Posts Tagged ‘forever war’
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
the government is trying to put this person in prison https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn pic.twitter.com/5Avr1TTq1I
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
The ICE fake university thing makes no sense if you see them as ‘law enforcement’ and perfect sense if you see them as what they really are.
— David Kaib (@DavidKaib) November 30, 2019
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
what is most horrifying about Trump is precisely how easy it would have been, and will still be, for someone with just a little more self-control to completely transform this country, with effectively no resistance https://t.co/SUYW58umE5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2019
If it is deadly serious and makes you blink extra hard? It’s something that has always happened but now it’s being done under the cover of Trump’s administration.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) December 3, 2019
I don’t think anyone has yet processed the level of lawbreaking we’re going to see once McConnell and the Senate Republicans formally declare that Trump is absolutely above the law. https://t.co/SllfwUWRSW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2019
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
current state of the Dem primary: beloved previous president working to make sure the nomination doesn’t go to one of only two candidates who even pretend to give a damn about normal people (both topping out around 19% each), while multiple billionaires straight up try to buy it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
I know “Great Man of History” thinking is banned now but I really wonder how much of the history of the 2010s ultimately redounds to Obama’s incredible personal magnetism against his failures as a leader
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
the only contradiction is between the fantasies people still have about him and the person he actually is https://t.co/h7m5ExpRnn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
“The GOP’s incumbent is a vile, universally loathed creep! Now our only choice is whether to run a senile pervert or an absolute psychopath”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
the subtext of all of Scorsese's mob films is the gradual subsumption of the mob's rackets to finance capital, who run them at even greater profit https://t.co/rSqTtppMKz
— giorgio (@stungusbungus) December 1, 2019
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
I hope you all got good advent calendars today… pic.twitter.com/TIOA23iqLM
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
‘My Reading Year’ (for yesterday’s @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/u4oat6jVtA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
UNCLE: I say this every year but-
ME: not this again
MOM: we’re NOT talking politics this thanksgiving
UNCLE: without luigi there is no waluigi, therefore he is responsible for waluigi’s many sins
ME: ARE YOU SAYING WALUIGI HAS NO FREE WILL
UNCLE: I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) November 28, 2019
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
can’t wait for dec. 20th pic.twitter.com/EWLG7qrztp
— porky thee pig (@faithwithanf) November 26, 2019
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 63 Up, 7 Up, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, agricultural civilization, air travel, Albert Camus, Amazon, America, amusement parks, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, Baby Yoda, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, billionaires, blue, Bolsonaro, books, Brack Obama, Brazil, Buffalo, butterfly effect, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Chinese science fiction, cinema, class struggle, climate, climate change, college closures, college majors, color, Colorado, comics, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, corruption, D.C. Fontana, dark side of the digital, debt, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DHS, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drug addiction, dystopia, ecology, electoral fraud, Elon Musk, English majors, Episode 9, Exxon, fantasy, farming, fascism, film, football, forever war, Foxconn, franchise fiction, free college, Frozen, games, general election 2020, Generation X, geoengineering, George Zimmerman, Ghostbusters, GIFs, global south, Go, Google, Gorbachev, graduate student movements, Great Recession, guns, Harvard, HBO, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, income inequality, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Iraq, Joe Biden, KGB, kids, Latinx, Latinx science fiction, life expectancy, Life in Hell, Lyndon Johnson, maps, Mark Fisher, Mark Z. Danielewski, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, Matt Groening, McKinsey, MCU, mentors, micro plastics, migrants, millennials, Milwaukee, Monopoly, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Orleans, New York, Octavia E. Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, Ozymandias, Parable of the Talents, parenting, Patreon, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, Pizza Hut, podcasts, politics, potatoes, poverty, public universities, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rent control, ruin, Samuel Beckett, school shootings, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Seattle, SFRA, Should I go to grad school?, social media, socialism, spheres, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starlink, strikes, student debt, Super Mario, Superman, Thanksgiving, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Census, the courts, the Federation, the flu, the humanities, The Irishman, the law, the recession, the stars, the sublime, the university in ruins, time loops, Title IX, Tom Gauld, true crime, tuition, Turkey, Twitter, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, unemployment, unions, United Nations, Vermont, Waluigi, war crimes, war huh, Watchmen, water, wheelchairs, white people, wildfires, Wisconsin
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference, May 2018. CFP: The Future of Fandom. CFP: J. G. Ballard and the Sciences.
* The Rise of Brittle Paper: The Village Square of African Literature.
* The Library of America’s Story of the Week is an Ursula K. Le Guin classic, “The Day Before the Revolution.”
* Four book series that are shaping the future of science fiction on television. Butler! Okorafor! Jemisin!
We all know it is ending.
Trump is not an aberration. There will be no “return to normal.” The damage has been done. America is over.
* For years, Richard Florida preached the gospel of the creative class. His new book is a mea culpa.
* Something has gone wrong with our atheists.
* The Ludicrous Prepper Plans of the Super Rich.
* Today’s “dominant cultural elite”—those Currid-Halkett has labeled “the aspirational class”— “reveal their class position through cultural signifiers” instead of material possessions, as was the custom during the golden age of conspicuous consumption. Ownership of relatively luxurious products (large electronics, SUVs) is now so widely accessible that the new elites eschew material things not because they’re reluctant to publicly display their affluence but because material goods no longer offer enough distinction. The hottest commodity for this group, whose members range from “partner[s] in a law firm” to “unemployed screenwriter[s],” is participation in a value system with the imprimatur of moral excellence: the conviction that they are living in the best (most responsible, most mindful, most objectively right) ways. These consumers are united by “shared cultural capital” as opposed to similar financial standing. “This new elite,” she contends, “is not defined by economics.”
* How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
* Soviet Pseudoscience: The History of Mind Control.
* The Mind-Set List, Faculty Edition.
* What is antifa? Who are the antifa?
* Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are unsettling.
* Now you can see what Donald Trump sees every time he opens Twitter. Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV. A bizarre memo by an administration official suggests why Trump was so hesitant to blame white nationalists for the fatal violence in Charlottesville. Trump and his party continue to creep ever closer to a destination that once seemed unthinkable. And three and a half years of his term remain. Optimist. McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency. The President of Blank Sucking Nullity. “We tried to stop him.” Losing Mitt. If you want a vision of the future.
Trump is a racist and a narcissist in decline while under the most pressure he's ever faced in his life. No reason this can't get worse.
— Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) August 23, 2017
* 7 things Republicans could do to check Trump without ditching conservative policy.
* Was it worth it, America? Was it?
* Forever and ever amen. How the Forever War Brought Us Donald Trump. Trump’s Afghanistan buildup is revealing a rift among Democrats.
Seems weird that we've been at war in Afghanistan for 16 years and the "new strategy" is to stay there indefinitely
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) August 22, 2017
whether our president is an urbane intellectual or the dumbest man on earth, the policy is still all war all the time, weird how that works
— Hippo (@InternetHippo) August 22, 2017
* Whose heritage? Lee comes down at Duke.
* How Trump Ruined My Relationship With My White Mother.
* Catholic priest steps down after revealing he was a Ku Klux Klan member decades ago.
* I Used To Be a Neo-Nazi. Charlottesville Terrifies Me.
* If you’re one of the more than 140,000 people doing time in a Texas state prison, you’re not allowed to read books by Bob Dole, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Sojourner Truth. But you’re more than welcome to dig into Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” or David Duke’s “My Awakening.”
* Leaving town at rush hour? Here’s how far you’re likely to get from America’s largest cities.
* “Buffy at 20″ will have to find some way to reckon with Joss Whedon at 53. Joss Whedon was never a feminist. Joss Whedon and the Feminist Pedestal: A Reading List.
* Infographic of the far future.
* Machine learning and misogyny.
* Afrofuturism has finally been gentrified.
* This deal is getting worse all the time. Because you demanded it.
* Marvel’s Black Panther Has Been Fighting White Supremacists For Decades and He’s Not About To Stop.
* Marvel Superheroes Who Basically Only Protect New York City, Ranked.
* In the future every franchise will be revived for fifteen minutes.
* Game of Thrones is definitely collapsing under its own weight. Bady and Mesle. Game of Thrones has become a terrible show. “Straining plausibility.” Game of Thrones‘ “Instantaneous Westeros Travel” Fallacy Is Driving Me Insane. Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story.
* Dogs Are Turning Blue in India for the Saddest Reason.
* Astronaut Pee and Sweat Could Be the Key to Getting Humans to Mars.
* A Future of Genetically Engineered Children Is Closer Than You’d Think.
* Family Jumps Rising Drawbridge in Car, Lands on Other Side.
