Posts Tagged ‘evil’
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
Tuesday Night Links!
* ST: TNG: TNG: Patrick Stewart to Return as Capt. Picard in New ‘Star Trek’ Series for CBS All Access. Well, that’s something! CBS All Access Is Laying the Groundwork for Non-Stop Star Trek.
#STLV Stewart says he may not be the captain anymore. He may be a very different individual. Setting is 20 years past Nemesis. There are no scripts yet. It will be something very, very different. It will be made with love for the material and the fans.
— TrekMovie.com (@TrekMovie) August 4, 2018
* Celebrating Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and black creativity at the first-ever Wakandacon.
* Draft schedule for the Worlding SF conference I’ll be keynoting at this December. Looking forward to it!
* Poem of the day: “A Metaphor.”
* Pedagogy flashback: Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* How to Prepare for Class. Against the Grade. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Another list of 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English).
* That rare thing, a good Twitter thread: What is the most interesting and revealing and hard-to-believe/understand statistic you know?
* Gasp, shock: Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions.
* What You Need To Know About Democratic Socialism.
* “But Tikopia is an *insanely abundant* place by the standards of space. You can breathe, for starters. The seas teem with fish. Throw a pawpaw seed in the ground and you’ll have a food tree in a few years.”
* Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature.” How Not to Talk About Climate Change. No, we didn’t almost solve the climate crisis in the 1980s. When Will Capitalism Answer For Its Crimes?
* 2018 Was Probably Already Doomed, But We Might Have Saved 2030.
* ‘Many parts of Earth could become uninhabitable’: Study’s grim warning.
* These 360 Drone Photos of the California Wildfires Are Devastating.
* ‘Capitalism, The Sole Culprit of the Destructive Exploitation of Nature’ by Alain Badiou.
* Brexit continues to give Trump a run for his money in the deliberate-national-suicide-Olympics.
* Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception. The rise of QAnon Is a Sign That Trumpism Might Not Be Primarily About Trump at All. After mainstream exposure, QAnon is starting to fracture.
* Trump just keeps confessing to crimes and it just keeps not mattering.
* Alejandra ultimately decided to “self-deport” to Mexico, rather than turn herself in to be detained and then deported. After 20 years in the United States, she no longer has family or friends in the country, so she chose Merida, a city in the Yucatan where a small community of deported military spouses might help her. U.S. historians are rallying to stop federal immigration agencies from destroying records of their treatment towards immigrants. Worker Charged With Sexually Molesting Eight Children at Immigrant Shelter. Man Detained by ICE Claims He Went Blind in One Eye After Agent Didn’t Believe He Had Diabetes. How Trump Radicalized ICE. Border family separation isn’t “zero tolerance” – CBP looked for parents to charge so they could kidnap kids. New Jersey Jail is Holding Nearly Triple its Capacity in ICE Detainees. What happens after ICE tears your family apart: ‘The storm descended.’ Now the Trump administration wants to limit citizenship for legal immigrants. Judge upholds ruling that DACA must be restored. The Power of Abolish ICE.
* “We Need to Fight for Aloha”: Hawaii congressional candidate and democratic socialist Kaniela Ing on taking on Hawaii’s biggest corporations, a bold climate change agenda, and the necessity of opposing US imperialism.
* I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one.
* Markets in everything: More Schools Are Buying ‘Active-Shooter’ Insurance Policies.
'Socialism or barbarism' is a bad slogan because 'barbarian' is just a term used by imperial extractors to denigrate the non-conforming nomadic & semi-pastoral populations outside their walls. Instead, I propose a dialectical synthesis: Barbarian Socialism
— 🌎 The 🚀 Cosmist 🌌 Insurrection ✊ 🏴 (@yungneocon) August 1, 2018
* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is: It’s not all bottles and straws—the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear.
* Meanwhile, in serious environmentalism: Trump Accuses California Of Causing Wildfires By ‘Diverting’ Water To Pacific.
* Fields medal stolen moments after it was awarded.
* There’s so much corruption in the federal government at this point it’s impossible to keep track of.
* A mother orca’s dead calf and the grief felt around the world.
* The Trader Who Made a Massive Short Bet Against Nintendo.
* NRA Legal Strategy / Fundraising Appeal Goes Viral.
* A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man’s death. A second expert said he doesn’t agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious. His crime was calmly asking what he was being charged with.
* How the NYPD recriminalized marijuana after the state decriminalized it. Internal documents reveal how Bronx prosecutors are taught to slow down cases.
* Democrats do the darnedest things.
* How the Cold War Created Astrobiology.
* A small-town couple left behind a stolen painting worth over $100 million — and a big mystery.
* These The Last Jedi Fans Put on a Mock Court Martial for Poe Dameron.
* Missing the point is the point: Pre-reading Young Aragorn.
* You Bet Your Life: ‘Death Bonds,’ the Investments That Want You Dead.
* Amazing arbitrage opportunity.
* Sexuality and gender in science fiction games.
* Somebody get me Michel Foucault on the phone: Open Office Plans Increase Employee Stress, Reduce Productivity.
* Ask your doctor if R’lhygrex is right for you.
* Facebook getting pretty brazen even by Facebook standards.
* Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage.
* The Great Recession Never Ended.
* Well, if they’re really sorry.
* The end of the writers’ room.
* The next stage of the Tesla scam.
* Chilling Testimony in a Tennessee Trial Exposes Lethal Injection as Court-Sanctioned Torture.
* Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks If Treated by Female Doctors.
* And now they tell me! Why punishing your children doesn’t work.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 7, 2018 at 4:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolition, academia, academic jobs, Afrofuturism, Alex Jones, Amazon, antibiotic resistant bacteria, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, astrobiology, barbarism, Black Panther, Bob Menendez, bodies, Brexit, C-sections, California, capitalism, Captain Picard, CBP, CBS All-Access, children, climate change, Cold War, conspiracy theories, corruption, DACA, death penalty, democratic socialism, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, Dreamers, drones, drugs, ecology, Elon Musk, environmentalism, evil, Facebook, Fields medal, finance, fishing, foreclosure, Foucault, free speech, games, gender, grading, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Great Recession, guns, Hawaii, How the University Works, human life, ice, immigration, Infowars, insurance, keynotes, kids today, lethal injection, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, Marvel, mass shootings, math, MCU, medicine, metaphor, Missouri, mortality, my scholarly empire, New Jersey, Nintendo, NRA, NYPD, panopticon, parenting, pedagogy, poems, police brutally, police violence, post-hospital syndrome, pregnancy, psychopharmacology, QAnon, reproductive futurity, Russia, schools, science, self-promotion, sexuality, social media, socialism, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, statistics, surgery, syllabi, teaching, television, Tesla, the elderly, The Last Jedi, The Rock, the Senate, The Stand, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, TNG, true crime, Twitter, United Kingdom, vaccination, voter fraud, voter suppression, voting, Wakanda, water, Wells Fargo, whales, wildfires, WNBA, words, Worlding SF, writing, Young Aragorn
Thursday Morning Links!
