Can Go Below 1. Ten bucks left, no place to go. None of us asked to be laid off. In These Neighborhoods, the Jobless Rate May Top 30 Percent. A growing side effect of the recession. Shecession.
* My “Eastman’s Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Well, at least they’re sorry.
* Read in the light of traditional craft values, the constitutional text, we think, demonstrates convincingly that there has been no legitimate president of the United States since Zachary Taylor. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says.
* Trump’s tweets about saving the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” explained.
* Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. KSR: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?
* A great multiverse story from Ted Chiang, from his latest collection: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
* Diacritics special issue on terraforming.
* it me
* Yes, you have heard this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.
* Incredible development of the Alex Morse story. The Left Needs to Stop Falling for Absurd Sex Panics.
* Parents Like Me Shouldn’t Have to Fight This Hard to Ensure Schools Go Remote.
* The Seven Right-Wing Attacks Against Kamala Harris. The DNC Is Still a Week Away and I’m Already Annoyed. The first piece of Biden propaganda that’s ever worked on me.
… this is the “hägar the horrible” comic strip framed on biden’s desk. pic.twitter.com/fqNcuW8ceC
— fake nick ramsey @ 🏡 (@nick_ramsey) August 11, 2020
The next time someone runs for president who wasn’t personally selected by Joe Biden for the job could be as far away as 2036. So a single bad decision by Barack Obama in 2008 screwed up the next 20-30 years. https://t.co/JdTKPChPen
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020
it’s awesome how Joe Biden gets to set the direction of the leftmost party in the world’s imperial hyperpower for what could be the most important decade in human history and no one can really explain why he’s the nominee or even how he won exactly
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 11, 2020
* some conditions may apply https://t.co/yJ8yxSsSZI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020
* Deputies accused of being in secret societies cost L.A. County taxpayers $55 million, records show. Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest. Which NYPD officers have most complaints against them? Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X.’ Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. “Police detained and handcuffed a Black mother and four children after mistaking their SUV for a stolen motorcycle from another state.”
* When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal.
* Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.
* Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change. Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases – study. What Climate Scientists Really Think. Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California. U.S. Sees Up to Six Major Atlantic Hurricanes Forming This Year. Canadian ice shelf area bigger than Manhattan collapses due to rising temperatures. An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it. It’s Worse in Cedar Rapids Than You Know. A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. The evolution of Extinction Rebellion.
* Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained.
* Disney World Set To Reduce Hours After Bob Chapek Admits People Are Cancelling Trips. Disney posts its first quarterly loss since 2001.
* Avatar-mania has hit my house hard, so this comes just in time: The Legend of Korra’s messy, complicated legacy.
* The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture. How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.
* The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?
* The Great Captain Planet/Hitler Face-off of 1995.
* Hamilton in the Time of Trump.
* ok here we go. DRAGONLANCE characters as academic types, a thread. 1/
tag yourself I’m pretty sure I’m Tanis and I don’t like it https://t.co/DIHNkx7S9M
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 10, 2020
* Once more, with feeling: Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.
* Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel.
* Paramount’s New President Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About the Star Trek Movies. Star Trek: Lower Decks Is an Entertaining Entry in a Franchise Suffering an Identity Crisis.
* Thinking about Watchmen: A Film Quarterly Roundtable.
* College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots.
* Wireless phone charging is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
This is such a perfect example of modern innovation in action — wireless charging, which saves us like 0.001 seconds every time we plug in our phones, uses up to *50% more energy*.
Nearly imperceptible convenience, at massive social costhttps://t.co/epfFenCJku
— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) August 5, 2020
* Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages. How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley. Reports: Facebook Fires Employee Who Shared Proof of Right Wing Favoritism. Buzzfeed confirms.
* TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
Gotta feel for this kid. His 66 person American town is only accessible by road to the Canadian side where most people live, so now he's the only kid his age and because of what's happening in the unconnected rest of the country he's forced to stay on his side indefinitely. https://t.co/OqJjY0xJMA
— Evan Hadfield (@Evan_Hadfield) August 8, 2020
* New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation.
* Zombie stories are going to have to change.
* They stole the house out from under Angela? Damn that’s cold.
Funny how it's always "The Simpsons predicted the future" and never "We created ourselves a nightmare world beyond parody".
— Kung Fu Monster D (@Duerer95) August 4, 2020
zizek on sesame street talking to the puppets “no i cannot say, as you do, ‘i love you’ so casually, i believe this is obscene, love is deeply private, so particular it is really almost evil”
— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) August 15, 2020
someone check the simulation heat sinks, reality generation is clearly being throttled by high temps pic.twitter.com/W3NlLzSGOx
— lvl 45 chaos chatterton potus (@thetomzone) August 6, 2020
All these tweets about "2020 please end already" remind me of an old communist joke:
Two friends meet in the middle of Bucharest:
– How are you doing these days?
– Average. Worse than last year, better than next year.— Orel Beilinson (@BeilinsonOrel) August 11, 2020
Uber exists entirely through its wild abuse of existing laws and even then it loses money hand over fist https://t.co/peeHu0EvJy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2020
* The Princess Bride Board Game Is an Inconceivably Good Idea.
* Extremely my shit: I made a set of Twilight Struggle cards based on the Bond films.
* Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski. Netflix, fresh from cancelling her series, is there with praisehands emoji.
* I prefer to think of this as BSG-style anti-Cylon security rather than incredibly terrifying.
* How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.
* Still waiting for this shoe to drop.
* Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again.
* ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.
* The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.
* Look what one of my former students had made! Thanks @GingerSnap!
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2020 at 1:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, actually existing media bias, Alex Morse, America, ants, Are we living in a simulation?, Arizona State University, Avatar, Battlestar Galactica, Beirut, birthers, Black Lives Matter, Black Student Council, blackface, Bond, Candyland, capitalism, Captain Planet, CEOs, CFPs, child care, China, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, clothes, college, college football, comics, cop shit, coronavirus, corpocracy, COVID-19, cruises, decolonize everything, democracy, depression, derecho, diabetes, dibs on the screenplay, Disney, Disney World, dogs, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, ecology, energy, epidemic, essential workers, eviction, explosions, Extinction Rebellion, Facebook, family, fantasy, fascism, FiveThirtyEight, Flannery O'Connor, Florida, flu season, fMRIs, fraud, futurity, games, general election 2020, genocide, gerrymandering, Grad School Vonnegut, grading, grift, Hagar the Horrible, Hamilton, Hitler, hoaxes, homelessness, hospitals, How the University Works, hurricanes, ice sheet collapse, immunology, indigenous futurism, Iowa, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, Kamala Harris, kids today, labor, lame duck session, LAPD, layoffs, Lebanon, Legionnaire's disease, lithium, Louisiana, Lower Decks, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Marquette English, masks, McDonald's, mental health, Millard Fillmore, Mt. Rushmore, my media empire, Nate Silver, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, Notre Dame, NRA, nuclearity, nursing homes, NYPD, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, pandemic, Paradoxa, parody, pedagogy, podcasts, poetry, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, Ponzi schemes, post-truth, power, protest, QAnon, race, racial slurs, racism, radiators, remote learning, Rent, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, sex, sitcoms, Slaughterhouse Five, social media, Star Trek, strikes, suicide, syllabi, teachers, teaching, Ted Chiang, terraforming, the Anthropocene, the Census, the economy, The Last Airbender, the Left, The Legend of Korra, The Legend of Zelda, The Matrix, the Midwest, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the suburbs, TikTok, tourism, true crime, Twilight Struggle, Twitter, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, unions, useful idiots, USPS, USSR, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, Wachowskis, war on education, Watchmen, white supremacy, Who's the Boss?, wildfire, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, Zelda, zombies, Žižek
Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else
* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.
* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”
* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.
* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!
* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.
* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s cruel to hold individuals responsible for the continued spread of Covid-19. Unemployment has risen to over 30 million in ~30 days, and yet states are beginning to reopen. Millions will have lost their livelihood for nothing.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Rather than take responsibility for our safety by providing adequate financial support and guidance, our local and national governments have continued to waver, providing confused “recomensations” rather than clear, reasoned dictates with accompanying supports.
— gal debored (@__acadame) May 5, 2020
Capitalism is so thoroughly naturalized as a “law” that we are going to allow our society to crash into a decade-long depression rather than leverage our vast existing resources to solve an eminently solvable, temporary problem.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.
* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.
* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.
* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.
* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.
* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.
* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?
* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.
* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.
* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.
* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.
People are doing their best, and local districts/unis are doing better or worse, but the speed with which everyone agreed the ADA no longer applies to anything is disturbing
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2020
Here is a photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I. The photo was taken by a student, Thomas Carter. It was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeal. pic.twitter.com/jgVvgtlUbK
— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) May 6, 2020
This 102 year old photo made my day. pic.twitter.com/0hrjXlmtGm
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) May 8, 2020
* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.
* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.
* Four months as a private prison guard.
* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.
* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.
* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.
* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.
* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.
* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.
* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.
* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.
* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?
* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.
* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.
* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.
* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.
* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.
* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.
* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.
* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.
* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* How we got to Sesame Street.
* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.
* CBS All-Access gonna try again.
* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.
* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.
* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.
[Don Draper voice] The Hamburgler isn't burgling hamburgers. He's burgling comfort, he's burgling security. He's burgling America
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) May 13, 2017
* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.
* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?
* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.
* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.
* No one knows what a g looks like.
* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.
* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread
* society if dads went to therapy
* made a Rube Goldberg machine
* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.
* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 22, 2020 at 9:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, a man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life, ADA, after America, air travel, Airbnb, Amazon, America, Animal Crossing, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, billionaires, Black Mirror, Bong Joon-ho, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Captain Pike, captalism, carbon, CFPs, Charlie Brooker, child abuse, class struggle, Cleveleand, climate change, coal, comics, commuting, coronavirus, COVID-19, cruises, democracy, disability, disease, Disney, Donald Trump, DoorDash, eating meat, education, Elizabeth Warren, environmentalism racism, essential workers, evil, Extrapolation, family, floods, games, Gargoyles, general strike, Georgia, grief, Hemingway, Huntington's disease, ice sheet collapse, Iron Man, Jaimee Hills, Joe Biden, John Brown, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, Lyft, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, medicine, Michigan, Milwaukee, Mother Nature, Muppets, murder hornets, my misspent youth, Nancy Pelosi, NASA, neural nets, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, organ donation, pandemic, Pentagon, Plain Dealer, podcasts, poetry, police dogs, politics, pollution, private prisons, psychology, quarantine, race, racism, remote learning, Republicans, resilience, restaurants, rich people, Rube Goldberg, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, seagulls, Seattle, Second Great Depression?, Sesame Street, SimRefinery, six-word stories, soccer, Sopranos, Spanish flu, sports, Star Trek, STEM, Strange New Worlds, strikes, submarines, the Arctic, the Constitution, the economy, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, The Onion, therapy, Uber, unemployment, unions, USPS, vaccines, Wall Street, war on education, wealth, wildfires, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, X-Men, Zoom
Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links
* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).
* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”
* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.
* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.
* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.
Look, let's be real. The ultimate reason the economy "must" "reopen" is so that we everyone can once more be individually blamed for their own unemployment, desperation, etc in this coming depression. It is fundamentally dangerous to our system to have masses of people 1/2
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
simultaneously unable to work or make basic ends meet in a way that would suggest blame lies elsewhere than on them (whether in the virus, our leaders' failures, quarantine orders, market chicanery, etc), that is collectively experienced, and that might give them ideas. 2/3
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
this pandemic sharpens a divide that already existed, between those of us whose labor is "inessential" but who have the privilege of, basically, hibernating indefinitely, and those whose labor is "essential," but whose lives are treated as disposable
— Eric Weiskott (@ericweiskott) April 5, 2020
Everything we're doing – IE tokenistic "aid" (which just funnels money back to creditors and landlords) – is just the barest minimum not for survival, but to ensure that we can blame people for their own starvation and misery once things are "normal" again. That's it. 3/3
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
The wildcat strikes that are happening across the country now are important not just for their immediate goal of saving lives but in the long term they are the only thing we have to face down the monstrosity of austerity that this pandemic will leave it its wake.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) April 10, 2020
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wild billinair he parbly ben the las wyld billinair on Longisland any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint looking to see none agen. https://t.co/Q2xpiRAM1f
— Gregory Hays (@aristofontes) April 3, 2020
2020 is going really well. My timeline is mostly debating:
1. Would you kill a million Americans to save the economy?
2. Is it possible to save the economy by killing a million Americans?— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) April 16, 2020
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.
* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.
* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.
* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.
Hearing on Facebook that Zizek is uploading new chapters to his COVID book like DLC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.
* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.
* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.
* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.
* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.
* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.
Milwaukee resident Jennifer Taff requested an absentee ballot almost three weeks ago, never got it. She has a father dying from lung disease and then waited hours in line to vote at Washington High School. Photo from Patricia McKnight.
More: https://t.co/i7weo2xdfv pic.twitter.com/ceHb2i8zpC
— JR Radcliffe (@JRRadcliffe) April 7, 2020
The City of Milwaukee is experiencing a surge of cases on the south side, Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik says.
— Mary Spicuzza (@MSpicuzzaMJS) April 17, 2020
* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.
The United States is a failed state: Five theses. pic.twitter.com/VbtrsZajIH
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) April 6, 2020
By including Kentucky, we are telling Iowa and Dakotas things about themselves in a tone that only Upper Midwesterners can hear. https://t.co/aQvfAdWTSZ
— Maggie Koerth (@maggiekb1) April 16, 2020
* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.
* Vegas after the end of the world.
This is going to be one of the iconic images of the pandemic, from photographer @todseelie:
Homeless Americans sleeping in taped squares in a parking lot, while the Las Vegas strip, full of empty hotel rooms, shimmers behind them. https://t.co/Sy2Qq5rcpK pic.twitter.com/QRZHckPZrt
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) April 15, 2020
* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.
* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?
EXACTLY https://t.co/tC1Djqb5FV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020
* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.
* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.
* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.
* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.
* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.
* In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.
* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.
Opening up the economy prematurely will kill off every small and marginal business in the country even if you don’t immediately have to go into shutdown again three weeks later (which you would). People are too freaked and won’t spend at their own levels, esp. in wide gatherings.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020
oh so no more restaurants then https://t.co/DOJTeDaway
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020
Money is a social fiction, which you see in the way they can simply summon more out of the aether when they need it. But the amount of debt spending we’re all about to do is going to be hard to honor afterwards when we know perfectly well we could just say it all never happened.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 9, 2020
* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.
* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?
* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.
since the world is filled with rhinos and you can’t catch them all, you need social forms that are generous, resilient, and devoted to harm reduction, elimination, and amelioration, rather than the incredibly brittle and cruel modes of social organization we use now
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
the coronavirus memes are extremely good pic.twitter.com/3dkZMAeFIk
— love one another (@girlziplocked) April 13, 2020
* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.
* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.
* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.
Another rare but instantly iconic shot of the Muppets being puppeteered. Apparently Sesame Street is filming at their homes. pic.twitter.com/Fj8to2P1Wu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
* The case for teaching depressing books.
* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.
* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.
* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.
* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.
* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?
* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.
* why would her name be doogie too
* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.
* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?
I thought I’d predicted a PICARD-style deconstruction of the original jouissance of SAVED BY THE BELL, revealing the characters destroyed by time, but perhaps that one was just for me https://t.co/9a2vSCn7ZT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020
* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.
* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.
* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.
* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.
One way of thinking the Anthropocene is that it is when geological time starts to move more quickly than historical time.
— chica marx (@mckenziewark) April 17, 2020
* At least this Hamilton video was fun.
* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.
* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 17, 2020 at 4:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, admissions, Adrian Tchaikovsky, AI, air pollution, alienation, aliens, Amazon, America, America in ruins, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, backwards universes, baseball, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, black swans, books, Boomers, call for papers, Cape Cod Statement, cats, Charles Yu, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, class struggle, climate change, COBOL, collapse, college, comics, Corey Robin, coronavirus, cost of thriving, COVID-19, cruises, cyberpunk, Deep Space 9, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, devolution, Donald Trump, Doogie Howser, elections, epidemic, extrasolar planets, failed states, Fox News, Fraggle Rock, futurity, general election 2020, grading, gray rhinos, guns, Hamilton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hugos, Joe Biden, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Las Vegas, lawsuits, LEGO, Los Angeles, medicine, megadrought, memes, Miami, middle class, Mike Pence, Milwaukee, money, movie theaters, Muppets, Navajo Nation, outer space, pandemic, podcasts, politics, Port Huron Statement, professional wrestling, protest, race, racism, Reddit, release the butthole cut, remdesivir, Republicans, resistance, restaurants, revolution, Saved by the Bell, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, stimulus, Stonehenge, strikes, Students for a Democratic Society, Tawain, teaching, the Anthropocene, The Apprentice, the economy, the humanities, the Midwest, The Ministry for the Future, the Moon, the sublime, the university in ruins, travel, UBI, unemployment, Utopia, vaccines, veepstakes, Vegas, voting, Weird Al, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, WWE, Žižek
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.
That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 2, 2020 at 6:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, America, apocalypse, art, Big Oil, Big Soda, Britney Spears, Chicago, children's books, China Miéville, class struggle, college, college sports, condoms, coronovirus, crisis, cruise ships, Dan Albergotti, democracy, Democrats, depression, divorce, DNC, domestic violence, Donald Trump, eating meat, ecology, Elon Musk, Extrapolation, federalism, Felix Guattari, film, financial exigency, Frosthaven, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, hippos, homelessness, How the University Works, Joe Biden, journalism, kids today, language, Last Supper, loneliness, mad science, magnets, maps, Mario, medicine, Milwaukee, my scholarly empire, NCAA, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, originalism, Pablo Escobar, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, Picard, plastic, poetry, police, politics, postdocs, prison-industrial complex, recession, remote learning, Republicans, revolution, Rick and Morty, Samuel R. Delany, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, strikes, teaching, Ted Chiang, television, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The World's End, TNG, toilet paper, unemployment, Utopia, voting, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, xkcd, YA literature, Zoom
Happy Captain Picard Day Links!
* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.
* The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.
* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).
* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.
* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.
* The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.
* Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.
* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.
* Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.
* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.
This is also why the gig economy has such incredibly high turn-over. Once you’ve put 100k miles on your car for peanuts, you’re suddenly hit with the bill for a new transmission or whatever. Wiped out. These companies chew through desperation and spit out destitution.
— DHH (@dhh) January 28, 2020
* The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.
* The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.
* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?
* It would sell! It would sell.
proud to announce my friends at Pfizer and the MIT Media Lab have a pill you take every morning that makes you forget the day before and believe our government has some fundamental legitimacy; the effects last till around evening, when you'll see ads for it on major news networks
— supererogatory masochism (@PatBlanchfield) January 27, 2020
* Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.
* Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.
* Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.
* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.
* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.
* And in a dark time, true art finds a way.
If there is to be one piece of art left for some alien intelligence to find and ruminate over among the ruins of the human race, I hope it's this one. https://t.co/qkG4vUttUK
— Nathan Ballingrud (@NBallingrud) January 28, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
January 30, 2020 at 10:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020 Democratic primary, abolish the Senate, adjunctification, adjuncts, America, another world is possible, art, Bernie Sanders, capitalism, class struggle, climate change, climate fascism, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, Donald Trump, Duquesne, Duquesne University, emojis, forgetting, fossil fuels, general election 2020, Generation X, gig economy, Joe Biden, license plates, Lyft, maps, memory, Mike Schur, Minneapolis, neoliberalism, Nintendo, nostalgia, NYPD, old millennials, Parks and Recreation, Picard, police, police state, politics, rewilding, rising sea levels, science, sex offenders, Star Trek, television, the Arctic, The Good Place, the Holocaust, the Senate, Uber, unions, Untitled Goose Game, Vermont
Monday Night Links!
* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.
* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.
* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.
* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.
Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV
— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019
* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.
* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.
* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.
* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?
* The university in ruins in Buffalo.
* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.
Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019
* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.
* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.
* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.
* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.
* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.
* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.
* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.
* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.
* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.
* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.
* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.
* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.
* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.
* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.
* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.
* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.
2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ
— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019
Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019
* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.
* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.
* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.
* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?
* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.
* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.
* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.
* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?
* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.
sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019
Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019
What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019
* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.
"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019
* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.
* The Case Against the Popular Vote.
* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.
* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.
found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7
— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019
* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.
* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.
* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.
* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.
* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.
* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.
* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.
* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.
* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.
* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.
* This game should be illegal.
* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.
* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.
* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.
* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.
* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.
* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.
* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.
Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019
* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.
In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.
* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.
* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.
* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.
* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.
* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.
* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.
* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.
* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.
* How we invest in our cities is broken.
* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.
* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.
* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.
* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.
* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.
* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.
* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.
* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.
* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.
* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.
* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.
* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.
* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.
Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019
* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.
* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?
* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 23, 2019 at 3:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 737 Max, academic freedom, Achille Mbembe, Africa, air travel, aliens, Alzheimer's disease, America, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, Area 51, artificial intelligence, asteroids, autism, Boeing, Buffalo, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, charter schools, China, class struggle, climate change, climate grief, climate strike, clowns, college footballs, college sports, comics, communism, consciousness, conspiracy theories, copyright, Cory Doctorow, cultural preservation, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, drugs, Duke, ecology, Electoral College, electric cars, Elizabeth Warren, English departments, essays, evolutionary psychology, fast food, film, first contact, flat Earthers, Florida, Florida Keys, Foxconn, free college, free speech, Frozen II, games, games studies, gender, Generation Z, genius, gig economy, graffiti, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, Groundhog Day, guns, Harvard, High Line, How the University Works, Hunter Biden, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Impossible Burger, indigenous futurism, industrial agriculture, Islamophobia, Israel, James Tiptree Jr., Jeffrey Epstein, Joanna Russ, Joe Biden, John Milton, Johns Hopkins, kids today, King of Kong, Koch brothers, language, legacy admissions, logos, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michael Vick, military-industrial complex, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT Media Lab, modern art, MOOCs, Muppets, names, necropolitics, neoliberalism, New Mexico, New York, NLRB, nuclear power, opioids, organ theft, Orwell, over-educated literary theory PhDs, OxyContin, Palestine, pencils, Peter Pan, physics, plagiarism, plantations, podcasts, politics, popular vote, Posadism, Princess Bride, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, recycling, reproducibility crisis, Republicans, resistance, retirement, revolution, San Francisco, Sandy Hook, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saved by the Bell, scams, school-to-prison pipeline, science, science fiction, Scrabble, sea level rise, Sesame Street, Shakespeare, Shampoodler, since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun, socialism, space elevator, standardized testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, strikes, student debt, student movements, Superfund sites, the afterlife, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Bahamas, the Capitalocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the kids are all right, The Little Mermaid, The Lost Girls, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, TikTok, Tiptree award, Tolkien, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, trees, TurnItIn, Two Americas, UFOs, Ukraine, UNC, unions, University of Buffalo, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, vaccines, war on education, wellness, Wes Anderson, WeWork, white people, Wisconsin, X-Men
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.
* Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.
* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).
* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.
* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.
* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?
* Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.
“what was called normalcy was a hyperviolent multi-generational ponzi scheme rendered inoperable by accelerating ecological crisis” https://t.co/IPUGLl9ArZ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 14, 2019
* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.
* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.
* Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.
* What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?
Fantastic Four #1 established a lot of canon, but perhaps none so firmly as Reed Richards' inability to read a room. pic.twitter.com/FvZ0i8XgFp
— (((Jay Edidin))) (@NotLasers) September 15, 2019
* Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.
* When a woman ran for president in 1872.
* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.
* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.
* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.
* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.
* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.
* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 16, 2019 at 8:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #The Resistance, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, air pollution, Alaska, alcoholism, America, apocalypse, art, automation, Brazil, CFPs, chess, climate barbarism, climate change, climate fascism, corruption, democracy, depression, diets, Donald Trump, English majors, Fantastic Four, film, Fredric Jameson, general election 2020, grief, health insurance, ice sheet collapse, IRS, John Mulaney, liberation, Lord of the Rings, mass extinction, memory, mental health, Mike Pence, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mortality, mourning, movie trailers, MTV, music, neoliberalism, normalcy, obituary, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, post office, recession, robots, science fiction, science fiction studies, sexism, socialism, standup comedy, the 1980s, the 2000s, the Amazon, the archives, The Cars, the Midwest, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, UC Irvine, unions, voting, weird science, wellness
Wednesday Night Links!
* Readers in a frenzy as Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments released early. Why It Matters That Amazon Shipped Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” a Week Early. Look for my review of The Testaments in LARB soon!
Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019
* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.
* The coming death of just about every rock legend.
* CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies.
* The job so nice they posted it twice: Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature.
* Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room. Why I Quit the Writers’ Room.
* The real Dickinson scandal appears only at the margins of Wild Nights with Emily, at the start and at the end. The movie begins with a disclaimer: “The poems and letters of Emily Dickinson are used in this film with permission of Harvard University Press.” But why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.
* As of today there are no longer any children who were alive on 9/11. Never forget the worst comics page in history.
* “The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab.”
* Liberalism can’t defend itself.
* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.
* California to force NCAA to pay athletes. More at the MetaFilter thread.
* Ronan Farrow exposes MIT. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites. The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab.