* A bonus episode of Thor: The Lightning and the Storm for your listening pleasure.
* And the arc of history is long, but Chuck E. Cheese is phasing out its animatronic bands.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2017 at 8:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afghanistan, Africa, African literature, Afrofuturism, Ainehi Edoro, alt-right, America, antifascism, apocalypse, atheism, banned books, Black Panther, books, Breitbart, Brian Aldiss, Brittle Paper, Buffy, cable news, Catholicism, CEOs, CFPs, Charlottesville, Chuck E. Cheese, class struggle, coastal elites, Confederacy, creative class, Democrats, digital media, dogs, Donald Trump, Duke, eclipse, elites, fandom, fascism, feminism, forever war, futurity, Game of Thrones, genetics, George R. R. Martin, Han Solo, health care, heritage, India, J.G. Ballard, Jabba the Hutt, Joss Whedon, kids today, KKK, machine learning, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, mind control, misogyny, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Moana, N.K. Jemisin, Nazis, New Atheism, New York, Nnedi Okorafor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, obituary, Octavia Butler, only the super-rich can save us now, pigs, podcasts, politics, pollution, preppers, prison, race, racism, Republicans, Richard Florida, Robert E. Lee, science fiction, Scorsese, sexism, social justice, solar eclipse, Soviet Union, Star Wars, survivalism, syllabi, television, Texas, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, The Day before the Revolution, The Disposessed, The Jetsons, The Joker, This American Life, Thor, timelines, traffic, Ursula K. Le Guin, Village Voice, Virginia, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The course descriptions for Marquette’s Fall 2017 English classes are up at the department website. Check them out! I’m teaching Tolkien and a grad seminar on utopia.
* Also in Marquette news! Marquette to host ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ conference in April.
* Becoming a parent forces you to think about the nature of the problem — which is, in a lot of ways, the problem of nature […] the realities of aging and sickness and mortality become suddenly inescapable. […] [My wife] said something during that time I will never forget. “If I had known how much I was going to love him,” she said, “I’m not sure I would have had him.” Mark O’Connell on transhumanism and immortality.
* From the great Ali Sperling: Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene. And this review of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem from the great David Higgins!
* Adam Roberts reviews New York 2140. Another review, from a climate scientist. And an interview with Stan. My review comes out in LARB this weekend…
* The Most Cringeworthy Monuments to Colleges’ Innovation Jargon.
* Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq.
* The liberal arts at Harvey Mudd College, whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford.
* You-might-be-from-Wisconsin-if at Ask MetaFilter.
* Wisconsin is apparently harassing trans state employees.
* Chaos, again. This is fine. Even James Comey. Twilight of Reince Preibus. Ten Questions for President Trump. Ten More Questions for President Trump. Remember when it was scandalous that Obama, years before he became a politician, once sold his house?
* It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy.
* The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
* “Forever war, but too much.”
* An Afghan family of five that had received approval to move to the United States based on the father’s work for the American government has been detained for more than two days after flying into Los Angeles International Airport, a legal advocacy group said in court documents filed on Saturday. Profiles of immigrant arrested in Austin. Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws. (Note this lawsuit was filed in 2014.) This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World. And if it were a book, it’d seem laughably contrived: A letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Resisting ICE. Here we go again.
* 4chan and the Great Meme War.
* Russia and the Cyber Cold War.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation. I think this is a very good reminder of the need to stay calm and detached from the chaos of the news cycle.
* Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
* Democrats keep trusting demographics to save them. It hasn’t worked yet — but maybe this time…
* NASA unveils plan to give Mars an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere.
* House Republicans Unveil Bill To Repeal Obamacare. The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.
If the market does it, it isn’t systematic mass murder.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 7, 2017
* Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.
* No! It can’t be! Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win.
* Contrary to What You Learned in Sex Ed, You Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant.
* Mid-decade gerrymander in Georgia.
* What We’ve Learned from Giving Dolphins LSD.
* Possible lynching outside Seattle, in 2017.
* In the richest country in human history, children have “lunch debt.”
* “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.” How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.
* Finding a jury of your peers in a racially segregated society.
* Divination hasn’t disappeared; it’s taken over the world.
But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.
When I said that opinion polls are sibyls and soothsayers, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Opinion polling has all the trappings of a science—it has its numbers and graphs, its computational models, its armies of pallid drones poring over the figures. It makes hypotheses and puts them to the test. But polls are not taken for what they are: a report on what a small number of people, fond of changing their minds, briefly pretended to think. Instead, we watch the tracking graphs as if the future were playing itself out live in front of us. The real structure of the electoral-wonk complex is more mystical than materialist: it’s augury and divination, a method handed down by Prometheus to a starving and shivering humanity at the faint dawn of time. Behind all the desktop screens and plate-glass of his office, the buzz of data and the hum of metrics, Nate Silver retreats to a quiet, dark, and holy room. He takes the knife and slits in one stroke the throat of a pure-white bull; its blood arcs and drizzles in all directions. He examines its patterns. And he knows.
* There’s a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not they’re breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that it’s like we’re doing Godfather Part I and II, only it’s going to nine movies? And we’re just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? We’re gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you can’t have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, “Get in this bed and dream, but don’t touch the pillows or move the blankets.” You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade. James Mangold on Logan.
* The making of The Silmarillion.
* And we have but one choice: the Ring must be destroyed.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 7, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 4chan, A Colony in a Nation, academia, actually existing media bias, ADA, Adam Roberts, addiction, Afghanistan, Alan Moore, alumni, Angel, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, Berkeley, Black Mirror, Buffy, Bush, California, canon, children, Chris Hayes, cities, continuity, corruption, cyberwar, democracy, Democrats, demographics, disability, dolphins, Donald Trump, donations, drones, drugs, ecology, elections, endings, entrepeneurs in residence, Existential Comics, film, FiveThirtyEight, forever war, Franklin Roosevelt, futurity, games, Georgia, gerrymandering, Harvey Mudd College, health care, How the University Works, ice, immigration, immortality, innovation, Iraq, James Comey, Japanese internment, Jeff Sessions, Jerusalem, Joss Whedon, jury duty, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Logan, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, LSD, lunch debt, lynching, Mar-a-Lago, Marquette, Mars, mass murder, Milwaukee, moral panic, my teaching empire, NASA, Nate Silver, New York, New York 2140, panic, parenting, pedagogy, philosophy, poll aggregators, polls, pregnancy, protest, race, racism, refugees, Reince Preibus, Republicans, resistance, Russia, schools, science fiction, Seattle, sex, sickle cell anemia, Siri, Steve Bannon, student debt, suburbia, superheroes, terraforming, the Anthropocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the Left, The Silmarillion, the wisdom of markets, Tolkien, transgender issues, transhumanism, transition, Twilight Zone, Utopia, visas, war on education, West Virginia, white nationalism, white people, white supremacy, Wisconsin, World War II, X-Men, YouTube
Thursday Links!
* Deadline extended: Special Issue: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Narrative, Characters, Media, and Event.
* CFP: Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction.
* After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.
* The banality of evil in Baltimore.
* “Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles.” Every revelation in this story is stunning. Trump leans on ‘fake news’ line to combat reports of West Wing dysfunction. Donald Trump says all negative polls about him are fake news. Check out this fake news about voter fraud. Yemen Withdraws Permission for U.S. Antiterror Ground Missions. Milwaukee passes resolution opposing Trump travel ban. White House rattled by McCarthy’s spoof of Spicer. White House Denies Report That Bannon Had to Be Reminded He Wasn’t President Amidst Travel-Ban Chaos. Probably best to put this in writing ahead of time. The simple fact is that Trump has never had real friends in the sense you or I think of the term. Never Believe the Republicans’ B.S. Ever Again. How Each Senator Voted on Trump’s Cabinet and Administration Nominees. Five Theses on Trump. To Stephen Miller, Duke University Class of 2007.
* Elsewhere in Duke News! Bernie and the Duke Grad Student Unionization Movement.
Last night, Meryl Streep played Donald Trump and sang Cole Porter on the @PublicTheaterNY's Delacorte stage. pic.twitter.com/Pgv19HooQm
— Darren Johnston (@DarrenEdward) June 7, 2016
* Apparently those who support income redistribution through aggressive top marginal taxation are still willing to accept union busting and poor parent shaming before considering direct infusions of cash. No matter how lofty their rhetoric, there is an intuitive desire within mainstream American liberalism to believe that the trouble in education is not so obvious as poor people not having enough money to do well—but rather, that poor parents are to blame for not being enough like middle class ones. DeVos Was Inevitable. Democrats reject her, but they helped pave the road to education nominee DeVos.