There is not a single part of me that doubts that ALF could be a viable contender in the next Presidential election. I’m not saying he’d win…but I do think it’d be close.
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) August 1, 2018
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Pedagogy, and Social Change. CFP: Teaching 9/11 and Its Aftermaths. CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow: New Conversations & Productive Catalysts Across Science and Humanities Boundaries as the Global Emergency Worsens. CFP: Episodes VII, VIII, IX.
* The ‘feel-good’ horror of late-stage capitalism.
What if the problem isn't stimulants but the mandate for productivity
What if the problem isn't benzos but the mandate to stay calm in actual chaos
What if the problem isn't opioids but the mandate to work like a machine that can't suffer to keep you and your loved ones alive— Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) August 1, 2018
* Unreal.
* Twilight of the omniversity.
* All about QAnon, if you’re just catching up to the latest nonsense.
If you call Qanon people crazy it just hardens their stance. Let's open our intellectual debate to the iconoclasts who believe Democrats, Tom Hanks, and US intel agencies are engaged in a worldwide pedophilic conspiracy to take down Trump. (cc: op-ed page editors.)
— George Zornick (@gzornick) August 1, 2018
* Alex Jones, Pursued Over Infowars Falsehoods, Faces a Legal Crossroads. Man, I hope he loses everything.
* Plymouth State University said Wednesday that a retired professor who defended a convicted child rapist in a letter to the court will not be rehired as an adjunct instructor or “in any other capacity.” Two other faculty members who defended the Plymouth State graduate and high school guidance counselor convicted of sexually assaulting a student will complete sexual harassment training prior to their return to campus and will work closely with other professors upon their return, the university also said.
* “The UNC Board of Governors respects each of the varying opinions within the university community concerning this matter. However, after consulting with legal counsel, neither UNC Chapel Hill nor the UNC System have the legal authority to unilaterally relocate the Silent Sam statue,” the board wrote in a statement. “Thus, the board has no plans to take any action regarding the monument at this time, and we will await any guidance that the North Carolina Historical Commission may offer.”
* But in order to turn a story about the U.S. politics of climate change into a story about the entirety of the human species, Rich has to make a strange argument. He has to dispatch with the two most powerful and prominent enemies of a climate policy in the United States: the fossil-fuel industry and the Republican Party.
* A reminder: Just 90 companies are accountable for more than 60 percent of greenhouse gases.
The idea that ‘people,’ as in the entire human species, are failing to act on climate change is based on the assumption that decisions affecting it are democratically made, which is verifiably false.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 1, 2018
It’s not so much the heat or humidity as it is the existential dread that comes from realizing that catastrophic climate change will lead to the collapse of human civilization.
— Doug Gordon (@BrooklynSpoke) August 1, 2018
* How the Carr Fire became one of the most destructive fires in California history.
* Europe facing its hottest day ever.
* Here’s a different question one could ask: Could it be that reporters like Chait, who are obsessed with finding the next Watergate and tend to err on the side of military intervention, aren’t exercising enough skepticism?
* Months later I not only considered my own future, but the far-reaching political implications of these cases: Why did the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia find it appropriate to hang virtual life sentences over the heads of 214 people after an indiscriminate mass arrest? How could they have so shamelessly gleaned evidence from far-right groups like Project Veritas, a discredited organization known for making deceptive gotcha videos, as well as the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, and still felt they had a legitimate case? Where was the motivation—the conspiracy—to pursue these cases coming from?
* Immigration crackdown: U.S. soldier honored for service could be heading for ICE custody.
* ‘Like a kidnapping’: ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video.
* Another migrant child molested at a DHS facility. And a WaPo story about the migrant child who died shortly after their release from an unsafe, unhygienic detention center.
* Source close to Ivanka Trump confirms no one so beautiful could be evil.
A “Purge”-like holiday where one day a year American women are allowed to break their NDAs without getting sued.
— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) August 1, 2018
* From the archives: What Is Socialist Feminism?
* Can’t anyone in Congress have a normal hobby?
* Inside the first database that tracks America’s criminal cops.
* Breaking: leftist politics are very popular. Still / again / always.
* The art of the murder mystery.
* Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine.
* Maybe it’s possible to have too much money.
* Nobody powerful ever makes a mistake, MCU edition.
Worth considering: basically nobody responsible for the financial crisis, Iraq War or 9/11 intel/security failures was held accountable or faced serious career consequences. In fact, many of them got richer, became more powerful & accrued more social status. This seems important.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 2, 2018
* Something is happening in America.
Yowza. https://t.co/XRBunwsQZ7 pic.twitter.com/6EiiZkqbqa
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) August 1, 2018
* At some point in the process, all four of these nominees—Haynsworth, Carswell, Bork, and Ginsburg—seemed like shoo-ins for confirmation, much as Kavanaugh does today. And yet they were all defeated. And the Justices who took their places were closer to the judicial and political mainstream.
* Parents Are Paying Fortnite Coaches So Their Gamer Kids Can Level Up.
* Pope declares death penalty inadmissible, changing Church’s stance.
* …in the U.S., water park rides are not tightly regulated. Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.
* Can Mars even be terraformed?
* Yikes.
* The Songs We Banned From Our Weddings. The answer to a wedding soundtrack is always just all Motown, I think.
* Film Crit Hulk considers Nanette.
* Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia. No detailwas spared, from a food dish for their cat, Snowball II, to Duff beer cans in the fridge.
But controversy soon erupted in this faux-Springfield mock-up. The homeowner’s association wasn’t keen on having a cartoon house that broke conformity requirements by being painted solar yellow. The sweepstakes winner rejected it outright. And the current owner had to learn to live with the property being a source of perpetual curiosity for fans of the show who brazenly turn her doorknobs and peer through her windows at all hours of the day and night. As it turns out, the reality of living in a fantasy can get a little complicated.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 2, 2018 at 9:40 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #J20, 9/11, academia, Al Franken, Alex Jones, ALF, America, anarchism, apocalypse, Barbara Ehrenreich, Boots Riley, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, catfishing, Catholicism, CBP, censorship, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, communism, Congress, conspiracy theories, coups, death penalty, democracy, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, Europe, evil, feminism, Fortnite, fossil fuels, free speech, games, general election 2020, Guardians of the Galaxy, homeland security, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Infowars, Ivanka Trump, Japan, kids today, leftism, lies and lying liars, Mars, MCU, medicine, mental health, misogyny, monuments, Motown, murder, music, mysteries, Nanette, NDAs, neoliberalism, Pizzagate, Plymouth State, police, police corruption, politics, polls, QAnon, rape, rape culture, Republicans, revolution, rich people, Russia, science fiction, sexism, sharks, socialist feminism, Sorry to Bother You, South Korea, Supreme Court, terraforming, the Confederacy, the Pope, the Purge, The Simpsons, true crime, UNC, water parks, weddings, wildfires, women
Monday Morning Links (The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mama)
Well, I’ve been on the new Star Tours, and I regret to inform you I have some pretty serious concerns about its canonicity 1/89
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2018
* CFP: The Evolution of Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Academia Lunare.
