Posts Tagged ‘disaster’
CoronaFRI!vus
* Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful. No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing. Without Urgent Action, Coronavirus Could Overwhelm U.S., Estimates Say. I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed.
* David Harvey: Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. The Politics of the Pandemic. You and Your Boss Have the Same Interests Right Now. That Is a Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity. Sara Nelson Says People Are Ready for Solidarity. COVID-19 Emergency Tenant Protections. Homeless families occupy vacant homes in LA. Dealing With Coronavirus Requires Bold Action. The Democratic Leadership Won’t Take It.
* 9% of Working Americans (14 Million) So Far Have Been Laid Off As Result of Coronavirus; 1 in 4 Workers Have Had Their Hours Reduced; 2% Have Been Fired; 20% Have Postponed a Business Trip; Shock Waves Just Now Beginning to Ripple Through Once-Roaring US Economy. U.S. Jobless Claims Jump to Two-Year High Amid Closures. 2700% increase in unemployment claims in Ohio — midweek. [Calfornia] averages 2,000 unemployment applications a day. Two or three days ago, it received 40,000. On Tuesday, 80,000 applications were filed. JP Morgan is forecasting -14% RGDP growth in Q2. That’s so bad it isn’t even on the historical axis.
* So, It’s Bad. Free, Widespread Testing Is The Only Way America Goes Back to Normal. This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus. Coronavirus will radically alter the U.S. US sales of guns and ammunition soar amid coronavirus panic buying. The Stimulus Plan That We Need Now.
* Curb Your Enthusiasm: “The Virus.”
* I’m reminded somehow of the way you end a SimCity game by unleashing every disaster on your city as once. The Midwest Is Preparing To Get Hit With Major Floods During The Coronavirus Outbreak. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Locust crisis poses a danger to millions, forecasters warn. Earthquake in Utah. A Huge Chunk of Yellowstone Is Pulsing.
* Weeks Before Virus Panic, Intelligence Chairman Privately Raised Alarm, Sold Stocks. Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness.
* Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet. Amazon Workers Shut Down Warehouse After Employee Is Infected With Coronavirus. The tech execs who don’t agree with ‘soul-stealing’ coronavirus safety measures.
* Mitt Romney’s $1,000 Isn’t Our Universal Basic Income. Americans may see first round of checks from US government by April 6. I really should have known.
* Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded. In Coronavirus Testing Ramp-Up, U.S. Called Private Sector in Late. How the CDC Botched Basic Science in Its Attempt to Make a Coronavirus Test. Don’t Let Trump Off the Hook.
* I had a lot of question about this, so perhaps it will be useful to you too: No, The World Health Organization Is Not Recommending Against Ibuprofen For Coronavirus Symptoms.
* The world’s fastest supercomputer identified chemicals that could stop coronavirus from spreading, a crucial step toward a treatment. Japanese flu drug ‘clearly effective’ in treating coronavirus, says China. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID‐19: results of an open‐label non‐randomized clinical trial.
* “I’m Not An Epidemiologist But…”: The Rise Of The Coronavirus Influencers. This is certainly a problem but I became attuned to the reality of coronavirus precisely through these sorts of non-experts while Trump and the CDC were still lying to everyone. I haven’t seen anything better for learning true information about this crisis than Reddit’s upvote/downvote system.
* Today in the trolley problem. Today in the simulation argument. Today in career goals. Today in Star Trek Studies. Today in Watchmen fan fiction. Weird time.
* Rikers Island inmate has contracted coronavirus: officials. How coronavirus could explode at Riker’s Island. Reducing prison population protects us all from coronavirus.
* You Need Me to Have a Mask. ‘It Feels Like a War Zone’: Doctors and Nurses Plead for Masks on Social Media. A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling. Simple math offers alarming answers.
* Rural America Isn’t Ready for a Pandemic.
* This picture tells a story about America.
* As Cities Around the World Go on Lockdown, Victims of Domestic Violence Look for a Way Out.
* The COVID-19 Crisis and International Students. Colleges offering dorms as hospital overflow for virus cases. A Brief Letter to an Institution that Believes Extensions are the Accommodations We Need Right Now.