[whispers] nice white liberals getting super-invested in their children’s educations was actually how we got in this mess in the first place
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 8, 2017
* The 10 US colleges that stand to lose the most from Trump’s immigration ban. American Universities Must Take a Stand.
* The Nervous Civil Servant’s Guide to Defying an Illegal Order.
* Meet Antifa, the Most Reasonable People in America.
* The Wisdom of Science Fiction in the Age of Trump.
* “All the pieces of the neo-Nazi solution to climate change already exist.”
* Dakota Access Pipeline Is Back On, Skipping Environmental Review.
* The New Yorker celebrates the great Mo Willems.
* Much has been written about the toxicity of internet “call out” culture over the past five years. But less has been said about the prevalence of efforts to fire people, one of that culture’s creepiest and most authoritarian features.
* Doctor Strange Has Now Made More Money At Box Office Than Man Of Steel. DC is really bad at this.
* Liberalism looks and feels like a waiting period that may never end. A primary purpose of this tactic is to allow policymakers and elites to announce their intention to do something about a problem while hoping the problem goes away on its own as public attention dies down or as they move on with their careers.
* We Asked Sci-Fi Writers About The Future Of Climate Change.
* Within a decade, according to a 99-page white paper released today, Uber will have a network—to be called “Elevate”—of on-demand, fully electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. Instead of slogging down the 101, you and a few other flyers will get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in about 15 minutes—for the price of private ride on the ground with UberX. Theoretically.
* The Singularity has already happened.
* 150 Years to Alpha Centauri. But it’s no place to raise your kids.
* Make stamp-collecting great again.
* Teaching is not longer a middle class job. College professor isn’t either, pretty much anywhere but a town like Milwaukee.
* The Arc of History Is Long But Republicans Are Moving To Scrap Rules That Limit Overdraft Fees.
* A clever study showing how protests impact election outcomes, using rain.
* A general strike could transform American politics. But we’re nowhere near being able to call one.
* Capitalism is struggling to reproduce the misery and terror required for worker compliance.
* Even baseball hates baseball.
* Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy.
"Chill out, our institutions have survived hundreds of years, they'll contain Trump" is the new "Trump can't win."
— Brandt (@UrbanAchievr) February 5, 2017
* I don’t think there’s been a better postmortem on the election, and what it means for the coming decades, than this by Mike Davis: The Great God Trump and the White Working Class.
In addition, as Brookings researchers have recently shown, since 2000 a paradoxical core-periphery dynamic has emerged within the political system. Republicans have increased their national electoral clout yet have steadily lost strength in the economic-powerhouse metropolitan counties. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output — just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.”
* Trump believes his base desires cruelty above all else. Here is today’s case study.
* “Uncle Biden” has done a lot to mask the fact that the real Joe Biden fought desegregation, wrote the 1994 crime bill, and appeared to side with Clarence Thomas over Anita Hill during Thomas’s confirmation hearings. The hyper-competent “Texts From Hillary” made it more difficult for the real Clinton to rebut charges of shadiness and corruption, and also served to mask over the fact that she had never won a closely fought election. Liberal Fan Fiction.
* When Details in a Story Can Put People at Risk.
* He speaks for us all: “Man found stuck in waist-deep mud has no idea how he got there, officials say.”
* The best news anybody’s gotten since 1997.
* What it’s like to lose your short-term memory.
* Ubiquitous surveillance watch.
* A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months. Oh, well, that explains everything, doesn’t it.
* Rick and Morty and Bojack and existentialism.
* Yes Weekly interviews the great Fred Chappell.
* What a horrible night to have a curse.
* And this is a really good start, but I’m sure we can find a way to do worse.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 9, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", #NoDAPL, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic freedom, Al Franken, alignment, Alpha Centauri, America, animals, antifascism, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, banking, Barack Obama, baseball, Betsy DeVos, Bojack Horseman, border patrol, carbon, cartoons, Castlevania, CFPs, Charlie Stross, charter schools, class struggle, climate change, colleges, comics, debit cards, democracy, Democrats, Department of Education, deportation, Doctor Strange, Donald Trump, Duke, elections, Electoral College, Elephant and Piggie, Elon Musk, Episode 7, existentialism, fake news, fascism, flying cars, forever war, Fred Chappell, free speech, friendship, futurity, games, general election 2016, general election 2020, general strike, genocide, Go, graduate student unions, Greensboro, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, immigration, impeachment, Joe Biden, journalism, liberalism, liberalism is working, Mars, Marvel Cinematic Universe, memes, Meryl Streep, Mike Davis, Milwaukee, Mo Willems, Nancy Pelosi, nature, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, only following orders, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, overdraft fees, plants, politics, protest, Republicans, resistance, Rick and Morty, science fiction, SNL, social media, sports, stamps, Star Wars, Steve Bannon, Superman, surveillance society, teaching, television, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the banality of evil, the Constitution, The Expanse, The Force Awakens, the Senate, the Singularity, the white working class, this is why we can't have nice things, Uber, UNCG, voter fraud, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, weather, X-Men, Yemen
Fritrump Links!
* Trump’s America Conference at University College Dublin.
* Midwest area research opportunity: Horatio Alger Fellowship for the Study of American Popular Culture, Northern Illinois University.
* See Marquette University’s $600M plan to transform its Milwaukee campus.
* Teens sue Wisconsin over nightmare conditions in juvenile jails.
* Like everyone, I mocked the tweet. Deep down, I never thought it could happen to me. Now I wish I had stopped to think things through, because I didn’t know how to respond. A terrorist had actually kidnapped my baby. By all indications, he had rigged the poor little tyke with a bomb set to go off in one hour. Somehow, miraculously, I had wound up in the same room with him. And now I faced a terrible choice: do I torture the terrorist, or let my baby be blown up, by the bomb that he had rigged the baby with, and then left the baby at some remote location while winding up in a situation where he could be tortured by me?
* Starvation in northern Nigeria’s Borno State is so bad that a whole slice of the population — children under 5 — appears to have died, aid agencies say.
* Amazing Twitter project: @Stl_Manifest.
Wow, subspace ratings just out: 31 trillion people watched the Inauguration, 11 trillion more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!
— Dukat (@realRealDukat) January 22, 2017
* Astoundingly Complex Visualization Untangles Trump’s Business Ties. Trump: the lie list. Trump’s phone as security risk. Trump and the Republicans Are on a Suicide Mission Together. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era. You’re a little late. Is Trump Morally Unfit or Are We Facing a Constitution Crisis? Pretty dick move, Germany. This one’s unreal even by Trump standards. Sad! One week down.
President Trump has completed 1/2 of 1% of the term to which he has been elected.
— Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) January 27, 2017
* Not only is Obama, at only fifty-five, set to have one of the longest post-presidential careers of any president, but now freed from the shackles of the office — which often forced him to temper his true beliefs and triangulate — Obama can become the progressive hero his most fervent supporters always wanted him to be. Or so the theory goes.
An eye-opening stat in this new @timothypmurphy piece about one group's quest to rebuild the Democratic bench https://t.co/293uthyQtB pic.twitter.com/44lGB1KWNi
— Daniel Schulman (@DanielSchulman) January 26, 2017
Just think: Democrats are going to find a way to lose to this guy a second time.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 27, 2017
* In a new book, The Blood of Emmett Till (Simon & Schuster), Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, reveals that Carolyn—in 2007, at age 72—confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. “That part’s not true,” she told Tyson, about her claim that Till had made verbal and physical advances on her.
* ND House passes eliminating reporting of small oil spills.
* Trump Has Never Been Popular.
* Mark Weston at Time pitches a tax strike until the coasts get adequate representation in government.
* What the Hell Is the Opening Crawl for The Last Jedi Going to Be?
* Why don’t we drink pigs’ milk?
* Why don’t some people get brain freeze?
* Ten Ways Reading The Silmarillion Makes The Lord of the Rings Better, Part 1.
* I write out of disarray, from a field of compatriots in disarray. We’re drifting like astronauts, distantly tethered by emails like the one I just got from a friend: ‘i feel like he is making everyone sick, and bipolar./i feel like I am so incredibly ill-equipped to deal with any of this./i’m taking blind advice from all comers without feeling like anything is remotely adequate./ i feel nostalgic for all of life before Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh Arizona Resort, Asks Rocks for “Guidance”’). At these moments we’re the special snowflakes we were wishing to see in the world, the canaries in our own dystopian coal mines. But we’ll brandish our sensitivities proudly (if not our safety pins, which may be too smug and lame a gesture), since they’re what we’ve got, and are anyway better than robotic numbness, better than ‘normalisation’.
