Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Federal Reserve

Spring Break Forever Links

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* 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:

* 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?

Cdwgg6MWEAA65gz* #altac

A Video Game About Changing What Happens In Shakespeare’s Hamlet Using Time Travel. Sold!

* Zootopia and ideology.

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.

* Legalize everything.

“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.

Why We’re Opting Out of Testing.

* Junot Díaz on time travel and colonialism.

* Daredevil and Catholicism.

* 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.

* Somehow, Telltale is going to continue its Walking Dead series after radically fracturing the outcomes at the end of Season Two.

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!

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Written by gerrycanavan

March 23, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Monday Links!

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* CFP: SFRA 2015.

* From the archives: the inaugural issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Ephemera 11.4: “Work, Play, and Boredom.” And in the mail: Science Fiction Film and Television 7.2, all about Doctor Who.

Pro-Sports Moochers and the True Cost of “Student Athletes.”

* Existential Comics recaps France vs. Germany.

* Today in things that won’t get a policeman thrown in jail, much less fired: Video Catches Highway Cop Punching Woman On The Side Of The Road.

* What If America Had Lost the Revolutionary War? U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths.

* The past is another country: Black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow south – except on Independence Day.

* Today in the surveillance state. If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance.

* Jedediah Purdy at Politco: 238 years after its first birthday, America is in deep denial.

* The Democratic Party is an inside job.

* “There’s $300 billion worth of gold in the basement, but the real money is on the ninth floor.”

* Here’s the Lawless Hellscape Colorado Has Become Six Months After Legalizing Weed.

* TSA Now Mandating That All Phones Be Turned On Before You Fly. Up is down! Black is white!

* Let’s redesign parking signs.

Children left to play alone achieve more. So that’s my secret!

* 10 Words Every Girl Should Learn.

* Jaws Is Ridiculous, Say Kids Who Owe Everything to Jaws.

* This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting.

Researchers Discover the Meaning of Over 60 Words Used by Wild Chimps.

* Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem.

* Presenting the absolute worst people in the world: the coal-rollers.

* Introducing TV’s Best Female Monster Yet.

* Batman v. Superman only seems terrible because they got Kevin Smith to write a fake script to fool everyone. Well it certainly accounts for all the known facts.

* On Maleficent, Disney’s first rape-revenge film.

* And the new rules for Dungeons & Dragons are free; you’ll note for historical purposes that race is still real, but sex and gender aren’t.

‘TARP At Least Had Some Strings Attached’

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Wednesday!

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* The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has once again rejected Troy Davis’s appeal. Terrible.

* Occupy Wall Street, Day 5. Some more here.

* Apocalypse 2012: Just shy of a majority of registered voters, 49 percent, say they definitely plan to vote against Barack Obama in 2012, but just 36 percent say they definitely plan to vote for him, according to a newMcClatchy-Marist poll.

* House and Senate GOP leadership are taking fire from all sides for publicly pressuring Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke not to further loosen monetary policy, even if he thinks it will help the economy.

* Things Apple is worth more than.

* And some good news for a change: our energy problems are over forever. We’re saved!

“This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water,” said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering. “It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy.”

Saved!

Progressives Need to Politicize Money

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From a series of legal codes favoring creditors, a two-tier justice system that ignore abuses in foreclosures and property law, a system of surveillance dedicated to maximum observation on spending, behavior and ultimate collection of those with debt and beyond, there’s been a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense. Control over money itself is the last component of oligarchical income defense, and it needs to be as contested as much as we contest all the other mechanisms.

Read Rortybomb. Via Krugman, who notes “the upshot is terrible: more and more, this really does look like the Lesser Depression, a prolonged era of disastrous economic performance. And it’s entirely gratuitous.”

Monday Night

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* A key feature of capitalism in America is the complete insulation of elites from the violence the system inflicts against the poor. This is illustrated well in today’s health care debate; the actual human suffering and death caused by our broken health care system is invisible to people like Joe Lieberman, who is therefore free to consider health care reform as a purely abstract game centered around revenge against his enemies. To bring up the fact that people are actually dying over this is considered unspeakably rude—a total breach of decorum. Frank Rich and BAGnotes make the same point today about the invisibility of suffering in the economic crisis as a whole.

* In any event, Lieberman won (with an apparent assist from Rahm): the Medicare buy-in is officially dead.

* Ezra Klein explains why everyone is so terrified of reconciliation.

* Grist says the big story out of Copenhagen’s first week is the emergence of tensions between richer and poorer developing nations.