* ‘Panic-gogy’: Teaching Online Classes During The Coronavirus Pandemic. As Schools Look for Guidance, Educators Are Left Asking, ‘What?’ New Coronavirus Package Could Unravel Protections For Students With Disabilities. Is online school illegal? With schools closing from coronavirus, special education concerns give districts pause.
* GameStop claims it is ‘essential retail’ to remain open amid coronavirus shutdowns. It didn’t work.
* Minnesota and Vermont Just Classified Grocery Clerks as Emergency Workers.
* The Quiet Emptiness of a World under Coronavirus.
* The desire for public sex is, of course, nothing new. In his book Tell Me What You Want, sex researcher and Kinsey Institute fellow Justin Lehmiller found it was one of the seven most common fantasies, but the way people are having it in a coronavirus-ridden world definitely is. Now, instead of treating it as nothing more than a novel thrill to “spice things up,” some people are using it as an act of resistance against the virus-induced lockdowns that have squashed so many of the liberties we hold dear. Sex etiquette during the coronavirus.
* Kim Stanley Robinson releases a chapter from his latest novel, though weirdly it’s listed as “news.”
* I’m beginning to think you just can’t trust billionaires: When he joined the race last year, the billionaire said he would employ his campaign staff through the November election, even if he weren’t the nominee. But Bloomberg dropped out after a poor showing on Super Tuesday, and he has since fired staffers in multiple waves. His campaign had announced earlier in March that it would launch an independent expenditure group to take on Trump that would employ former campaign staffers in swing states.
* The Sanders worldview wins even as Bernie loses.
* You know it’s bad when politicians are leaving elected office to join the priesthood.
* A false accusation nightmare in the Times.
* Moffat leaving Doctor Who seemed like a good exit ramp for me, so I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — but wow, this latest retcon looks like a mess, as well as a pretty clear “find some way to tie this off and wrap it up” directive from the BBC.
* Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto.
* Octavia Butler gave us a few rules for predicting the future.
* An “Extinction Event” for the Comic Shop or “Too Stupid to Quit, Too Dumb to Die”?
* The Ending of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Revisited.
* Star Wars in ruins: The Most Problematic ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ Plot Twist Ruined Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy. Disney has embarrassed itself issuing Episode 9 retcons but it really ought to explain why it’s being so elliptical about this one issue for no apparent reason.
* And Star Wars resurgent: The Mandalorian Casts Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano.
* Because you demanded it: A new Disney Princess historical fiction series finds Belle in the French Revolution.
* And they were nearly almost done, too! I swear!
* Hey, it’s me, the first sign of civilization in a culture.
* Coming soon: The Collapsing Empire, Book 3. A Cixin Liu story collection. And some free coronavirus reading: Short Changes, a story collection by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Friday Links! SpoOooOOOOOoOOOOooOOooky
* Remarkable reversal: James Tiptree’s name will be removed from the Tiptree Award after all.
* Meritocracy purports to ensure that social and economic rewards track achievement rather than breeding and, in this way, to underwrite deserved advantage, squaring hierarchy with democratic fairness and squaring private gain with the public good. The book’s central charge is that this account of merit is a sham.
* Aggression sensors. Classroom barricades. How architects are transforming schools for the era of mass shootings. The Mad Rush to Bulletproof American Schools.
* Emails Show Falwell Mocked Students, Staff For Years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* Green and white nationalism.
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – fond of using an arboreal emoji on Twitter, until journalists smelled them out – demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ Quoting both Mosley and Heidegger, the alt-right publisher Greg Johnson asserts that saving the ecosystem requires saving the white race. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, a religious homestead movement named after a series of novels, combine racial myths with environmental mysticism.
Most of these are tiny, fringe movements. But there are signs that green and white nationalism is scaling up. In the recent European elections, France’s National Rally claimed that ‘borders are the environment’s greatest ally.’ Marine Le Pen declared that someone ‘who is rooted in their home is an ecologist’, whereas those who are ‘nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland’. Across the Atlantic, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed to be against illegal immigration because it ‘produces a huge amount of litter’, while the far-right pundit Ann Coulter has suggested that Americans must ‘choose between a green America and a brown America’. In India, public tree planting and reverence for sacred groves reinforce the government’s majoritarian claim that only Hindus are the nation’s true stewards.