* Paging Kim Stanley Robinson: Are scientists going to march on Washington?
* The starships of the future won’t look anything like the Enterprise.
* First as tragedy, then as farce, as the feller said.
* Great moments in headlines: Georgia lawmaker shot behind adult entertainment store; was carrying thousands of dollars in storm relief money.
* If you want a vision of Thanksgiving.
* And two Northwestern University professors have demonstrated it’s possible to be good at neither research nor teaching. Of course this is no news to me.
Skilled researchers and effective teachers are neither substitutes nor complements for each other — in fact, they have no relationship at all, according to a study by two Northwestern University faculty published by the Brookings Institution Thursday.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 27, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, alt right, America, American Studies, autocracy, Barack Obama, bees, Cardassia, CFPs, class struggle, Constitutional crisis, corruption, Deep Space Nine, democracy, Democrats, Department of State, diabetes, Donald Pease, Donald Trump, dystopia, Emmett Till, Episode 8, fascism, fellowships, forever war, general election 2020, genocide, Georgia, Gul Dukat, Hillary Clinton, horrors, How the University Works, hydrogen, ice cream, impeachment, Ireland, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, lies and lying liars, Marquette, mass strike, metallic hydrogen, milk, mortality, national security, Nazis, neoliberalism, Nigeria, North Dakota, oil, oil spills, our brains work in interesting ways, pigs, politics, polls, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, psychometrics, race, racism, refugees, Republicans, research, resistance, scientists, social media, Star Trek, Star Wars, starships, tax strike, taxes, teaching, terrorism, Thanksgiving, the Constitution, the economy, the Holocaust, The Last Jedi, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, ticking time-bomb scenarios, Tolkien, torture, Trumpism, University College Dublin, Utopia, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wasps, white people, white supremacy, Wisconsin
Labor Day Weekend Links!
* Aliens! Aliens! Not really. But it’s never too early to panic.
* This truly is the darkest timeline: Marquette signs new contract with Pepsi for on-campus beverage services.
* Some Of The Best PC Games Ever Made Hit Steam This Week. Quest for Glory! Police Quest! Wow. Waiting now for the Mac port.
* Star Trek: Discovery really will follow Number One. Relatedly: The 2000s-era Star Treks we never saw. Star Trek Beyond, Reviewed by Tim Phipps.
* Jason Scott Talks about Preserving Games with the Internet Archive.
* Be a rebel; major in English. A decent discussion of the fact-free moral panic involving choice of major, clickbait headline aside.
* The Peculiar Success of Cultural Studies 2.0.
* How to Write an Effective Diversity Statement for a Faculty Job Application.
* Mandatory Trigger Warnings at Drexel?
* Symposium: Why Monster Studies Now?
* Nicholson Baker, substitute teacher. Welcome to Terror High.
* The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.
* Improv as self-help philosophy, as scam, as fad, as cult. (via) I’ve never taken an improv class, but my nonstop consumption of improv-based comedy podcasts has seriously helped my teaching by helping me see the importance of adopting the yes-and stance in the classroom.
* Professor hunger strikes against denial of tenure.
* Islam and Science Fiction, the long-running website dedicated to “fill[ing] a gap in the literature about Muslims and Islamic cultures in Science Fiction,” has just published Islamicates: Volume I, as a free-to-download release.
* Check Out These Amazing Soviet Maps Of D.C.
* That’s a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale? The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner.
* Stranger Things and the spirit of play.
Here’s why: it’s about play. We have good reasons to overthink TV shows, to take them too seriously: it helps us reclaim from them all that they take for granted, all the ideology in which we find ourselves implicated as we enjoy works produced by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, etc. If your fave is problematic, it’s worth thinking about why, not because you or it are bad and should feel bad, but because our world is fallen and all is vanity and what does humanity gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun, etc. Or something like that. Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.
* Girls feel Stranger Things, too.
Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories,Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.
* Global Capitalism, Fan Culture, and (Even) Stranger Things. The Strange Motivations of Stranger Things. Sticking a tough landing: Stranger Things Season Two Will Add New Characters, New Settings, and Sequel Sensibility.
* Teasing the Fall 2016 Pop Culture series at Marquette: Harry Potter, Tarantino, and (yes) Stranger Things.
* $600,000 humanities endowment account at CUNY turns out to be a mere $599,924 dollars short.
* Learn to Write the Vandermeer Way. Keep scrolling!
* Virtually every decision made by Warner Bros. with regards to its DC superhero movies has been bad. But it’s been so desperate to recreate Marvel’s success that it keeps running forward, trying to constantly course correct, when what it really needs to do it take a break, a deep breath, and start over from scratch with a long-term plan that it will actually stick to.
* Jack Kirby’s long-lost, incomplete “The Prisoner” comic book.
* The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel.
* Apartment Broker Recommends Brooklyn Residents Spend No More Than 150% Of Income On Rent.
* Airlines are surprisingly ill-equipped to handle accusations of sexual assault on their planes.
* This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? Yes, the word “oxy” appears in the first sentence.
* Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy.
DEVELOPING: Sheriff in Greenville, South Carolina, vows to arrest anybody dressed as a clown after reports of creepy clowns across town
— Al Boe (@AlBoeNEWS) September 2, 2016
* Tracing the history of the phrase “office-involved shooting.”
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. Why Isn’t It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?
* Democrats really might have a shot at taking the House. Here’s the math.
* Because you demanded it! CBS is developing a scripted drama based on the life of Judge Judy. It’s also graciously decided to allow you to pay extra for an ad-free experience on its subscription service.
* Ah, the good old days. Still not done yet!
* Meet Moya Bailey, the black woman who created the term “misogynoir.”
* Dialectics of Superman: The Old Lois Lane Really Doesn’t Like the New Lois Lane. The Rise and Fall of Axiom.
* Math is cool: The absent-minded driver’s paradox.
* Solar Power Plant Can’t Figure Out How to Stop Frying Birds.
* Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past. Georgetown’s slavery announcement is remarkable. But it’s not reparations.
* Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom.
* “A short story in English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times.”
* How far are you from an In N Out Burger?
* Works for academic papers too.
* Debating the Legality of the Post-9/11 ‘Forever War’ at the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Whiteness without white supremacy?
* Football and the Buffalo both owe some of their survival today to Teddy Roosevelt, who loved them both because they were accessories to one of his first loves: violence, which he and others of his time and a lot of people living right now believe tempers men into steel.
* Sold in the room: Alison Brie Will Star in Netflix’s ’80s Lady-Wrestling Series G.L.O.W. And that’s before I even found out Marc Maron would be on it too.
* I’m also excited to option this one: Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker.
* The L.A. Times is running a six-part story on that framing of a PTA mom in California.
* Screens in Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.
* The critics are saying Arrival (née Story of Your Life) is the real deal.
* Breaking: Warner Brothers wants another five billion dollars.
* Few baseball fans have heard of the tiny Pacific Association, an independent league founded in 2013. But in 2015, during the Stompers’ sophomore season, the team fielded pro baseball’s first openly gay player, Sean Conroy. Then, in the off-season, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola approached the team to talk about making his Virginia Dare Winery, based in nearby Geyserville, one of its sponsors. That proposal came with another: he wanted the team to recruit female players.
* Understanding Prenatal Depression.
* It’s weird that 911 has an off switch, isn’t it?
* Web comic of the week: Ark.
* Short film of the week: Movies in Space. Chris and Jack’s other stuff is pretty great too.
* The New York Times Reassures Parents That Their Sons’ Penises Are Probably Totally Fine.
