Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Ellen DeGeneres

Friday Links!

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* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.

* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.

* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?

* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.

* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.

* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.

The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…

* Next year, Greta!

* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.

Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.

* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!

Joe Biden’s Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to Acknowledge That.

Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.

* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?

How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.

* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.

* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.

The Making of the American Gulag.

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.

* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.

* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.

Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.

* Today in the nightmare society.

How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.

Beware the climate pragmatists.

Google’s core business is misinforming people, but sometimes they do it on a pro bono basis.

A lost decade and $200,000: one dad’s crusade to save his daughters from addiction.

* Understanding the professional-managerial class.

* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.

Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, presents the actual history of one of those possible branches. It traces the development of the idea of the Fourth Reich—a resurgent, Nazi-like regime based in apocalyptic visions and quasi-religious ethnonationalism. Though the Fourth Reich never actually took power in Germany or elsewhere, Rosenfeld shows how the idea itself has been influential. His account helps us to understand why the Fourth Reich never came to fruition—and what we can do to make sure it remains a counterfactual.

* From the archives: Tribal Map of America Shows Whose Land You’re Actually Living On.

Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies.

Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter.

* Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.

* A tale of two Arthurs. Why We Shouldn’t Fear Joker.

* The Real Threat of ‘Joker’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight: What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.

Rewatching Taxi Driver in the Age of Joker.

* So I do know what it’s like to be a bat.

Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!

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* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.

Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.

* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.

* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.

* On good science fiction.

* Get ready for the next recession.

* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.

* The looting of higher ed.

* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.

Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.

* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.

You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.

* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.

Set in 2053, Carbon Ruins inhabits a near-future world where we managed to get our collective shit together, reaching global net-zero carbon dioxide emissions goals in 2050.

* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.

* Cancel billionaires.

* The Obamanauts.

* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.

* The Concern Troll in Everyone.

I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.

* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.

Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.

* every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”

* The Supreme Court has told Domino’s they have to stop suing over an accessibility issue that would have cost them $40,000 to fix.

* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.

* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.

* Against automated hiring.

Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.

* What can’t we remember our earliest years?

* And this gender reveal party has so much to teach us.

Monday Night Links!

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* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.

* Boomers, man.

* This photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive.

We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering.

Police have taken pre-emptive action against environmental protesters who are planning to cause disruption in Westminster.

I study collapsed civilizations. Here’s my advice for a climate change apocalypse.

I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.

Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?

* Big tech is a black box.

* US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria. Top Military Officers Unload on Trump. Sounds like my man is on the brink of self-impeaching. Trump at serious risk of losing the mandate of heaven. Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman: Trump wrong to seek help from Ukraine, China. ‘Out on a limb’: Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump’s possible impeachment. Trump allies sought Ukraine gas deal. Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson. Nine scenarios.

Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.

Political Operatives Are Faking Voter Outrage With Millions Of Made-Up Comments To Benefit The Rich And Powerful.

* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.

Slain witness Joshua Brown was expected to testify in lawsuit against Dallas police.

* How the Prison Economy Works.

* Sacramento Amazon Workers Are Protesting after Woman Was Allegedly Fired for Spending Extra Hour with Dying Mother-in-Law.

Journalist says a CBP officer withheld his passport until he agreed he writes ‘propaganda.’

Robots to Cut 200,000 U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says.

* America is a failed state.

* For real though.

* Finally, some good news.

* I like this.

24 Reasons “Angel” Was Perfect, and one pretty big reason why it wasn’t.

Joker and the vacuity of influence. Joker and white male resentment. (I liked what Noah Berlatsky had to say on this subject, too; I thought a lot about it while I was watching.) Joker Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. ‘The Greater Danger to Society May Be If You Don’t See This Movie.’ My own meager contribution to The Discourse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

* I think I linked this once before, but I saw it on Twitter and wanted to link again: Ida Yoshinaga’s Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films.

* This tweet got inside my fucking head.

In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.

* They say America’s best days are behind it, but Someone Beat Minecraft Without Mining Any Blocks.

* Of course you had me at hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map.

* Ours is a fallen world.

* But at least Rick and Morty‘s coming back. Everything’s coming up Canavan!

Predictions

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Jeff from Syntax of Things nails the prediction thread for 2008, calling the electoral threshold (Obama with 364 EVs) exactly and missing the popular vote spread by only 2%. His prize: our undying respect. Well done, Jeff!

UPDATE: Neil asks for (and receives) deserved credit for his second-place finish. Well done, Neil. Can NeilThirtyEight.com be far behind?

Written by gerrycanavan

November 6, 2008 at 12:29 am

Campaign Postmortems

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Newsweek has the first of the great campaign postmortems, including new tidbits on the even-worse-than-previously-thought Sarah Palin shopping spree and even an F-bomb from BHO. A few highlights from the highlights:

* Palin launched her attack on Obama’s association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

Palin goin’ rogue goes a long way towards explaining why the McCain camp never seemed to know what it was trying to do with Ayers.

* McCain also was reluctant to use Obama’s incendiary pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as a campaign issue. The Republican had set firm boundaries: no Jeremiah Wright; no attacking Michelle Obama; no attacking Obama for not serving in the military. McCain balked at an ad using images of children that suggested that Obama might not protect them from terrorism. Schmidt vetoed ads suggesting that Obama was soft on crime (no Willie Hortons). And before word even got to McCain, Schmidt and Salter scuttled a “celebrity” ad of Obama dancing with talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres (the sight of a black man dancing with a lesbian was deemed too provocative).

WTF?

* The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.

UPDATE: Part I of the article is now up.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 5, 2008 at 11:17 pm