* Someone who is good at the economy please help me.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: A program on civic virtue at UNC-Chapel Hill is raising concerns about secrecy and funding.
* John Bolton and the Fox News Century.
* Science corner! A bold new perspective suggests space-time isn’t a fundamental entity but emerges from quantum entanglement, says physicist Sean Carroll.
* ‘I Lost Everything’: The Obscene Cost of Being a Woman with a Chronic Health Problem.
* Actually existing media bias: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday.
Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.” The report, which was produced by researchers at Define American, a nonprofit media and culture organization, and Media Cloud, a project of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focuses on immigration reporting in those outlets over a four-year period starting in 2014.
* The richest man in the world has some news for his workers at Whole Foods.
* Bizarre comet from another star system just spotted. Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
* In my home timeline, Tiger Woods was on You Can’t Do That on Television for a season.
* In 1949, LIFE magazine broke it down.
Monday Links!
* Somebody thinks 2015 could be a doozy: Treasury Department Seeking Survival Kits For Bank Employees.
* Trends We Can Work With: Higher Ed in 2015.
* Remembering the reason for the season: During Holiday Season, City Erects Cages To Keep Homeless People Off Benches.
* Christmas Eve Document Dump Reveals US Spy Agencies Broke The Law And Violated Privacy.
* But, are they more likely to precipitate police violence? No. The opposite is true. Police are more likely to kill black people regardless of what they are doing. In fact, “the less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black.”
* Ending excessive police force starts with new rules of engagement.
* What Does It Mean to Be Anti-Police?
* How to Survive a Cop Coup: What Bill de Blasio Can Learn From Ecuador.
* And whether or not people accept it, that new normal—public life and mass surveillance as a default—will become a component of the ever-widening socioeconomic divide. Privacy as we know it today will become a luxury commodity. Opting out will be for the rich.
* “Enhanced interrogation” is torture, American style. Exceptional torture. Torture that insists it is not torture. Post-torture? This uniquely American kind of torture has six defining characteristics.
* “The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled”: In praise of The Usual Suspects.
* Decades of Bill Cosby’s shadow ops.
* Justice Denied to Steven Salaita: A Critique of the University of Illinois Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure Report. This was my reaction as well.
* Anti-intellectualism is taking over the US.
* Are ideas to cool the planet realistic? Meanwhile: Pope Francis Could Be Climate’s Secret Weapon Next Year.
* The architecture of dissent.
* The red state economic miracle that wasn’t.
* Airlines want you to suffer.
* Games are ancient, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. But their stock is not rising at the rate that their fans’ Twitter streams and Web forums might suggest. Instead of a ludic age, perhaps we have entered an era of shredded media. Some forms persist more than others, but more than any one medium, we are surrounded by the rough-edged bits and pieces of too many media to enumerate. Writing, images, aphorisms, formal abstraction, collage, travesty. Photography, cinema, books, music, dance, games, tacos, cats, car services. If anything, there has never been a weirder, more disorienting, and more lively time to be a creator and a fanatic of media in all their varieties. Why ruin the moment by being the one trying to get everyone to play a game while we’re letting the flowers blossom? A ludic century need not be a century of games. Instead, it can just be a century. With games in it.
* Death toll among Qatar’s 2022 World Cup workers revealed. Migrant World Cup workers in Qatar are reportedly dying at alarming rates.
* Enterprise, TOS, and “the scent of death” on the Federation.
* How Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks.
* I am no fan of the North Korean regime. However I believe that calling out a foreign nation over a cybercrime of this magnitude should never have been undertaken on such weak evidence.
* Longreads best crime reporting 2014.
* A Drone Flew Over A Pig Farm.
* The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant. This gives their literature weight, but dooms it with monotony. Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness? Those living through it certainly don’t; the success of much lighter fare among the reading public in Africa proves this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are untouched by such suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation with such a literature. But this tyranny of subject may well lead to distortion and limitation.