* But the other thing that strikes me – we were talking early on about the history of modernity as connected in a structural way to the history of slavery, of capitalism, to histories of ordering and wasting – when I read that long history, a striking thing is capitalism’s impulse to abolish limits. From a capitalist’s standpoint, there are simply no limits. In regard to almost anything and everything, limitlessness is the law. Another striking thing is that capitalism aims to abolish some of the key dualisms without which the very idea of society as we understand it would have been unimaginable. To some extent, capitalism is the only religion without taboos humans have ever invented.
* The way it works is that, once the first settlers on a new planet demonstrate that they won’t die horribly from allergies, pathogens, or getting buried under the excrement of herds of titanosaurs, they then spread out to build mining settlements all over the planet, high-grade all the most accessible mineral deposits, drill for oil, and grow the infrastructure needed to build starships. With starhips built and trade links established, they grow into a mature colony over the course of a few centuries, all the while founding as many daughter colonies on new planets as possible. Eventually, they run into serious pollution problems, loss of usable mineral deposits, changing climate (both natural through the equivalent of Milankovich cycles, and anthropogenic), and a biosphere that coevolves to exploit the colony, because that’s just what life does (think pesticide resistant bugs, coyotes, superweeds…). At that point, the colony starts to fall apart. Interstellar trade shifts away from it (after all, whatever’s causing them to collapse them might be contagious). Ultimately the survivors hang on to become a truly resilient indigenous population in a backwater world–or all die horribly as their critical infrastructure fails. Their fate doesn’t matter to our interstellar civilization, because it has literally already moved on to new frontiers, boldly going where no man has gone before. So long as they can find new worlds to conquer, they can go on forever.
* Hard to argue with this reading of Harry Potter, honestly.
Wizards in Harry Potter fought a war over whether they should be genteel and cultured about racism but vulgar about everything else or vulgar about racism and genteel and cultured about everything else.
— Alexandra Erin (@alexandraerin) July 9, 2018
The figureheads of the war (Harry Potter and Voldemort) were mostly divorced from the larger cultural context of the sides they inspired or led. Their motivations were personal: Harry wanted revenge and to protect people he knew personally, Voldemort wanted power to live forever.
— Alexandra Erin (@alexandraerin) July 9, 2018
* “Eco-Philosopher Fails Hurricane Test, Crawls Under Rock.”
* A mere couple of hours away till the end of America, get excited.
* Still, God help me, I can’t get enough of this stuff: What if Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987?
* Madeleine Albright: ‘The things that are happening are genuinely, seriously bad.’ Yeah, that’s what I keep saying!
* America is catastrophically incapable of holding its elites responsible for their crimes, and that’s supposed to be the good news.
* Meanwhile, the Trump Foundation was a comically illegal slush fund and it just doesn’t matter.
* A Mexican couple was turned over for deportation this week when they tried to visit a New York military base to celebrate the Fourth of July with their son-in-law, who is an army officer. They had lived in Brooklyn for decades. More here.
The couple’s son-in-law is a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. According to the family, the Department of Defense won’t let him intervene in the case.
“Most worrying is the fact that both parents have recently undergone surgery and need medication,” the report said. “The Silvas say they have gotten calls from their mother, who said she was denied her medication. They say they have not heard from their father.”
This is a different army base in Brooklyn than the one that called ICE on a pizza delivery guy a few weeks ago.
* Trump admin won’t reunite all migrant families, will place some kids in foster care.
* Illinois governor profits off ICE detention center contracts.
1. 3K children were separated from their parents which is a humanitarian catastrophe
2. Trump signed a document in the Oval Office designed to communicate that family separation was “over”
3. 3K kids remain separated
4. There’s no indication of any real plan for reunification
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 9, 2018
1. You really want to know what grinds me gears about a good portion of "the resistance?" We are literally going through the early stages of ethnic cleansing, yet people are urging that we play chess against an opponent that has flipped the board over & set the house on fire.
— ✊🏿Black Aziz aNANsi✊🏿 (@Freeyourmindkid) July 7, 2018
Hard to imagine a greater blasphemy against Jesus than the living example of Christians in 2018, to be honest.
— Julius Goat (Read Pinned Tweet!) (@JuliusGoat) July 8, 2018
* Not for nothing. Of course you’ve heard me sing this song before.
My plan is to accept a cushy job at a university in New Zealand about six months before the killings start, if you’re wondering
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 8, 2018
hmm 🤔 https://t.co/3l7cFabX7p
— MF (@MF_return) July 8, 2018
* Notes from the Ocasio-Cortez campaign.
* Even “being drunk” is culturally specific.
* Introducing the Marvel Curriculum: A look at film history via the MCU.
* What if HBO, but super, super creepy?
please, i want to die now https://t.co/WPKj1ew1RC pic.twitter.com/TPEWNF0bEG
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) July 9, 2018
* How Much Does Being a Legacy Help Your College Admissions Odds?
* Elon Musk’s submarine is nonsense. Meanwhile.
* Brexit vs. Gibraltar. Brexit vs. Britain. Brexit vs. the Tories. Brexit vs. Brexit.
* I happened to listen to NPR for a few hours this morning, and I heard three stories that are very much connected to climate change without anyone on the radio mentioning climate change even once.
This week in climate change:
-Quebec: heatwave kills 54
-Algeria: 124.3 degrees F as hottest temps ever recorded scorch Africa.
-Japan: “unprecedented” rain kills dozens
-California: LA notches all-time-high temp, wildfires kill 1 and force 1000s to evacuate.— Alexander Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) July 7, 2018
Still astounded by the people arguing that the Puerto Rican government has a moral responsibility to funnel all of its money to bondholders rather than making basic services work as hurricane season begins
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) July 8, 2018
Tired: Humans are killing the planet
Wired: literally like ninety specific people are killing the planet and we literally know their names— Bigger Laius Theory (@the_bird_roads) July 8, 2018
* U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials.
* Like Pizzagate but it actually happened.
* 150 Cheers for the 14th Amendment.
* Killing all the whales and turtles to own the libs.
1/7: We are now in a transitional moment: as was the case internally for people in the Soviet system c.1980, most people in the West who today are involved in or thinking about the int’l system realize that the warm & fuzzy things that are said about this crumbling system are BS.
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) July 8, 2018
a more just social order is not only possible it’s near, reactionary fascism is just that – a reaction.. to the rest of us, don’t let them steal the future
— Ayesha A. Siddiqi (@AyeshaASiddiqi) July 8, 2018
Whenever I get irritated with young people for incomprehensible weirdness like calling crispy duck pizza racist or watching videos of people playing computer games, I feel it's important to remember that old people voted to burn down the economy and put babies in prison.