It turns out that handing over research universities to a handful of billionaire sociopaths was a bad idea https://t.co/HCTJasWOfO
— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019
The MIT fiasco should underscore how fundamentally toxic the entire philanthropy- & billionaire-reliant funding model is for education & research, period. Should be easy to picture the countless email threads just like the Ito/Epstein chats with Saudi princes, opioid dealers, etc
— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019
I know “the ivory tower of leftist academia” is a thing people murmur incessantly, but anyone in a university community knows they’re hidebound institutions that hoover money and prop oligarchies on every level, and if the Epstein MIT news gets us talking more about that: Good
— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019
* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.
* The WSJ takes aim at the English major, again. Some college major data from the Center on Education and the Workforce.
* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.
I laughed so hard at this pic.twitter.com/wCb8XiUnUZ
— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019
* Another free speech exception.
“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”
Ah, they’ve got nothing on Columbia or NYU.
An autocratic president and a hedge fund operating under cover of a university mission isn't what distinguishes Liberty U from other big privates. https://t.co/mczFLujfiP
— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019
* I worked at a website that rated professors for political bias. This is what I learned.
* ‘UVA has ruined us’: Health system sues thousands of patients, seizing paychecks and putting liens on homes. “Johns Hopkins deliberately puts poor people who seek its care into medical debt so they lose their homes so Johns Hopkins can buy the land for its expansion.”
* Congress Promised Student Borrowers A Break. Education Dept. Rejected 99% Of Them.
* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.
* Inside the cuts at Marquette. Under the circumstances I feel overly relieved that we’ve moved up in the US News rankings.
* When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect.
again, the *purpose* of these exercises is to traumatize children. this is *the purpose.* it is a social pedagogy. and there is a strong chance that anyone who tells you otherwise is literally invested in or otherwise monetizing that trauma https://t.co/hRN2xl2JZL
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019
* Daughter should have been armed, it’s the only way to prevent these things unfortunately.
* Richest Could Lose Hundreds of Billions Under Warren’s Wealth Tax. They wouldn’t even notice it missing.
* UBI Already Exists, We Just Need to Redistribute It.
* Climate change is here. Climate change isn’t an intangible future risk. It’s here now, and it’s killing us. Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. The heat is on. James Cameron says “people need to wake the fuck up” about climate change. Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt. Climate change also means retreat. In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home. Mississippi Beaches Have Been Vacant For 2 Months As A Toxic Algae Bloom Lurks Offshore. Tired: The Anthropocene. Wired: The Carnivalocene. The novel in the Anthropocene. Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.
* Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water. Hurricane Dorian Survivors Were Turned Away & That’s A Chilling Look At Our Future.
* NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump. I knew he’d slip up eventually!
* Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia: Cli-fi books for the young-adult reader.
* Agribusiness against the Amazon.
* From the mixed-up files of the top Republican gerrymanderer.
* Today in the wisdom of markets.
* For every grift, a mark: Meet The Hyperloop’s Truest Believers.
* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”
* And speaking of white fragility.
That people expect to have pleasant fun trips to former slave plantations tells you everything you need to know about this country's failure to deal with the legacy of slavery.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019
* Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent.
* TWO MONTHS BEFORE my operation, I dreamed I was a character in a video game. As sometimes happens in video games, I died. When I respawned, I had a new face, the face of another woman altogether. Upon discovering this in the dream, I collapsed into my companion’s arms and told her, through tears, that all I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.
* The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained.
* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.
* In Chicago, more than 16,000 students are homeless.
* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.
* Don’t Be Fooled — Kamala Harris’s “Criminal Justice” Plan Is Not Progressive.
* Baby Boomers are charmed by his rose-tinted revisionism. Younger Democrats see the past more clearly. The Historical Amnesia of Joe Biden’s Candidacy.
* Joe Biden can’t stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionaires’ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.
* Imagine if we had a democracy.
* Trump’s already cancelling elections.
* Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas’s theory of race.
* The case for changing the voting age to zero.
* The Fall of the Meritocracy.
* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.
* Rethinking cities, from the ground up. Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.
* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is
* extremely normal very normal
"A 7- or 8-year-old boy was separated from his father, without any explanation… The child was under the delusion
that his father had been killed +
believed that he would also be killed. This child ultimately
required emergency psychiatric care."— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019
* Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona. The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants.
* Made In America: For $9.50 An Hour, They Brew Tear Gas For Hong Kong.
* California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees. UPDATE: Uber already refusing to comply.
* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.
* How We Shut Down the Nation’s Largest Child Detention Center.
* The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort. Gee, I hope someone was fired over that blunder!
* TSA PreCheck: It absolutely shouldn’t exist, and is absolutely an incredible value.
* The struggle to save Day-Glo.
* Whatever happened to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar?
* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.
* A history of Tetris randomizers.
* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.
* 44 African Architectural Styles.
* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.
* A people’s history of labor history.
* They solved the Geedis mystery.
* The Lost Issue of Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man From 1988 – “Dominion.”
* Maid of honor shows up to wedding in T. rex costume after being told she could wear anything.
* Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks.
* Occupations by frequency as mentioned in the lyrics of David Bowie.
* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.
Lego from the 1997 container loss, a monster in my pocket, bungs and balloon wands, cereal packet toys from the 50s and 60s, pegs and pen tops, Vanish bottle caps from a spill in 2015. All found on Cornish beaches. #oceanplastic #anthropocene #plasticheritage pic.twitter.com/AWZGBT6Ktd
— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) September 9, 2019
* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.
* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 11, 2019 at 3:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, administrative blight, admissions, Africa, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amnesia, Animal Man, animals, another world is possible, apocalypse, Apollo Program, apps, architecture, art, authoritarianism, Black Panther, books, California, care work, cars, cartoons, CBP, Center for American Progress, cheating, cheese, Chicago, cities, civilization, Clarence Thomas, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, concentration camps, Corey Robin, corruption, cultural preservation, David Bowie, Day-Glo, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Emily Dickinson, emissions, English majors, enrollment, eugenics, Excuseman, fandom, fans, FBI, feminism, Fermi paradox, France, free speech, futurity, Gamergate, games, gay rights, Geedis, general election 2020, gerrymandering, gig economy, Grant Morrison, guns, Harry Potter, Harvard, homelessness, Hong Kong, How the University Works, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Imagineers, indigenous issues, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, Joe Biden, Johns Hopkins, Kamala Harris, kids today, labor, LEGO, Les Miserables, liberalism, Liberty University, literature, Lyft, maps, Margaret Atwood, Mark Z. Danielewski, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, medical bankruptcy, meritocracy, meth, millennials, Minecraft, MIT, MIT Media Lab, music, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, normality, North Carolina, nostalgia, NRA, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedestrians, plagiarism, plantations, poetry, politics, PreCheck, prison-industrial complex, PTSD, race, racial slurs, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, rich people, science fiction, science fiction studies, sex, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, state's rights, sterilization, straight people, student debt, students, taxes, tear gas, TERFs, Tetris, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the archives, the Bahamas, the courts, The Familiar, The Handmaid's Tale, the hyperloop, the law, the Moon, The Muppets, the Pyrocene, The Testaments, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, toys, trans* issues, trauma, TSA, Twitter, Uber, universal basic income, University of Wisconsin, US News, UVA, voting, Wakanda, Walter Mosley, war on education, wealth, weddings, white fragility, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, yoga, young adult literature, zoos
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.
* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.
* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.
* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.
* Student debt is transforming the American family.
* No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.
* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?
* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.
* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?
* How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?
* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.
Our first images of Abaco from air. pic.twitter.com/rPmXuKDrSD
— Travis C-Carroll (@TravisCC) September 3, 2019
* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.
* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.
* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.
* The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.
* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.
* South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.
* Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.
* The voting machines don’t help, either.
* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.
* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”
This is literally every cohort of kids for the last forty years or more. Dumb fads sweep through again and again, chewing up valuable time in the ONE CHANCE that these kids have to get a basic education. https://t.co/Hl9jSiv8A0
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 3, 2019
* Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.
* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!
Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.
* She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.
* In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.
* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.
* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.
* This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.
This is a hell of a thread. If you're concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police. https://t.co/SiwwLEh8jo
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) September 3, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
September 4, 2019 at 8:34 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, apocalypse, apps, Baby Boomers, Ben and Jerry's, Bernie Sanders, boycotts, Bret Stephens, Britain, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, concentration camps, democracy, democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge, deportation, disability, Donald Trump, drug addiction, ecological humanities, education, educational debt, ethics, fact-checking, fall, Flint, France, free speech, general election 2020, gerrymandering, golf, Goonies, graduate student movements, Grenada, guns, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice, ice cream, immigration, James Tiptree Jr., Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, kids today, lead, Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michigan, millennials, Neal Stephenson, New York Times, North Carolina, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oztmandias, parenting, politics, poverty, Prince, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, publishing, rehab, restaurants, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, sex offenders, slavery, socialism, South Dakota, Tesla, the Bahamas, the courts, the law, the Senate, The Testaments, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tiptree award, unions, Vietnam, violence, voting machines, Waffle House, war crimes, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, water, wildfires, Yemen
Wednesday Links!
* Marquette now requires permission for on-campus protests. An Open Letter Opposed to Marquette U.’s Anti-Demonstration Policy.
Two aspect of Marquette's new protest policy worth noting:
1) All protests must be approved by the administration and in the designated protest era. This recalls the "free speech zones" of the Trump era. Essentially: denude protest of power by hiding it. pic.twitter.com/zh8aG9ztUm— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) August 28, 2019
* Elsewhere in academics behaving badly: Professors rally behind MIT Media Lab director after Epstein funding scandal.
* The Quantitative Easing of the Humanities.
The dangerous essence of the humanities is loyal criticism of the institutions one serves.
— William Pannapacker (@pannapacker) August 27, 2019
* Most-Expensive 4-Year Private Nonprofit Institutions, 2018-19. Impressive for Harvey Mudd to be so committed to that last three dollars to tick just over $75,000/year.
* College Board Drops Its ‘Adversity Score’ For Each Student After Backlash.
✍ by @tomgauld pic.twitter.com/FQ3EkVW12M
— New Scientist (@newscientist) August 26, 2019
* The Next Recession Will Destroy Millennials.
* I just knew it would be something like this.
* This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost. A Q&A With the Man Who Called Bret Stephens a Bedbug. Bret Stephens’s “bedbug” meltdown, explained. Who Gets to Speak Freely? Aaron Bady goes all the way back to 2005 for a good old-fashioned blog post.