* I’m a pretty big fan of “Jean & Scott”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
* A profile of David Letterman from 1981.
* How Colonel Sanders Became Father Christmas in Japan.
The filmmakers’ cartoonishly evil vision of Saruman is unfortunate, as it deprives a fascinating narrative of its complexity, while also being untrue to Tolkien’s own vision. Jackson and his team seem incapable of imagining that a person can be wrong without also being evil. For example, the Master of Lake-town in The Hobbit was greedy, but he was an elected official, generally well regarded by the community (at least until he absconds with the municipal funds, a fact revealed only on the last page of the book); in the film The Desolation of Smaug, he is a murderous tyrant who opposes even the idea of elections. An even worse example is the case of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, who in the books has been driven mad by grief and despair, partly owing to the cruel machinations of Sauron himself; in the film (The Return of the King), he is made so irredeemably evil that Gandalf actually attacks him, while we the viewers are expected to cheer. If this is what Jackson does to weak and pitiable characters, what must he do to Saruman, who is a legitimate “bad guy” in The Lord of the Rings?
* Quiz: Find out how your salary stacks up against other American workers. You know, fun.
* L.A. studio to restore venerable ‘King’s Quest’ to its gaming throne.
* Is the anti-vax movement finally dying?
* You can’t beat the media at its own game.
* America’s own 7 Up: Johns Hopkins’s Beginning School Study.
* Sober People against New Year’s Eve SuperPAC.
* And of course you had me at Grant Morrson’s All-New Miracleman Annual #1.
Nothing Good Will Happen Any More
The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.
The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.
“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”
My daughter just turned two. My son will be born next month. We are leaving them a broken world. And the final obscenity is the people responsible for this disaster will make the innocent pay for their crimes, while they slink off safely into death, fat, old, and happy. There’s no hell for the people who destroyed the planet, just the hell they’re leaving for our kids.
Monday Night Links
* Florida develops innovative solution to problem of students unprepared for college.
* We’re all to blame for MOOCs. (Hey! Speak for yourself. I just got here.) A second chance to do the right thing. Online college course experiment reveals hidden costs.
“I get this call from San Jose State: ‘Uh, we have a problem,'” recalled Mark Ryan, superintendent of the Oakland Military Institute, a public school set up on a military model.
It turned out some of the low-income teens didn’t have computers and high-speed Internet connections at home that the online course required. Many needed personal attention to make it through. The final results aren’t in yet, but the experiment exposed some challenges to the promise of a low-cost online education. And it showed there is still a divide between technology-driven educators and the low-income, first-generation college hopefuls they are trying to reach.
To make it work, the institute had to issue laptops to students, set aside class time for them to focus on the online course, and assign teachers to make sure they stayed on task.
* Inside the no-confidence vote at NYU. CUNY Faculty Votes No Confidence in Curriculum Overhaul.
* In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality.
* Where do greenhouse gases come from? Links continue below the graph.
* Mother Jones reports nobody has a good place to fix student debt.
* A generation of voters with no use for the GOP. Can the GOP somehow manage to throw away another chance at the Senate?
* Facts as ideology: women’s fertility edition.
* …this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced “affluent” nations in connection with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy (21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out of 18), public spending on social programs as a percentage of GDP (19th out of 21), maternity leave (21st out of 21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the “material well-being of children” (19th out of 21), and overall environmental performance (21st out of 21).
* Comics Beat’s 16-part history of Marvelman ends with one question: who owns Marvelman?
* Sony wants to sell DVDs of Dan Harmon watching Community Season Four.
Perhaps the most intriguing news: “Sony said they’re very interested in recording me watching it as a commentary track” for the Season 4 DVD set, he said. His co-host for the evening, Rob Schrab, asked if the DVD commentary could also include a visual in the corner of the screen of Harmon’s facial expressions as he watches the season he was aced out of.
* Ben & Jerry’s Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients, Company Says. Soylent Green’s apparently going to be a real thing now.
* The Today Show has confirmed that the “disabled guide” Disneyland thing is actually happening.
* And a headline that seems like it must have been generated by a fake headline generator, and yet: Update: Was Pablo Neruda Murdered By a CIA Double Agent Working for Pinochet?