— John B (@johnb78) July 8, 2018
* Actually existing media bias watch: 1, 2.
* Siri: show me fragile masculinity.
* And the headline reads: “Fake sultan was scamming a Miami billionaire. Then he ate pork.”
Siri: show me fragile masculinity pic.twitter.com/XVtCDKSW5D
— Nun Ya (@Ishfery) July 8, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
July 9, 2018 at 12:07 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, 14th Amendment, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, Achille Mbembe, actually existing media bias, alcohol, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America, apocalypse, books, border patrol, breastfeeding, Brexit, Brooklyn, Bruce Rauner, cable news, California, capitalism, censorship, CFPs, charity, Charles Stross, China, Christianity, class struggle, climate change, college, concentration camps, deportation, Donald Trump, drunkenness, ecology, elites, Elon Musk, endangered species, ethnic cleansing, evil, fantasy, fascism, film, fragility, galactic empires, Gibraltar, Great Britain, grifts, Harry Potter, HBO, How the University Works, hurricanes, ice, Illinois, journalism, kids today, legacy admissions, lies and lying liars, Madeleine Albright, Marvel, masculinity, math, MCU, Mexico, Miami, MSNBC, New York Times, New Zealand, outer space, parenting, philosophy, pizza, Pizzagate, politics, Putin, racism, rape, rape culture, Russia, science fiction, Soviet Union, Supreme Court, surveillance society, taxes, Thailand, the courts, the law, Tim Morton, trade war, true crime, Trump Foundation, turtles, United Kingdom, USSR, whales, zero
Don’t Fall Behind, Spring Ahead with These Sunday Morning Links
two papers graded. let’s see what’s in the news
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2018
* The R.D. Mullen Fellowship is calling for applications. The deadline this year is April 2, 2018.
* Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector.
* For Your Consideration: African Speculative Fiction Society Nommos 2018.
* I had a few bad parents during my time in One Hour, One Life but only one of them outright abandoned me. Most of them, even if they could barely care for themselves, tried to keep me alive. “We’re going to die,” one mother told me when I spawned into the game with her in the middle of a barren wilderness. We did, but she carried me with her every step of the way through our brief lives. ‘One Hour, One Life’: This Game Broke My Heart and Restored My Faith in Humanity.
* We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake.
* Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future.
* Despite their claim to be the champions facts, reason, and evidence the right-wing and alt-liberal figures have failed to understand a simple fact about universities: they’re not actually left-wing places at all.
* Fewer foreign students exacerbate financial challenges for some U.S. universities.
* What passes for intellectualism on the right.
* Unpaid internships are back.
Who else can imagine a wave of university adjunct strikes? Adjuncts do 3/4 of all the teaching these days.
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 10, 2018
* All The Movies I Didn’t See.
My guess is, having elected, much to their surprise, a lunatic as the most powerful man on the planet, a man who boasts of ‘his’ nukes being bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, a man who could actually be crazy enough to unleash a nuclear warhead on millions, the Americans are sorely missing a time when the white man did something right.
* A slow, cerebral, Miracleman depiction of Barry Allen losing all touch with his humanity Dr.-Manhattan-style seems like the only way for The Flash to proceed from here.
* Black Panther crosses $1 billion.
I’m so dumb I’m only just now thinking about Killmonger as Hamlet.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2018
I think a lot of the Hamlet parallels are inverted, not just catastrophic indecisiveness vs catastrophic decisiveness but also the materialist vs spiritualist orientation of the final speech, but there’s something there.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2018
* “President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.”
* Echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in today’s immigration debate.
* We’ll Never See This Politically Themed Black-ish Episode Because of ‘Creative Differences.’
* How to Lose Your Job From Sexual Harassment in 33 Easy Steps.
* This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town.
* YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.
* Super Mario as it was meant to be experienced.
Writing tip: If no one wants to publish your manuscript, consider the possibility that you're living in a simulation whose only purpose is to punish you for a crime you can no longer remember.
— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) March 10, 2018
I'm gonna do a true crime podcast that's just me reading everything US presidents have done for the last 240 years
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) November 4, 2017
everything on planet Earth is falling apart
— NYT Minus Context (@NYTMinusContext) March 10, 2018
* The Singularity in theory and practice.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* I Felt Despair About Climate Change—Until a Brush With Death Changed My Mind. “Leukemia and climate change have more in common than you might think.”
* Remembering The Hobbit: The Text Adventure.
* And a much-too-long-delayed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The oceans are warming. It’s altering turtle reproduction so that the vast majority of offspring are female. It was mistake to drop acid with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Pure evil. I’ll do anything for a good grade. Dear science. Dr. Bees. On sequels. I have this nightmare where a giant monster chases me. I’m going to give you a pill that’ll double your intelligence. Welcome to robot heaven. Penguin have a much happier version of the Titanic story. Finegan’s Wake. You are watching The Nihilist Channel. Where do you think all these fossils come from? Get me a scientist! Purposelessness is the only real super villain. Daddy, can I ask you something? The fundamental kid utility function. And my whole life has been one string of failures. Please send help.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 11, 2018 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, actually existing academic bias, African science fiction, Afrofuturism, algorithms, apocalypse, applied evil, Are we living in a simulation?, Bitcoin, Black Panther, Black-ish, cancer, Churchill, class struggle, climate change, creationism, death, Democrats, deportation, despair, Disney, Donald Trump, dreams, evil, evolution, failure, feminism, film, Finegan's Wake, fossils, Frozen, Fugitive Slave Act, full of bees, fully automated luxury communism, futurity, games, Hamlet, hope, How the University Works, ice, immigration, intellectualism, intelligence, James Joyce, Jordan Peterson, kids, Limitless, Lord of the Rings, Miracleman, misogyny, movies, music, National Anthem, New Jersey, NFL, nihilism, Nintendo, parenting, politics, pure evil, R.D. Mullen fellowship, rape culture, robot heaven, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fictions studies, sexism, sexual harassment, solarpunk, student debt, Super Mario, superheroes, Superman, survivalism, text adventures, the Flash, The Hobbit, the Singularity, the Titanic, Tolkien, true crime, turtles, Twitter, Uncle Scrooge, unpaid internships, Utopia, visas, Wakanda, writing, YouTube
Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day Links
* Call for Papers: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene.
* People that found their doppelgängers in art museums.
* We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities in order to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. Many of us stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some barely audible phrases involving “skills,” “relevance,” “a changing economy,” “engagement,” and “values.” The reason it does not come out as something coherent or articulate, much less compelling, is that the ideas behind the words are just as hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.
* George Ciccariello-Maher Resigns: “We are all a single outrage campaign away from having no rights at all.” Iowa senator proposes bill decried as ‘political litmus test’ for universities. A note to tenured faculty.
* Meet the black architect who designed Duke University 37 years before he could have attended it.
* J.R.R. Tolkien, Beyond Good and Evil.