The one significant new feature of this treaty round is the emergence of a distinct voice for small island nations and the poorest states—the folks for whom climate change is an existential, not just economic, problem. Inside the talks, this manifested in the tiny island state of Tuvalu’s call for a new, post-Kyoto treaty that would require mandatory reductions not only from rich countries but from the biggest and fastest-growing developing nations, including China and India. It would also set 1.5 degrees C as the target for limiting the rise in global temperature, rather than the 2 C agreed upon in previous talks (and still maintained by big emitters). This amounts to the first big public eruption of the simmering tensions between major developing countries and their smaller/poorer brethren. Whereas China and India want to shelter their economic development above all else, Tuvalu, well, might go under water soon.

* The ultimate Disney/Marvel mashup.

* Millions of “lost” Bush administration emails discovered by computer technicians. MetaFilter has your schadenfreude.

* Could Bernanke really withdraw his nomination for chairman of the Federal Reserve?

* And I wanted to post this a few days ago, but seem to have forgotten: the situation with Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is rapidly growing completely insane.

Friday Links

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* Good job numbers suggest the recession could be bottoming out. Of course, you can’t please everyone.

* BREAKING: Ben Bernanke is kind of a douche.

* Ted Kennedy may be gone, but John Kerry still won’t support the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound.

* In a new piece in Vanity Fair, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater/Xe, turns out to have been CIA. Via MeFi. What’s next for this real-life Bond villain?

For the time being, however, Prince contends that his plans are far more modest. “I’m going to teach high school,” he says, straight-faced. “History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

* New Jersey to pave million-year-old dinosaur footprints to put up parking lot. Okay, actually condos.

* Can humans reproduce in zero gravity?

This finding casts into doubt the science fictional notion that human beings can survive in zero gravity or in the microgravity environment of large asteroids.

* Could a super-advanced civilization live inside the acretion disk, the super-dense area around the black hole at the center of a galaxy?

* The headline reads, “Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex.”

Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings.

* Sarah Palin goes birther.

The other thing that struck me about her interview was her contention that she didn’t go after Obama enough during the election, and namely, that avoiding the birther thing was a mistake. I suppose she could have gone completely off the deep end during the campaign, and certainly it seems she wanted to but was held back by McCain, but good god, who in their right mind thinks she wasn’t enough on the attack? She accused Obama, through implication, of being a terrorist. She did so in a way that maximized the anti-Muslim insinuation, even though neither Barack Obama nor Bill Ayers (who is the excuse for this rumor-mongering) is Muslim, making the whole thing not only racist but incoherent. She went out of her way to imply that anyone who was not white or lived in a city was not a Real American. She red-baited Obama. She did everything but tell jokes about his mom. Her entire campaign strategy was to attack Obama. I fail to see how she could have done more, honestly. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

* And science proves Rousseau was right: God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.

Wednesday Night!

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* I just don’t understand it; instead of feeling happy, I feel sort of let down: You’re a Good Man, Barack Obama. (Thanks, Erica!)

* How cap-and-trade works for acid rain and smog. The success of sulfur dioxide market is an important piece of counterevidence to those (like me) who think that a cap-and-trade market won’t work—but it’s worth noting that a carbon market would be far larger in scope than the SO2 version, potentially impacting nearly every segment of the global economy. Speculative trading and even a financial bubble is much more likely to emerge in a global CO2 market than in a sulfur dioxide market conducted in a single country. An earlier Grist piece also problematizes the supposed success of sulfur trading:

Compare the success of the often-touted sulfur dioxide trading system the U.S., instituted in 1990, with the speed and quantity of reductions under rule-based systems during the same period. U.S. SO2 emissions dropped by 31% between 1990 and 2001. Over the same period of time, under old fashioned rule-based regulation, Germany reduced its emissions by 87%, Italy by 62%, and Western Europe as a whole by 57%.

A carbon tax remains the smarter choice.

* How Canada is screwing up Copenhagen.

* And my favorite senator, Bernie Sanders, will try to put a hold on Bernanke’s reconfirmation at the Federal Reserve.

King Ben

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That Republicans and Democrats always agree about who should chair the Federal Reserve tells you a lot about the way politics actually works in America. The most important issues are the ones that have been put beyond all possible dispute, on which all reasonable people can only agree.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 25, 2009 at 4:47 am

Market Apocalypse

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Via Matt Yglesias and everywhere else, this is why I’m glad I have no money:

It’s just been announced that JP Morgan will buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, implying a value of about $250 million. Given that the company headquarters is said to be worth about $1.2 billion, that gives the BS banking business a value of negative $1 billion. And that’s only after the Fed agreed to take on $30 billion worth of toxic waste from the BS portfolio, politely described as “less-liquid assets.”

Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s fifth-biggest investment bank, had opened at $60 a share on Thursday.

There’s much more at Huffington Post, MetaFilter, and elsewhere, including Alan Greenspan’s claim that this is the worst financial crisis since World War II. And he should know, he helped cause it.

Written by gerrycanavan

March 17, 2008 at 4:00 am