* And I really think just one more year ought to do it.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2016 at 8:43 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic papers, Agamben, air travel, aliens, Alison Brie, ant colonies, ants, Apple, archaeology, Ark, Arrival, art, augmented reality, austerity, Avengers, Axiom, Back to the Future, Barack Obama, baseball, Batman, because you demanded it, Biff Tannen, birds, Brooklyn, Buffalo, California, capitalism, CBS, CBS All-Access, CFPs, Chris and Jack, class struggle, climate change, clowns, comedy, comics, conferences, corruption, cults, cultural studies, CUNY, Dan Hassler-Forrest, DC Comics, Democrats, dialectics, diversity, Donald Trump, Drexel, drug addiction, drugs, Dungeons & Dragons, editing, education, endowments, English departments, English majors, epipens, fads, fan culture, feminism, Fermi problems, film, football, forever war, fugitive slaves, Full House, G.L.O.W., games, Gene Wilder, general election 2016, Georgetown, gerrymandering, grift, guns, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, heroin, hoaxes, homeland security, How the University Works, humanity, hunger strikes, improv, In N Out Burger, independent film, Indiana, Internet Archive, intersectionality, iPads, Islam, Islamicates, Jack Kirby, Jeff Vandermeer, Judge Judy, kids today, legacy admissions, lockouts, Lois Lane, Long Island University, Macs, maps, Marc Maron, Mark Waid, maroon communities, Marquette, math, medicine, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, misogynoir, moms, Monster Studies, moral panics, Movies in Space, Moya Bailey, my misspent youth, my scholarly empire, NASA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York, Nicholson Baker, nostalgia, nuclearity, Number One, obesity, obituary, off switches, officer-involved shootings, oxy, Paradox, pedagogy, penises, Pepsi, play, plot, Poland, police, Police Quest, police violence, politics, pop culture, prenatal depression, prequels, prison-industrial complex, prisons, probability, professional wrestling, Quest for Glory, rape, rape culture, rebels, Rent, reparations, Roger Ailes, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, self-help, sequels, SETI, sexual assault, short stories, Sierra, slavery, socialism, solar power, South Carolina, Soviet Union, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, state of emergency, state of exception, Story of Your Life, Stranger Things, streaming, strikes, superheroes, superhumans, Superman, taco trucks, Tarantino, teaching, Ted Chiang, Teddy Roosevelt, tenure, the archives, The Cage, the courts, the darkest timeline, the House, the humanities, the law, The Prisoner, the PTA, trigger warnings, true crime, unions, unnecessary sequels, violence, war on terror, Washington D.C., white privilege, white supremacy, whiteness, worldbuilding, writing, yes and, zunguzungu
Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic!
* Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose. Having done so, it now can leave. Whether it will, and how much it will take with it on its way out, remains to be seen. Clinton Opens Double-Digit Lead in National Poll.
* Virginia GOP Delegate Files Suit To Get Out Of Voting For Trump At Convention.
* All agree that we have entered an era in which “peace” coexists uncomfortably with interminable global violence (for those non-state actors that risk committing it or those state actors powerful enough to do so and avoid condemnation). All agree that executives have pushed the boundaries of national and international legality and redefined the scope and timeline of legal violence with little apparent constraint — except, theoretically, a wayward public, which has not done much to push back yet.
* “Protestors on both sides of the fray were stabbed.”
* I wouldn’t say this is great news, given the franchise’s recent experiments in that direction: The New Star Trek Series Can Feature All the Sex, Blood, and Profanity It Wants.
* Scremain, or Scoveto? I’m sticking with my gut: Brexit May Well Never Happen. “Bracksies.” All told, quite an achievement.
Truly British solution: never invoke Article 50, hope everyone else too polite ever to mention it.
— Alan Beattie (@alanbeattie) June 26, 2016
* How to Prep for Your PhD If You’re Poor.
* Study Links 6.5 Million Deaths Each Year to Air Pollution.
* This amount of rain in such a short time is likely a “one-in-a-thousand-year event,” the weather service said. A zunguzungu flashback.
* Texas Gun Rights Advocates Fatally Shoots Her Two Daughters.
* They call it the seagullypse.
* A New League Of ‘Barefoot Lawyers’ Will Transform Justice In The Next 15 Years.
* Strange days: The Icelandic translator of Stephen King will likely be the country’s next president.
* This tweet seems sweet but is actually ice cold. Truly chilling.
* And it Looks Like Pluto Has a Liquid Water Ocean. Last one in is a rotten egg…
Speaking as a member of the Illuminati, I’d like to apologise for 2016 so far. We acknowledge it has not been our best work.
— MichaelMarshallSmith (@ememess) June 26, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
June 26, 2016 at 7:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with apocalypse, artificial intelligence, babies, blood, books, Brexit, Britain, brokered conventions, California, class struggle, cognition, conservatives, Cory Booker, disease, Donald Trump, ecology, England, environmentalism, European Union, flooding, forever war, general election 2016, graduate student life, guns, Hillary Clinton, Iceland, Ireland, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mars, Nazis, our brains work in interesting ways, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, peace, Pluto, poetry, politics, polls, profanity, Republicans, Sacramento, Scotland, seagulls, sex, stabbings, Star Trek, Stephen King, stock market, Tea Party, the courts, the Illuminati, the law, translation, United Kingdom, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on terror, water, West Virginia, whiteness, zunguzungu
Weekend Links!
* The future of war, from the author of The Forever War. And a nice flashback from the archive: Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True.
* The dead zones of hypercapitalism.
* There’s some really weird, interesting stuff happening in X-Men fandom right now. It’s almost the inverse of the “Bad Fan” problem that tends to plague Quality TV shows like Breaking Bad: fans so devoted to “appropriate” affective investment in a story that the story itself can no longer be pleasurable to them…
* Insane: The EPA is accusing Volkswagen of illegally using software to cheat emissions standards, allowing the German automaker to sell half a million cars that produce nitrogen oxide, which creates smog, at up to 40 times the legal limit. Criminal charges?
* New details released Friday by researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University reveal that 96 percent of NFL players the group has examined showed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease impacting the brain. It seems hard to believe this sport can have much future.
* A Brief History of Toilet-Based Animal Attacks.
* The first, last, and only alignment chart you’ll ever need.
* Counterpoint: no, Jesus Christ, save money in your twenties if you can.
* Counterpoint: no, PhD programs exist to produce future professors. They can’t be saved independently of that, and why would you try?
* Counterpoint: no, actually that popular antidepressant was totally unsafe for teens.
* #IStandWithAhmed and the Criminalization of the American Schoolyard.
* The University As Ed Tech Startup.
* Ursula Le Guin’s guide to the impossible craft of storytelling.
* Meet the Engineers Trying to Prevent the Destruction of Humanity.
* Sometimes, though, it’s the little things.
* And the word’s come down: The FBI Says Retweets Are Endorsements.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 19, 2015 at 8:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, alignment charts, animals, anti-depressents, apocalypse, austerity, Big Pharma, capitalism, Cary Nelson, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, comics, concussions, disruption, Dr. Strangelove, ecology, emissions, EPA, fandom, FBI, forever war, futurity, How the University Works, Inhumans, Joe Haldeman, kids today, Marvel, money, neoliberalism, NFL, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paxil, PhDs, politics, psychopharmacology, queer theory, Republican primary 2016, science, Scott Walker, smog, startups, Steven Salaita, toilets, Twitter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Volkswagen, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing, X-Men, zero tolerance
Wednesday Links!
* Cura personalis: Whereas Arnold hoped culture would replace religion, Deresiewicz, though not religious himself, wonders if religion might rescue culture: Students are no longer “equipped to address the larger questions of meaning and purpose … that come so inevitably in young adulthood. Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one’s ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.”
* Catholic Colleges Greet an Unchurched Generation.
* Alien vs. Predator: Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices.
Harvard could put out every academic journal in the country for free and wouldn’t notice the money was missing.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014
“If we don’t work to cut costs now, in 200,000 years Harvard might be forced to make some cuts.” -Harvard trustee
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014
It is the year 3,000,000. All life on Earth is extinct. The only monument left to Homo sapiens is Harvard’s endowment, currently valued at
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014
* Video Gamers Are Having A Bizarre Debate Over Whether Sending Death Threats To Women Is A Serious Issue Or Not. #Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group. The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate. Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a planned talk at Utah State University after university officials refused to secure the venue following a mass shooting threat. In which gamers yell at a dumb chat bot from 1966 that someone wired up to twitter, because they think it’s a woman.
* Another Obama triumph: Since 2008, the District’s homeless population has increased 73%.
* The Americas in 1491. 9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel. The Real Christopher Columbus. And it gets worse: The Sopranos only ever made one bad episode and it was all Christopher Columbus’s fault.
* It’s Columbus Day. Let’s talk about geography (and Ebola).
* Ebola threatens world chocolate supply.
* White People Are Unironically Talking About the White Experience in New PBS Documentary.
* For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.
* Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants?
* Quick, everybody switch positions about civility and academic freedom.
* The Gates Foundation has a plan to save higher education through creating artificial enrollment crises exciting new efficiency metrics!
* The For-Profit College That’s Too Big to Fail.
* George Mason Grad Students Release Adjunct Study.
* The National Science Foundation has awarded grants of $4.8 million to several prominent research universities to advance the use of Big Data in the schools. Your dystopian term of art is “LearnSphere.”
* Uber Calls Woman’s 20-Mile Nightmare Abduction an “Inefficient Route.”
* What Do We Do With All These Empty Prisons? Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something.