* What was Leia supposed to do in Episode 9?
* Teach the controversy: the legend of Mark Hamill’s face.
* Another profile of the worst job on the Internet.
* NANO issue 12, a special issue on The Force Awakens.
* Ada 12, radical speculation and Ursula K. Le Guin.
* What if Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?
* Anomie. Quantum Mechanics. Love. Stotting. Zeno. Choice paralysis. Frosty. Melville. Poetry. Keep scrolling!
* Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology.
* Why Is a Small Montana Town a Hotbed of Far-Right Activity? Emboldened white nationalists? Look no further than this liberal Oregon college town.
* Price of 40-year-old cancer drug hiked 1,400% by new owners.
* US nuclear tests killed far more civilians than we knew.
New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
* Obamacare and the survival test.
* How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America. Extreme poverty in America. World’s richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1tn this year. The U.S. without pensions. No ‘Easy Answer’ To Growing Number Of Stray Dogs In The U.S., Advocate Says. Long after Trump is gone, we’ll still be fighting him. As Wildfires Raged, Insurers Sent in Private Firefighters to Protect Homes of the Wealthy. Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong. Death in an Amazon dumpster. The homeless and the coming cashless economy.
* Why Has Science Only Cured One Person of HIV?
* Same: Young American Men Are Choosing Video Games Over Work in Staggering Numbers. WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition in 2018.
* I’m starting to take this stuff personally: Poor social skills may be harmful to health.
* I mean really. Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly?
* Academics ‘face higher mental health risk’ than other professions.
* Atheism is caused by poor breath control.
* The Rise and Fall of the Racist Right.
* Every Black Mirror. Against SNL. Against Star Wars. Disney Apparently Expects ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ To Bomb. How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit.
* When Michael Jackson Almost Bought Marvel.
* Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme. How We Know It Was Climate Change. And just because there can never be a single moment’s peace from toxic masculinity: Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly.
* Can humanity make peace with its death?
* Seinfeld: The Point and Click Adventure.
* The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth.
* Private Prison Companies Are About to Cash In on Trump’s Deportation Regime.
* Marquette in the ne — oh no, this again?
Written by gerrycanavan
January 1, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, addiction, AIDS, alt-right, America, anomie, apocalypse, architecture, art, atheism, automation, Baby Boomers, Big Pharma, Black Mirror, cancer, cashless economy, choice paralysis, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theories, content managers, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, dopplegangers, Drexel, drugs, Duke, ecology, editing, Episode 7, Episode 9, Eugene, evil, fantasy, film, Frosty the Snowman, games, George Ciccariello-Maher, good, Han Solo, health, HIV, homeless, How the University Works, ice, Iowa, John McAdams, KKK, labor, love, Mark Hamill, Marquette, Marvel, Melville, Michael Jackson, midichlorians, millennials, Montana, murder, myth, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Obamacare, Oregon, parenting, pensions, politics, poverty, Princess Leia, prison, private prisons, quantum mechanics, race, racism, radical speculation, rich people, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Seinfeld, smart people, SNL, social skills, Solo, special issues, species extinction, Star Wars, subways, SWAT teams, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens, the humanities, the Internet, the Jedi, the prequels, Tolkien, toxic masculinity, true crime, ugliness, Ursula K. Le Guin, video games, water, Whitefish, wildfires, work, Zeno
Spring Break Forever Links
* Hey look! LARoB reviewed Green Planets.
* Another science fiction studies research opportunity: The 2016-2017 Le Guin Fellowship.
* Notes from ICFA roundtable on The Force Awakens, on cast, nostalgia, and franchise. This was a great panel; I’m so glad we did it.
* Will we ever learn George Lucas’s original Plan for Star Wars Episode 7?
* What a Funding Fracas Could Mean for the Future of CUNY.
* They’ve finally diagnosed my unusual condition.
* Snubbed again! Here Are 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman. Meanwhile:
But the movie itself is terrible, poorly made, dumb, and shockingly dull. Doomsday is trash. Lex stinks. The worst modern comic book film.
— Adonai (@devincf) March 22, 2016
* In other words, bad food becomes linked to good memories, and to our sense of who we are and where we come from. To give up that food would be to give up not only a piece of our childhood, but of ourselves. “When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favorite brand of ice cream or potato chips or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility,” Wilson writes. “It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss.”
* In this formula, the president implies that with hard work everyone can get a good job. This is the premise for a lot of public education rhetoric, and it is 100 percent false. It may be technically true that in the American system anyone can get a good job, but that doesn’t mean most people aren’t out of luck. Anyone can win the lottery, but everyone certainly can’t. America is still a class system, and by design, most people—no matter the average level of education or job skill—will have to sell their labor to property owners in order to feed and house themselves. Those property owners are the same people that have spent the past hundred years shaping the education system and scientifically reducing labor costs.
* What a weird coincidence, ten straight record warm months in a row.
* Appalachia in the Anthropocene: When mining a century’s worth of energy means ruining a landscape for millions of years. Ice in the Anthropocene. Oil in the Anthropocene. Boulder-Hurling Megawaves in the Anthropocene. Cli-Fi in the Anthropocene.
* “There are no plausible scenarios in which climate stabilization is compatible with a pace of capital accumulation required for economic and political stability under a capitalist system.” Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World.
* How are the political effects of “terrorism” produced?
* #altac
* A Video Game About Changing What Happens In Shakespeare’s Hamlet Using Time Travel. Sold!
* Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* The Christians, the Soviets, and the Bible.
* It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
* Game theory and the GOP nomination. Can’t #StopTrump? Third parties: a beginner’s guide. Of course, there’s always Plan B. Or Plan C.
* I, Cthulhu, endorse Donald Trump.
* BART Social Media Intern ’16.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
* A Brief History of Sabotage.
* Twilight of Gawker: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit.
* Sea World Promises to Acquire No New Orcas. Why SeaWorld is ending its killer whale program, in one brutal chart.
New SeaWorld Show Just Elephant Drowning In Large Tank Of Water With No Explanation https://t.co/JfgnMqF5L4 pic.twitter.com/uFtvm3K65l
— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 18, 2016
* Why We’re Opting Out of Testing.
* Junot Díaz on time travel and colonialism.
* A book length history of abolition.
* More from the death of psychology.
* Well, he tried: the Obama legacy.
* The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana.
* The stock market is a sucker’s bet.
* What we talk about when we talk about jobs.
* These measures seem harsh, but if Trump really is a sui generis evil, then unprecedented and difficult measures are called for. If we’re not willing to make and carry through with such threats, does that mean that we don’t really view him as a sui generis evil? That this is just the latest thing we’re willing to humor for the sake of family peace and avoiding social awkwardness?
* Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings. I’m currently in the process of filing a request with the chalk administration office so I can respond to this with the detail and attention it deserves.
* What if physical activity doesn’t help people lose weight?
* Duke’s non-tenure-track faculty have unionized.
* They found Himmler’s occult book stash.