Rorschach's journal, August 27, 2019: “Time to do what I long ago promised to do. Twitter is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt. Thanks to all of my followers, but I’m deact
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2019
the thing you have to understand is that university administrations absolutely despise faculty and will gleefully seek out any opportunity to hurt them no matter how petty or embarrassing https://t.co/VZ1b9PotBD
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2019
* Speaking of the mystery of free speech: Incoming Harvard Freshman Deported After Visa Revoked.
“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell them about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all,” he wrote. “After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room , and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.”
* Southern California police arrest 3 middle school students for inciting a riot.
* Photos: The Burning Amazon Rainforest. The basic premise of geoengineering is that it will be easier to get the planetary atmospheric and ecological systems to change the way they work than to get the capitalist economy to change the way it works. It is immoral to have climate change in the era of babies. Wildfires and Floods Push Russia to Revise Its Stance on Climate Change. Let’s just spray trillions of tons of snow on Antarctica?
it cost $350 million to make Avengers: Endgame https://t.co/WOdh4fEcxN
— flglmn (@flglmn) August 26, 2019
The US spends $32 million on its wars – per hour. https://t.co/0oetA6fFod
— Amir (@AmirAminiMD) August 26, 2019
That’s what climate change is. https://t.co/ooGMmSbIw7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2019
* The Affair, climate change, and the new realism.
* Florida Marine vet teacher on leave after telling students he would ‘be the best school shooter.’
* Bigotry and hate are more linked to mass shootings than mental illness, experts say.
* Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S. (A rebuttal.) Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart. Trump Allies Reportedly Set Up Network to Smear Journalists Ahead of Election. He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
* The Entire Plane of the Milky Way Captured in a Single Photo. Keep scrolling, there’s more!
* A reading list on alcoholism.
* School Administration Reminds Female Students Bulletproof Vests Must Cover Midriff.
* Native American Lacrosse Teams Reported Racial Abuse. Then Their League Expelled Them.
* When your kids start beating you in games.
* Where the candidates campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Democracy Better Than Republicans Do.
* When you’re extremely on message.
* Dairy Queen burgers are not made of human flesh, a county coroner is forced to confirm. He’s in on it.
* Johnson & Johnson must pay over $572 million for its role in Oklahoma opioid crisis, judge rules.
* Drug prices in 2019 are surging, with hikes at 5 times inflation.
As 1/4 of diabetics ration their insulin to survive, here's how much Pharma execs rake in:
Regeneron: $118M
Merck: $49M
Pfizer: $47M
Johnson & Johnson: $46M
Abbott: $32M
Gilead: $22M
Eli Lilly: $14MPharma's greed is as lethal as the diseases they’re supposed to be treating.
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 23, 2019
* 2 California towns where chickens have free range.
* Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say.
* A growing army of ‘Airbnb’ police gets paid to expose the addresses of homeshare hosts.
* Human-guided burrito bots raise questions about the future of robo-delivery.
* More evidence of YouTube rightwing radicalization. In a study of >79 million YouTube comments, @manoelribeiro et. al. shows that a high % of people who now comment on Alt-Right videos used to comment exclusively on IDW or Alt-lite videos.
* ProPublica found that – despite the TSA saying it is committed to treating all passengers equally and fairly – five per cent of civil rights complaints against the TSA related to the treatment of trans passengers, despite trans people making up less than one per cent of the US population.
* Lots of nerds *think* they like science fiction because of the technology and perditions.
* Marvel Comics Just Retconned the Entire Vietnam War.
* There Are People Who Think The West Invaded Iraq Over a Stargate.
* Mystery Deepens Around Newly Detected Ripples in Space-Time.
* “We are in a mass delusion that it’s all Gary, that he’s the father of role-playing games,” he said. “Humans do not like to admit they’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled.”
* We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture. The Campbell Award gets a new name.
* How Do We Colonize the Moon?
* And submitted for your approval: the new culture industry.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 28, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adversity score, Airbnb, alcoholism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, alt-right, Amazon, America, Andrew Luck, Antarctica, apps, artificial intelligence, bedbugs, bigotry, Bolsonaro, Bret Stephens, burritos, California, cannibalism, capitalism, CBP, chickens, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Congress, cosmology, culture industry, Dairy Queen, democracy, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, eating meat, education, Electoral College, football, free speech, games, geoengineering, graduate student movements, guns, Harvard, health, Heroes, How the University Works, ice, Iraq, Islamophobia, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, journalism, kids today, lacrosse, longevity, look upon my works ye mighty and despair, Lyft, maps, Marquette, Marvel Comics, mass shootings, Milky Way, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT, Monopoly, MS-13, my scholarly empire, Native American issues, neoliberalism, nerds, opioids, optimism, outer space, OxyContin, pardons, parenting, politics, pop culture, prescription drugs, protest, race, racism, radicalization, realism, recession, research, robots, Russia, SAT, science, science fiction, scooters, sex work, Siberia, Sleep Dealer, standardized testing, Stargate, the Amazon, the Constitution, the humanities, the Moon, the university in ruins, Tom Gauld, Uber, unions, Vietnam, visas, voting, white supremacy, wildfires, worst financial crisis since the last one, YouTube, Zeel, zunguzungu