* Cops Charge 10-Year-Old Boy as Adult in Slaying of 90-Year-Old Woman. Accused of Stealing a Backpack, High School Student Jailed for Nearly Three Years Without Trial. South Carolina Prosecutors Say Stand Your Ground Doesn’t Apply To Victims Of Domestic Violence. Why Are Police Using Military-Grade Weapons in High Schools?
* There’s always money for murder and torture, but we need to crowdfund Ebola research.
* Jimmy John’s has noncompete clauses. Jimmy John’s.
* Comic Books Are Still Made By Men, For Men And About Men.
* SF short of the night: Forever War.
* The Kids These Days Know More Than You Probably Think. The meat of the post is about a bogus “declining vocabulary” test that is used to fuel critics of schools.
* The nation’s largest union of flight attendants took the Federal Aviation Administration to court on Friday, arguing that the agency should have upheld a ban on the use of smartphones and tablets during takeoff and landing. Lawyers for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA argued that the devices distracted passengers from safety instructions and could fly out of their hands, becoming dangerous projectiles, the Wall Street Journal reports.
* Freddie de Boer against carceral feminism: The burden of expanding the police state’s power to prosecute sex crimes will fall on the poor and the black.
* Meanwhile, in utterly inexplicable results that will probably always be a mystery: Income is more predictive than race for early college success.
* We don’t even know which way solar panels should be facing.
* Naughty Marvel: It’s Tragic and Disappointing That Marvel Is Canceling Fantastic Four.
* Nice Marvel: And with Robert Downey Jr. signing on it sounds like Captain America 3 will be Civil War. I’d never have guessed that the Captain America movies would be the ones that really connected with me, but here we go…
* Milwaukee’s incredible shrinking art scene.
* Karen Russell on the greatness of The Martian Chronicles.
[Stephanie Palumbo]: How does Bradbury use human activity on Mars as a metaphor?
KR: He’s writing against patriotism during the Cold War. Humans land on Mars and then destroy it. Not much time elapses between landfall on Mars and the annihilation of all Martians.
SP: There’s a haunting image in one story, where a little boy is playing with a white xylophone that turns out to be a Martian ribcage.
KR: The planet is basically wiped clean of its indigenous people. I was shocked by the descriptions of these ancient, bone-white cities on Mars, and it took me an embarrassing length of time to recollect that people can visit ruins anywhere on our planet, too. It’s a case where sci-fi holds up a funhouse mirror to our own history. In case we have amnesia about the horror of the frontier, here we see another frontier and xenophobia, paranoia, aggression, madness. But we see people be really good to each other too. Bradbury seemed to be such a humanist at the same time that he is calling us out on our most despicable qualities.
* And being the indispensable shining city on the hill is confusing. If you ask me we should just let the biker gangs handle this.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 15, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic publishing, achievement gap, adjunctification, adjuncts, Africa, air travel, Alien vs. Predator, America, American exceptionalism, art, austerity, Barack Obama, biker gangs, capitalism, Captain America 3, carceral feminism, Catholicism, chocolate, Christopher Columbus, Civil War, civility, class struggle, colonialism, comics, crowdfunding, cura personalis, David Lynch, death threats, documentary, domestic violence, Don't mention the war, drones, Ebola, economics, efficiency, endowments, epidemics, Fantastic Four, feminism, film, flight attendants, for-profit schools, forever war, Gamergate, games, Gates Foundation, genocide, George Mason, Green Day, guns, H.P. Lovecraft, Harvard, history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, homelessness, How the University Works, imperialism, income inequality, indigenous peoples, Iraq, Iron Man, ISIS, Israel, Jesuits, Jimmy John's, kidnapping, kids today, LearnSphere, Los Angeles, maps, Marquette, Mars, Martian Chronicles, Marvel, Milwaukee, misogyny, neoliberalism, noncompete clauses, now we see the violence inherent in the system, NSF, Palestine, PBS, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, racism, rape culture, Ray Bradbury, religion, religious colleges, rock 'n' roll, science fiction, sexism, shining city on a hill, solar power, Sopranos, stand your ground, superheroes, Syria, the humanities, trolls, Uber, unions, Utah State University, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Washington D.C., white people, whiteness
Sunday Links!
* Did you notice my post last night? Isiah Lavender’s Black and Brown Planets is out! My essay in the book is on Samuel Delany.
I know there are ideas circulating for Yellow Planets, Blue Planets, and Steel Planets, so pick your color quickly and get to work.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
Rainbow seems a lock for LGBTQ SF, someone just needs to get around to it. Pink for Feminist SF.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
Orange Planets – food Grey Planets – old people Purple Planets – fan fiction about Grimace
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
“I thought it was about snow!” RT @epiktistes: @gerrycanavan gonna circulate a CFP for White Planets as a trap
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2014
* Sketching out a table of contents for Pink Planets: highlights from the history of feminist SF.
* The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism. The war is all too real. But it’s also fake. There is no clash of civilizations, no ideological battle, no grand effort on the part of the United States to defeat terrorism. As long as terrorism doesn’t threaten core US interests, American elites are content to allow it — and help it — flourish. They don’t want to win this war. It will go on forever, unless we make them end it.
* The United States and the “moderate Muslim.”
In each of these, I merely concede the Maher and Harris definition of moderation as a rhetorical act. That definition is of course loaded with assumptions and petty prejudice, and bends always in the direction of American interests. But I accept their definition here merely to demonstrate: even according to their own definition, American actions have undermined “moderation” at every turn.
* Fox News, asking the real questions. “What are the chances that illegal immigrants are going to come over our porous southern border with Ebola or that terrorists will purposely send someone here using Ebola as a bioterror weapon?”
* The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever.
* “Social Justice Warriors” and the New Culture War.
* As selective colleges try to increase economic diversity among their undergraduates, the University of Chicago announced Wednesday that it’s embarking on an unusual effort to enroll more low-income students, including the elimination of loans in its aid packages.
* In search of an academic wife.
* “Yes Means Yes” at campuses in California and New York.
* A model state law for banning revenge porn.
* Let the children play: Homework isn’t linked to education outcomes before age 12, and not really after age 12, either.
* Enslaved Ants Regularly Rise In Rebellion, Kill Their Slavers’ Children.
* Ebola Vaccine Delay May Be Due To An Intellectual Property Dispute. This was a bit in Kim Stanle Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series: one company has the cure for cancer and the other company has the delivery mechanism, so both go out of business.
* Elsewhere in the famous efficiency of markets: Marvel will apparently cancel one of its longest-running series out of spite for Fox Studios.
* This Is The First High-Frequency Trader To Be Criminally Charged With Rigging The Market.
* Prison bankers cash in on captive customers.
* The time Larry Niven suggested spreading rumors within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs in order to lower health care costs.
* Suicide, Unemployment Increasingly Linked, Paper Suggests.
* Perfectionism: Could There Be a Downside?
* I’d be really interested to see if this use of eminent domain would survive a legal challenge.
* Data centers are wasting electricity so excessively that only “critical action” can prevent the pollution and rate hikes that some U.S. regions could eventually suffer as a result of power plant construction intended to ensure that the ravenous facilities are well-fed, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Anthesis warns.
* From the archives: Lili Loofbourow on the incredible misogyny of The Social Network.
* Moral panic watch: ‘Back-up husbands,’ ‘emotional affairs’ and the rise of digital infidelity.
* Look, a shooting star! Make a wish! Also at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Superman, why are you lying about your X-ray vision?
* Fantasy sports and the coming gambling boom.
* And this looks great for parents and kids: B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 5, 2014 at 9:36 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, altac, America, animals, ants, B.J. Novak, banking, bioterrorism, Black and Brown Planets, California, capitalism, children's literature, comics, culture war, digital economy, Ebola, ecology, education, eminent domain, energy, environmentalism, Facebook, Fantastic Four, fantasy sports, feminism, forever war, Fox News, gambling, games, genies, health care, high-frequency trading, homework, How the University Works, immigration, infidelity, intellectual property, Isiah Lavender, Islam, Islamophobia, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Niven, let the children play, male privilege, Marvel, misogyny, MLA, monkeys' paws, moral panics, morally odious monsters, mortgage crisis, my media empire, New York, parenting, patents, pedagogy, perfectionism, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, revenge porn, Samuel Delany, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sexism, slavery, student debt, suicide, Superman, The Social Network, unemployment, University of Chicago, vaccines, war on terror, what it is I think I'm doing, wishes, yes means yes
Friday Links!