* “Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms.”
* Inside the Crazy Back-Channel Negotiations That Revolutionized Our Relationship With Cuba.
* Hackers ‘could take over your dildo and make it go berserk’, expert warns.
* Reading Calvin and Hobbes in Korea.
* I’ll be 100% honest, you had me at hello.
* And the best fantasy series you’ve never heard of is getting a second chance at a film franchise. This time it will work for sure!
Written by gerrycanavan
March 23, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NeverTrump, #StopTrump, 1969, abolition, academia, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncts, altac, Andrew Cuomo, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Appalachia, austerity, Barack Obama, BART, Batman, Batman v. Superman, Ben Robertson, Bernie Sanders, books, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, chalk, charter schools, Christianity, Chronicles of Pyrdain, class struggle, cli-fi, climate change, coal, colonialism, comics, conferences, Cthulhu, Cuba, CUNY, Daredevil, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, diabetes, dildoes, Disney, Donald Trump, Duke, ecology, education, Emory, empire, endorsements, Episode 7, espionage, evil, exercise, fantasy, fascism, Federal Reserve, fellowships, feminism, film, food, free speech, game theory, games, Gandalf, Gawker, George Lucas, Green Planets, grief, hackers, Hamlet, Hillary Clinton, Himmler, history, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, humor, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, ideology, jobs, joke addiction, jokes, Junot Díaz, Kansas, kids today, Korea, legalize drugs, Lloyd Alexander, Lord of the Rings, Louisiana, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nixon, occultism, oil, orcas, Paradox, Playboy, politics, psychology, race, religion, Republican primary 2016, sabotage, San Francisco, Saruman, scams, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sea World, Shakespeare, slavery, snubs and flubs, Soviet Union, standardized testing, Star Wars, stock market, student movements, superheroes, Superman, Telltale Games, The Americans, the Anthropocene, The Force Awakens, the occult, The Walking Dead, third parties, time travel, Tolkien, transgender issues, Twitter, unions, war on drugs, West Virginia, zombies, Zootopia
Friday Links!
* Terrible news from UWM: The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) is facing an unprecedented attack on its very existence.
* CFP for SLSA 2016: “Creativity.”
* The shift from a subordinate learner as a grad student to a would-be peer on the job market is one of the most predictable traumas in an academic’s life, inducing professional and emotional distress in almost everyone who encounters it. I think this is true, but I wish we would encourage graduate students not to think of themselves so much as students in the first place.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on the Game of Fibble. Played on a Scrabble board.
* Raucous confrontation at SF State over ethnic studies cuts.
* Melissa Click has been fired by the University of Missouri Board of Curators.
* Washington State Prof Charged With $8M Research Fraud.
* Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico (R-Grayson) said that books such as “Beloved” plant the seeds of evil in the minds of young people. This country’s gone completely mad.
* A 150-Year Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis.
* Nuclear waste dumped illegally in Ky. Poverty across Wisconsin reaches highest level in 30 years. Lead Warnings Issued for Pregnant Women, Kids in Jackson, Mississippi. Iowa Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Let Kids Have Handguns. America’s airlines are introducing a class below economy. America is pulling apart.
* A woman who was arrested at a hospital over the summer for failing to pay court fines died the next day because she was deprived of water at the Charleston County jail, her family’s attorneys said Wednesday.
* We’ve all thought about it: High School Honors Student Was Actually a Creepy Adult Pretending to Be a Kid.
* Facebook’s Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.
* This goes with another point: drones are a signal departure from the impersonal destruction that typifies modern technologically advanced warfare, in which the attacker rarely perceives his individual victims. The drone pilot, in contrast, even though he is thousands of miles away, spends many hours closely observing his victim and those near him, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The stories are about both the killers and the killed.
* A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. Counterpoint: A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.
* The Mirror Universe: A Historical Analysis.
* How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story.
* “Asteroid Will Pass Agonizingly Close To Earth.”
* In this article Huntington’s disease becomes the core of the case for editing genes, against even blindness on the other side. I wrote about it!
* Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.
* “I felt nothing,” she told me, smiling. “He was a dog thief, after all.”
* Finally we find that 38% of Florida voters think it’s possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. 10% say he for sure is, and another 28% say that they are just not sure. Cruz is exonerated from being a toddler serial killer by 62% of the Sunshine State populace.
Why does everyone keep joking about Ted Cruz being the Zodiac Killer?
I mean he definitely is but like, people died
— Griffin McElroy (@griffinmcelroy) February 26, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2016 at 7:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, air travel, America, animals, asteroids, austerity, banned books, Beloved, Big Data, Bloomberg, Century for 21st Century Studies, CFPs, CIA, class struggle, crisis, CRISPR, data, dogs, drones, ethnic studies, evil, Facebook, Fibble, Flannery O'Connor, Flint, Florida, food, fraud, games, gene editing, genetics, gorillas, graduate student life, guns, high school, history, How the University Works, Huntington's disease, Jackson, Kentucky, kids today, lead, lead poisoning, Melissa Click, MFA, Mirror Universe, Mississippi, Mizzou, monkeys, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, nuclear waste, nuclearity, over-educated literary theory PhDs, police violence, politics, polling, poverty, primates, prison, Republicans, science fiction, Scrabble, SFSU, SLSA, South Carolina, Star Trek, Ted Cruz, the Constitution, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, UWM, Vietnam, war, Washington State, water, Wisconsin
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* Americans first learn about slavery as children, before adults are willing to explain finance capital or rape. By high school, young adults are ready to hear about sexual violence as an element of slavery and about how owners valued their property, but there’s no level of developmental maturity that prepares someone to grasp systemized monstrosity on this scale. Forced labor we can understand—maybe it’s even a historical constant so far. Mass murder too. But an entire economy built on imprisoning and raping children? One that enslaved near 40 percent of the population? Even for the secular, only religious words seem to carry enough weight: unholy, abomination, evil.
* Plan C: The top secret Cold War plan for martial law in the USA.
* The Huntington honors Octavia Butler. And from the archives! My writeup on the Butler papers at the Huntington.
* The first issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Feeding English Majors in the 21st Century.
* Chicago State University in danger of closing: Alumni speak out.
* CFP: Fantasies of Contemporary Culture. Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.” MUHuCon 2016. Feminist Review: Dystopias and Utopias.
* Melissa Click has now been suspended, after being charged with third degree assault.
* A University Softens a Plan to Cut Tenured Faculty, but Professors Remain Wary.
* Prominent Medieval Scholar’s Blog on ‘Feminist Fog’ Sparks an Uproar.
* How startling, unique cuts have transformed Louisiana’s universities.
* Is It Discriminatory to Require Peer Review?
* 2.5 million men ‘have no close friends.’
* Sanders and the Theory of Change: Radical Politics for Grown-Ups.
* Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination.
* How to pair wine with your favorite Girl Scout cookies.
* How Intellectuals Create a Public.