Still Sandy
More pictures of Sandy from The Big Picture and Naked Capitalism. The New York Metropolitan Area’s transportation infrastructure is overtaxed on a good day; I can’t fathom how things in the Northeast are going to function if this many of its chokepoints are jammed, much less for weeks.
Year of Disasters
Another collection of best images from 2011 solidifies my impression that 2011 has been first and foremost a year of disasters.
Thursday Links!
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* A reminder: Marquette English has three open TT positions this year, two in rhet-comp and one in transatlantic Anglophone. The deadline is October 28.
* If I were going to encourage you to take any one class simply because it’s good for the freshman soul, I would say this: Take some introductory literature class that forces you to memorize poems, heaps and gobs and mounds of poems, old poems.
* Jameson on time travel in the LRB.
* AAUP v. LSU.
* Leftist academics need to understand they are embattled both as leftists and as academics.
* This afternoon at two o’clock the New York State Attorney General will announce the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Committee to Save Cooper Union, a group of activist students, faculty, and alumni against the Cooper Union trustees. The settlement will impose various reforms to Cooper Union governance, establish an independent financial monitor for the college, and begin the slow, difficult process of re-establishing Cooper Union as a free, healthy institution. Incredible turn of events. The tragedy of Cooper Union.
* A Proposed Heuristic for Academic Budgeting Decisions.
* NY Fed Study Should Redefine How We Think About Student Loans and College Costs.
* “Thanks, UCF, for having lecture-capture courses so I don’t have to go to class ever.”
* A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself. I continue to think Democrats are completely in denial about how bad this story could get.
* Massive hurricanes striking Miami or Houston. Earthquakes leveling Los Angeles or Seattle. Deadly epidemics. Meet the “maximums of maximums” that keep emergency planners up at night.
* The Moral Panic Over Sexting. Today’s obscenity.
* The Accreditation Wars: Where are the Faculty?
* Some rules for teachers.
* Films for the feminist classroom.
* The proportion of people with intellectual disability who have been treated with psychotropic drugs far exceeds the proportion with recorded mental illness. Antipsychotics are often prescribed to people without recorded severe mental illness but who have a record of challenging behaviour. The findings suggest that changes are needed in the prescribing of psychotropics for people with intellectual disability.
* Boom shakalaka! Read an interview with the NBA Jam voiceover artist.
* Concrete Action, the Wikileaks for architects.
* I’ll take three.
* Yahoo has added commentary tracks from Dan Harmon to its Community episodes.
* Harvard will let students select their own pronouns.
* Iceland Caps Syrian Refugees at 50; More Than 10,000 People Respond With Support for Syrian Refugees.
* American Chess May Finally Emerge From The Shadow Of Bobby Fischer.
* Meet the Twitter Bot Generating Unnervingly Plausible Think Pieces.
* Another Colbert profile.
* California Uber Drivers Can Proceed With Their Class Action.
* Wow, finally: Octavia Butler’s Dawn is allegedly being developed for TV.
* Goonies forever.
* Piggy, Kermit, and domestic violence. Next up: why Elmer Fudd hunting animals out of season is actually no laughing matter…
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2015 at 3:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, accreditation, administrative blight, architecture, BB-8, Bobby Fischer, boom shakalaka, cartoons, catastrophe, category errors, CEOs, chess, Colbert, come work with me, comedy, Commentary, Cooper Union, Dan Harmon, Democratic primary 2016, Department of State, disability, disaster, documentary, domestic violence, endowments, faculty, feminism, film, Florida, games, general election 2016, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Iceland, Jameson, Kermit, kids today, labor, LSU, Marquette, medicine, Miss Piggy, MOOCs, Muppets, NBA Jam, Octavia Butler, pedagogy, poetry, pronouns, psychopharmacology, refugees, sexting, Star Wars, student debt, student loans, Syria, teaching, television, tenure, The Late Show, the law, the Left, thinkpieces, time travel, toys, transgender issues, trigger warnings, tuition, Twitter, Uber, Wikileaks, Xenogenesis, Yahoo, zunguzungu