* I’ve pointed out before that even as academic institutions are more and more distrusted, professors oddly retain a good deal of public respect. We have it because we’re free: free to say the unpopular thing, free to teach the passionate course, free to study what we think needs studying. To be free means we have to occupy the whole possibility space that waits for our explorations, and take not just our students but our publics along for the ride. We have to keep a trust as well as walk the paths we see before us.
* Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist.
* On Campus, Grenade Launchers, M-16s, and Armored Vehicles.
At least 60 institutions have acquired M-16s through the program. Arizona State University holds the most, with 70 in its arsenal, followed by Florida International University and the University of Maryland with 50 M-16s each. Central Florida received its grenade launcher in 2008; Hinds acquired its in 2006.
* The Islamic Roots Of Science Fiction.
* Here’s How Global Warming Is Already Worsening Extreme Deluges In The U.S. Trees Are Dying From ‘No Obvious Cause’ In Rocky Mountains, Report Says. A Major Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change.
* On ISIS: Where Is Obama’s Exit Strategy?
Once again our country is invited to support the “long war” described by key Pentagon officials as lasting as long as 50 to 80 years. It’s probably both unwinnable and unaffordable, but no president and few politicians have the political ability to acknowledge failure and end it.
So they escalate enough to pass it along to their successor. War on an installment plan.
* Every American President in the past quarter century has now gone on television during prime time to tell the nation and the world that he has decided to bomb Iraq. Last night was Barack Obama’s turn, and it was a vexing performance.
* What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? We cannot champion Network Neutrality without admitting that the Internet is no Utopia.
* Reddit made over $100,000 off stolen celebrity nudes.
* U2, Apple and rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail. There’s really only one cure.
* Update: All Clear. The suspect has been located and the reported weapon has been identified as an umbrella.
* A Brief History of Typographic Snark and the Failed Crusade for an Irony Mark.
* The kids are all right: Millennials Are Reading More Books Than You Think They Are. Why Indie Bookstores Are on the Rise Again.
* Congressional Hearing Slams Feasibility Of Commercial Asteroid Mining. “The American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space Act.” You dicks.
* Everyone Knows Hedge Funds Are a Ripoff.
* Scientists warn of faulty Wisconsin wolf estimates. Learn to count, wolves!
* “Why English Majors are the Hot New Hires.”
* What Is Hope? Alex Trebek Is Bringing Back His Mustache.
* Dutch Girl Fakes a Trip to South East Asia.
* Archaeologists Have Made An Incredible Discovery At Stonehenge.
* The Cold War University is back! The Real Story Behind Canada’s Sudden Interest In Arctic Archaeology.
* The Soviets sent stray dogs to conquer space. This is what happened next.
* China Is Mass-Producing Islands To Extend Its Strategic Borders.
* What Happens to “Holdouts” Who Refuse to Sell Their Homes to Developers?
* Here’s What’s Becoming Of America’s Dead Shopping Malls.
* Wearable tech as triumph for bosses.
* Interview With a Time Traveler.
* So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights.
* Another roundup of all the many things that are more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
* And Comedian Joe Mande remembers brands remembering 9/11. Never forget.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 12, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, activism, Alex Trebek, America, apocalypse, Apple, archaeology, asteroids, Barack Obama, books, brands, Canada, capitalism, China, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college, Comedy Bang Bang, concentration camps, cosmonauts, Don't mention the war, don't tell me the odds, Earwolf, ecology, empire, Facebook, FEMA, finance capital, forever war, Google Glass, guns, hedge funds, How the University Works, Iraq, irony, ISIS, Islam, iWatch, Jeopardy, Laika, malls, military-industrial complex, millennials, mortality, mustaches, National Science Foundation, never forget, outer space, podcasts, police state, police violence, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Reagan, real estate. America, Reddit, Russia, science fiction, Scott Aukerman, short film, social media, Stonehenge, tenure, the Arctic, the Internet, time travel, trees, typography, U Talking U2 2 Me?, U2, war on terror, We're screwed, wearable tech, Wisconsin
All the Weekend Links (100%)
* Jaimee has one of her phobia poems up at Drunken Boat’s “funny” issue: “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* CFPs: ICFA 36: The Scientific Imagination. Joss Whedon’s Comics. Assemble! The Making and Re-Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction.
* MLA Subcon is trying to raise some money for its operations at indiegogo.
* New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change. Speaking for all of Wisconsin: this does not bode well.
* I have to say I really like what Freddie says about privilege and merit here.
Instead, the point should be to ask people to see the ways in which all of our lives are conditioned by vast forces we cannot control, that these forces in general work to the benefit and hindrance of certain broad groups of people in a way that conflicts with our conceptions of justice, and that we can build a more just, more equitable world if we acknowledge that no one’s life is the product only of their work ethic and intelligence.
The long-term project of those who decry the role of unearned advantage in human society should not be to try and parse who is most and least privileged. The project should be to deny the salience of “merit” as a moral arbiter of material security and comfort. The very notion of just deserts– the notion that some people have legitimate accomplishments that we must celebrate because they represent “merit,” whatever that is, distinct from their privileges– is what has to die. There is no space where privilege ends and legitimate accomplishment begins. There is, instead, a world of such multivariate complexity that we can never know whose accomplishments are earned and whose aren’t. Instead, we should recognize the folly of tying material security and comfort to our flawed perceptions of other people’s value, and instead institute an economic system based on the absolute right of all people to food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education.
* Kazuo Ishiguro to publish first novel since Never Let Me Go. I am on board. More links below the photo!
* And on the other side of the spectrum: Margaret Atwood’s new work will remain unseen for a century.
* Shock, horror: Most college classes cost more online than on campus.
* The Classroom of the Future.
* Q. How did you make the transition from professor to president? A. Maybe some of our problems in education today stem from the fact that someone like me is considered an unconventional choice. Maybe academic institutions should be run by academics, the way they used to be.
* Wisconsin inches closer to dubious obesity milestone.
* On Christopher Tolkien protecting The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales from New Line. I hadn’t realized that Peter Jackson was prohibited from making reference to those works in his films; that’s fascinating…
* If Pearson were trying to strike back against a researcher who told legislators that they were paying $100 million a year for tests that mostly measure test-taking ability, it would look an awful lot like what is happening to Walter Stroup.
* The New York Times pans a novel for being insufficiently pro-conquistador. The Economist wrings its hands over whether maybe we’re not being fair to slaveowners.
* The Justice Department will investigate the entire Ferguson police force. How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. Twitter Headquarters Has Painted #Ferguson On Its Office Wall.
* Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received “many” specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report.
* Feisal G. Mohamed and Cary Nelson debate the Salaita firing. Salaita and the Accreditors.
* This Is What It’s Like To Sit Through An Anti-Union Meeting At Work.
* Gaming doesn’t have a problem; capitalism has a problem. Rather than seeing them simply as immoral assholes or deluded consumerists, we should take gaming’s advanced wing of hateful trolls seriously as representatives of the reactionary shock troops that will have to be defeated in order to build a more egalitarian society in the games industry or anywhere else.
* Five myths about California’s drought. The news is not good, friends.
* Here’s Who Really Controls California’s Water.
* Staff at an Arizona gun range reportedly told investigators that the release forms signed by the family of a 9-year-old girl who accidentally killed her instructor with an Uzi last week were unavailable because they had been “blown away by the wind.” I’ve head less convincing excuses, I guess.
* Biden’s warning to ISIS militants: ‘We will follow them to the gates of hell.’ 200 U.S. troops headed to Ukraine for ‘peace-keeping exercise’ as Obama condemns Russian aggression.
* Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead.
* Today in the rule of law: Missouri May Have Lied Under Oath About What Drugs It Used To Kill People And When.
* But don’t worry: The system works. Antonin Scalia’s Favorite Murderer Is Innocent.
* Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones.
* L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA.
* NYPD Pays $33K to Settle Suit After Mistaking Jolly Ranchers for Meth.
* Police telling victims to solve crimes by themselves.
* In New York, a human rights lawyer has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD after she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk while waiting for her husband and kids to use the bathroom at a Times Square restaurant.
* The call to demilitarize police overlooks the longstanding link between policing and empire.
* The Worst Airbnb in the Universe: 22 Beds in One Apartment. Imagine this being your home. Imagine this being your neighbor.
* The fight for the Senate is getting weird y’all.
* For Parents Of Young Black Men With Autism, Extra Fear About Police.
* A horrifying new study says one in five women have been raped.
* “After the football season ended.”
* Vox says your revolution is over, the bums lost.
* Our congresswoman was arrested today at a fast food workers’ strike.
* For the first time ever, neuroscientists have demonstrated the viability of direct — and completely non-invasive — brain-to-brain communication in humans. Remarkably, the experiment allowed subjects to exchange mentally-conjured words despite being 5,000 miles apart.