* Long Before Helping Flint, Michigan Officials Were Shipping Clean Water to Their Own Workers. Flint’s Bottom Line. What went wrong in Flint. Flint Residents Told That Their Children Could Be Taken Away If They Don’t Pay For City’s Poison Water. Report: ‘Every Major US City East of the Mississippi’ Is Underreporting Heavy Metals In Its Water. It’s everywhere. “Milwaukee taking steps to prevent lead from getting in water.”
* And elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: FBI arrests suspect who allegedly wanted to cause mass terrorism in Milwaukee. MPS as “national disgrace.” ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Milwaukee leaders speak out against deadly rise in car thefts. Have I mentioned we’re hiring?
* Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams To Block Audio, Records Show.
* What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers.
* The Difference a Mutant Makes.
* See? It’s good that I’m like this.
* Suggested Amazon warning labels.
* Richard Feynman, “Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle.”
* Rhode Island: Children Under 10 Shall Not Be Left Home Alone, Even Briefly.
* Sea level rise from ocean warming underestimated, scientists say.
* Climate dystopia is here: Zika virus prompts calls for women to stop having babies.
* Why science-fiction writers find it so hard to discuss climate tech.
* Racial harmony in a Marxist utopia: how the Soviet Union capitalised on US discrimination.
* Linguists Analyze Every Disney Princess Movie, to Somewhat Depressing Results.
* List of animals with fraudulent diplomas.
* Everything’s fine: Hillary’s team copied intel off top-secret server to email.
* Constitutional Convention 2016.
* Today in Doctor Who fandom: The Season of River Song. And then there was Chibnall.
* Fictional Games From Epic Fantasy Books. A People’s History of Board Games.
* Here’s why we’re attracted to people of a similar height, scientists say.
* Former NFL Player Tyler Sash Had CTE When He Died At Age 27.
* A dark, gritty Hanna-Barbera reboot.
* Airbnb makes half its SF money with illegal listings.
* Trailer with $70,000 worth of cheese stolen in Wisconsin. And that’s only the second-largest cheese heist in the state this week.
* Nearly $50,000 In Bull Semen Stolen From Turlock Truck.
* The final days of Al Jazeera America.
* Twilight of the sleazy professor.
* The FBI Claims Not to Have a File on David Bowie.
* Meet the Americans Who Moved to Europe and Went AWOL on Their Student Loans.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 29, 2016 at 12:09 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academic journals, adjunctification, adjuncts, Airbnb, Al Jazeera, alcohol, Amazon, America, animals, anti-feminism, anxiety, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, austerity, Bernie Sanders, blizzards, books, bull semen, capitalism, car thefts, cartoons, CFPs, Challenger, change, cheese, Chicago, Chicago State University, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, class struggle, climate change, concussions, conferences, Constitutional conventions, Daily Show, David Bowie, DC Comics, Deadwood, delicious Girl Scout cookies, diploma mills, discrimination, Disney, Disney princesses, Doctor Who, dystopia, education, emails, English departments, English majors, evil, fantasy, FBI, feminism, film, Flint, games, gender, geoengineering, Go, graphs, Hanna-Barbara, HBO, Hillary Clinton, history, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Huntington Library, ice sheet collapse, Illuminatus, intelligence, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Koch brothers, lead, lead poisoning, LEGO, Louisiana, love, maps, Marquette, martial law, Marx, Marxism, masculinity, mass shootings, medievalism, Melissa Click, men, men's rights activism, Michigan, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools, misogyny, Mizzou, mutants, my scholarly empire, NASA, Native studies, neoliberalism, NFL, Octavia Butler, Paradoxa, parenting, peer review, pinball, police, police corruption, police-industrial complex, politics, Ponzi schemes, post capitalism, pregnancy, public intellectuals, race, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, revolution, Rhone Island, Richard Feynman, River Song, Rob Latham, romance, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, segregation, sexism, slavery, sleaze, social networks, space shuttle, Star Wars, student loans, surveillance society, teaching evaluations, television, tenure, terrorism, the 1930s, the Arctic, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the SNAFU principle, the university in ruins, Trevor Noah, trigger warnings, true crime, UC Riverside, United Kingdom, Utopia, warning labels, water, Western Illinois University, wine, Wisconsin, X-Men, Zika virus
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic freedom, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncting, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, Andy Daly, animals, apocalypse, Apple, austerity, automation, bad science, baseball, Batman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, black leftism, black power, books, boondoggles, Breaking Bad, bribery, Britney Spears, Brutalism, bullying, bureaucracy, campus police, Captain Picard, car alarms, carbon, card games, cars, celibacy, Chicago, children's literature, China Miéville, choice, Chomsky, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, comics, competitive bagpiping, creditonormativity, creeps, cussing, David Graeber, DC Comics, death penalty, decadence, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic primary 2016, desegregation, drought, dystopia, ecology, education, ennui, EPA, erotic alphabets, even the losers get lucky sometimes, evil, exotic pets, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, fake cream, fandom, Fantastic Four, fanzines, fat, film, final exams, fire, free speech, free will, freemium, games, gaslighting, Gene Roddenberry, gig economy, girls, Google, Google Plus, GPS, graduate student life, guns, harbingers of failure, Harry Potter, health, Hiroshima, historically black colleges, Hogwarts, Hollywood, hope but not for us, Hostess cupcakes, House of Cards, How the University Works, India, infrastructure, interviews, Islamophobia, ITunes, IUC, Jack the Ripper, Jacobin, Jimmy Carter, Jon Stewart, Judy Greer, jury nullification, Katrina, KFC, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Mead, literature, Little Women, Magic: The Gathering, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Marvel, mass shootings, math, megadrought, microaggression, millennials, Milverine, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Lion, modernism, museums, my media empire, my particular demographics, my scholarly empire, nationalize the Internet, neoliberalism, Nevada, nuclear war, nuclearity, nutrition, offshoring, oligarchy, organized crime, our brains work in interesting ways, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, Phyllis WIse, planned communities, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, polygraphs, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, reboots, rejection letters, renewable energy, Review, roads, robot umpires, run it like a sandwich, Samuel Delany, sandcastles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, serial killers, sewage, shared governance, short stories, social justice, social media, solitaire, Soviet Union, stadiums, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, Subway, Super Mario, superheroes, surveillance society, survival, sustainability, swearing, taste, tax cuts, teaching, teaching philosophy, technology, television, tenure, the alphabet, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, the courts, The Daily Show, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the law, the Left, The Matrix, the rent is too damn high, This American Life, Tijuana Bibles, Title IX, TNG, Tressie McMillan Cottom, trial by combat, trickle-down economics, Twinkies, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Iowa, University of Phoenix, Ursula K. Le Guin, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Vince Gilligan, war on education, water, wealth, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Wolverine, women's history, Won't somebody think of the children?, woodcuts, Woody Allen, words
Saturday Night Links!
* I’ve had a nice bit of professional good news: I’ve been asked to join Extrapolation as an editor beginning with their Spring 2015 issue.
* “Crutzen, who is not a geologist, but one of the modern great scientists, essentially launched a small hand grenade into the world of geological time scales,” Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the ICS’s anthropocene working group, told the Guardian. “The word began to be used widely, well before geologists ever got involved.”
* That old-time religion: Now that science fiction is respectable, it’s lost almost all of the conceptual craziness and dubious sexual politics that made it both fanboy bait and of genuine interest.
* From AfricaIsACountry: Ebola and neo-imperialism. And from Jacobin: The Political Economy of Ebola.
* The arsenal of, well, let’s say democracy: The U.S. sold $66.3 billion in weapons last year –- more than three-fourths of the entire global arms market.
* Richest 1% of people own nearly half of global wealth, says report.
* Climate change: how to make the big polluters really pay.
* Of Collaborators and Careerists.
* Whites are more supportive of voter ID laws when shown photos of black people voting.
* Meritocracy watch: Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.
* The 21st century university: women’s only colleges and trans identity.
* Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers.
* The Milwaukee police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park is believed to be the first officer in the city fired as a result of a fatal on-duty shooting in at least 45 years.
* More back-and-forth on carceral feminism from Amber A’Lee Frost and Freddie deBoer.
* Pieces like this are enough to make you nostalgic for the quietly understated narcissism of “job creators.”
like Uber but for poor people to sell their organs to rich people
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2014
So old I can remember when technological progress was going to increase human happiness instead of helping everyone hustle 24 hours a day.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2014
* An oral history of The Wonder Years.
* New Scrabble Dictionary Disrepects The Game.
* Stop worrying about mastermind hackers. Start worrying about the IT guy.
* And just for fun: How to die in the 18th century. Watch for for evil, and for the purples…
Written by gerrycanavan
October 18, 2014 at 9:50 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, Africa, Airbnb, Always Be Closing, America, arms trade, carceral feminism, carceral liberalism, careerism, class struggle, climate change, collaborators, college, death, deep time, Ebola, ecology, everything is trying to kill you, evil, Extrapolation, games, geology, hackers, How the University Works, humanitarianism, imperialism, income inequality, job creators, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, mortality, my media empire, neoliberalism, Paul Crutzen, police violence, politics, protest, race, racism, rich people, science fiction, Scrabble, sex, shipwrecks, technology, television, the Anthropocene, the hustle, the purples, The Wonder Years, trans* issues, Uber, voter ID, wealth, weird hobbies, what it is I think I'm doing, white people, women and children first, women's colleges
Headlines That Can’t Be Ignored
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2011 at 10:29 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with college basketball, Duke, evil, Newt Gingrich
Monday Morning Miscellany
* In case you missed it last night, a joint statement from students in the Program in Literature and the Polygraph Editorial Collective on the closing of the Philosophy program at Middlesex University is up at Polygraph‘s website, as well as down the page.
* Media Matters fact-checks the Kagan nomination. My favorite is the one about her college thesis, which will fuel a thousand wails of SOCIALISM! from the right. Meanwhile, “elena kagan husband” and “elena kagan personal life” are #2 and #6 on Google’s trending searches right now; someone in the White House is undoubtedly freaking out.
* His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in anger, if only they knew the truth. Oh, surely.
* This Google Maps app compares the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill to your local metropolitan area.
* …so far, the state has lost between $6 million and $10 million in projected business revenue, with 23 group hotel bookings–from small meetings to large conventions–having been canceled in protest since the stroke of Brewer’s pen, according to the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association.
* Fantasy Soccer ’09-’10 has ended and I have once again been denied my rightful crown: I came in first place in MetaFilter’s league and in our head-to-head league but silver-medaled in the elite Blue Devils United division. The good news is we’ll be doing a Fantasy World Cup next month; details sometime in the next few weeks.
* This Wired piece seems to be ground zero for the Facebook backlash. Judging from my newsfeed the Facebook backlash backlash is already beginning in earnest; I’m planning on spearheading the backlash backlash backlash.
* Science proves “babies know the difference between good and evil at six months.” So now we can try babies as adults.
* Trailer for my cousin’s upcoming documentary about Afghanistan, Where My Heart Beats.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 10, 2010 at 9:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Afghanistan, Arizona, babies, Barack Obama, boycotts, Deepwater Horizon, documentary, don't say socialism, Duke, Elena Kagan, evil, Facebook, fantasy soccer, good, How the University Works, immigration, justice, lies and lying liars, maps, medicine, Middlesex University, oil, philosophy, politics, Polygraph, science, statistics, Supreme Court, the economy, World Cup, xkcd
The Evil Santas of Science Fiction
The evil Santas of science fiction.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 15, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with evil, Santa, science fiction
‘The Case Against Delaware’
In honor of the Biden selection it’s worth revisiting the fact that Delaware is easily the worst state in the country, by a wide margin. Jonathan Chait’s “The Case Against Delaware”:
Until one day several years ago, I, like most people, harbored no ill feelings toward the state of Delaware. I suppose in some vague sense I thought of it as harmless and even endearing, the way you tend to regard other small things, such as Girl Scouts or squirrels. But all that changed the summer day I moved to Washington, when, making my way down I-95 in a rental truck with all of my worldly belongings, I screeched to a halt in front of what turned out to be a two-hour backup in Delaware. Never having driven down the East Coast, I at first assumed the traffic jam must have been caused by some horrific accident. But as my truck crept forward I saw it was no accident at all but a deliberate obstruction–specifically, a tollboth on the Delaware Turnpike. Slowly the full horror of it sunk in: The State of Delaware had turned the East Coast’s main traffic artery into a sweltering parking lot merely so it could exact a tribute from each driver crossing its miserable little stretch of concrete.
The practice of charging road tolls is an archaic holdover blighting much of the Northeast. But Delaware has taken it to a grotesque extreme. Whereas the I-95 tolls amount to less than five cents per mile in New Jersey and four cents per mile in Maryland, Jim Lange in Delaware they cost an exorbitant 18 cents per mile. Which isn’t surprising because, in a deeper sense, Delaware’s tolls epitomize the state’s entire ethos. The organizing principle of Delaware government is to subsidize its people at the rest of the country’s expense. While tolls represent the most obvious of the state’s nefarious methods, Delaware also utilizes its appallingly lax regulation of banks and corporations to enrich itself while undermining its neighbors. Indeed, Delaware’s image as small and inoffensive is not merely a misconception but a purposeful guise. It presents itself as a plucky underdog peopled by a benevolent, public-spirited, entrepreneurial citizenry. In truth, it is a rapacious parasite state with a long history of disloyalty and avarice…
Preach it, Brother Chait.
I’ve been stuck there myself, many, many times, which is why I still try to shunpike Delaware whenever I can…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2008 at 5:26 am
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with banking, corporations, Delaware, evil, I-95, Joe Biden, law, shunpiking, tolls, worst state in the country