* Science fiction classics in the news: Syfy Greenlights Six-Hour Miniseries Childhood’s End.
* BP May Be Fined Up to $18 Billion for Spill in Gulf. Almost 18 days revenue, less than a year’s profit…
* Workers At Coal Waste Landfill Told That Coal Ash Is ‘Safe Enough To Eat,’ Lawsuit Says.
* Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny. Joan Rivers and today’s comediennes.
* Downloaded Games Have A Larger Carbon Footprint Than Blu-Ray Discs. There’s some really questionable assumptions in here, but the argument that theres’s some point where this is true is an important one.
* A Child Helps Your Career, If You’re a Man.
Ms. Budig found that on average, men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women’s decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people’s labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.
* Here’s why CVS stopped selling cigarettes.
* Here’s why Twitter shouldn’t algorithmize users’ feeds.
* This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe.
* Bold new directions: Shazam will differ from other DC movies by being fun.
* Every popular text eventually gets an “it was all just a hallucination” rewrite. Today it’s Harry Potter’s turn.
* New Girl at School Had to Wear “Shame Suit” After Dress Code Violation.
* Werner Herzog will guest star on Parks And Recreation.
* Nothing good will happen anymore: Actually, HBO didn’t commission more Flight Of The Conchords.
* Here’s something I should probably waste all my money on.
* New Miracleman Comics Stories (Including One by Grant Morrison) Coming Soon.
* This Map Shows How Hunting Wiped Out Whales In Less Than A Century.
* And FiveThirtyEight is there with a hot take: If Tony Survived The ‘Sopranos’ Finale, He’s Probably Alive Today.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 6, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing academic bias, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, Airbnb, algorithms, animal personhood, animals, Arthur C. Clarke, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, books, BP, Breaking Bad, California, capitalism, Captain Marvel, carbon footprint, CFPs, Childhood's End, CIA, cigarettes, class struggle, climate change, coal, college football, colonialism, comedy, comics, communism, CVs, DC Comics, death penalty, Deepwater Horizon, deliberate misreadings, Derrida, dress codes, drought, ecology, Fantastic Mr. Fox, fast food, fathers, Ferguson, film, flexible online education, Flight of the Conchords, forever war, games, graduate student life, Grant Morrison, guns, Gwen Moore, Harry Potter, HBO, Hell, How the University Works, ICFA, Iraq, ISIS, Jaimee, Joan Rivers, Joe Biden, Joss Whedon, Kansas, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, labor, Laniakea, lies and lying liars, Lord of the Rings, maps, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, mass extinction, McSweeney's, merit, meth, Milky Way, Milwaukee, Miracleman, misogyny, Missouri, MLA Subcon, neoliberalism, NYPD, obesity, oil, oil spill, parenting, Parks and Recreation, patriarchy, pedagogy, Peter Frase, phobias, poetry, polar vortex, police, police brutality, police state, politics, pollution, privilege, progress, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rule of law, Scalia, science fiction, science is magic, sexism, Shazam, slavery, socialism, Sopranos, St. Louis, standardized testing, Steve Salaita, stop-and-frisk, strikes, Supreme Court, SyFy, teaching, technology, telepathy, television, tenure, The Buried Giant, the cosmos, the courts, The Hobbit, the law, the long now, The Onion, The Rock, the Senate, The Silmarillion, Tolkien, Twitter, UIUC, Ukraine, unions, We're doomed, We're screwed, Werner Herzog, Wes Anderson, whales, what it is I think I'm doing, white people, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, zombies
Tuesday Shazbat
* The world is awash in Robin Williams remembrances today, but for my money I’d recommend his recent appearances on WTF and Harmontown. Louie. Longreads has also collected four essays and his appearance on Charlie Rose. Robin Williams’s Best Bad Movie. Suicide contagion and social media. How to report a suicide. The MetaFilter thread.
* It’s primary day in Wisconsin. Endorsements from Shepherd-Express.
* Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friend’s death. Police Reportedly Refused Offer to Interview Man Who Was With Michael Brown During Shooting. Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard. Ferguson Police Cite Safety Risk in Decision Not to Name Officer in Shooting. Ferguson, MO, is 67 percent black, and its police force is 94 percent white. The FBI steps in to investigate ultimately sign off on everything’s that happened. Dystopia as how-to manual.
* Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs. Jon Burge, Torture, and the Militarization of the Police. American Gulag.
* Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be predicated on “peace, progress, and prosperity,” with “peace” defined as “forever war.”
* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.
* CFP: Mean Girls.
* Nnedi Okorafor’s syllabus for ENGL 254: Science Fiction.
* On the greatness of Metroid.
* What’s less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That’s a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.
* Ursula K. Le Guin: About Anger, Part I.
* The City and the City watch: a proposal that Israel and Palestine become grosstopic, overlapping states.
* Cary Nelson keeps digging: Zionist groups planned to lobby Univ. of Illinois trustees over Salaita appointment. Corey Robin has been coordinating some boycott campaigning for English and Political Science / Philosophy, though personally I think the English statement’s extension to tenure review cases is just too self-undermining to commit to.
* Announcing The Daily Show Podcast, without Jon Stewart.
* Marquette will give John Lewis an honorary degree at the new student convocation on August 20.
* California debates ‘yes means yes’ sex assault law.
Legislation passed by California’s state Senate in May and coming before the Assembly this month would require all schools that receive public funds for student financial assistance to set a so-called “affirmative consent standard” that could be used in investigating and adjudicating sexual assault allegations. That would be defined as “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by each party to engage in sexual activity.
Silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. The legislation says it’s also not consent if the person is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep.
For some reason that escapes me, this is hugely controversial.
* The time Bruce Wayne had an affair with Barbara Gordon while she was dating Dick Grayson, impregnated her, before prompting her to head out and have a miscarriage while crimefighting. You know, for kids.
* Uber vs. Lyft: whoever wins, we lose.
* Apple’s workforce after 30 years of operation is still 70% male. And that’s better than most of the tech sector.
* Hoarders are the new Luddites.
Help a hoarder consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.
* Activision is making a new King’s Quest. Space Quest and Quest for Glory next!
* How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.
* And because everything is a bummer today: Ponzi Scheme Capitalism: An Interview with David Harvey.
My question would be: can we not foresee a continuation of that ridiculousness for the foreseeable future, where you have one fiction built on another fiction, one crisis to the next?
Yes. I raise that question a bit in the book by saying there are these fictitious forms of capital that can continue to circulate and feed off each other, and they’re all Ponzi schemes, which can sometimes go on for a long time. Yes, there may be some possibility we’re moving into this era of fictitious capital formation and circulation, which is then managed by the central banks because they can just add zeros to the money supply at the drop of a hat, and have been doing so. First off, it seems to me increasingly senseless, and I suspect that people will start to say, well what’s the point of all of this? Secondly, I think the internal contradictions of that are that there’s going to be crashes, but then there have been financial crashes popping off all over the place for the last 20 years and capital has survived. For instance, there’s one in Indonesia, one in Argentina and then there’s one somewhere else. Dubai World goes bankrupt, somebody else goes bankrupt, there are all these asset bubbles popping up all over the place, and maybe we can continue in that vein for a while. But at some point, I think the possibilities will run out.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 12, 2014 at 3:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, affirmative consent, anger, Apple, Barack Obama, Batgirl, Batman, California, capitalism, Cary Nelson, CFPs, China Miéville, civil forfeiture, class struggle, comics, consent, corruption, Dan Harmon, David Harvey, Death to Smoochy, depression, disruptive innovation, drones, dystopia, feminism, Ferguson, forever war, games, Gaza, general election 2016, Harmontown, health care, Heroes, Hillary Clinton, hoarders, How the University Works, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Jessica Williams, John Lewis, John McCain, King's Quest, Louie, Luddites, Lyft, malicious bullshitting, Marc Maron, Marquette, Marxism, Mean Girls, mental health, Metroid, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Missouri, NCAA, Nintendo, Nnedi Okorafor, now we see the violence inherent in the system, obituary, Palestine, podcasts, police brutality, police state, politics, Ponzi schemes, primaries, prison, prison-industrial complex, public health, public transportation, race, racism, rape, rape culture, resistance, Robin Williams, scams, science fiction, sexism, Sierra, socialism, St. Louis, Steven Salaita, suburbs, suicide, syllabi, Syria, taxis, teaching, tenure, The City and the City, the courts, The Daily Show, the laws, Uber, UIUC, Ursula K. Le Guin, voting is the one and only solution to all problems big and small, Wisconsin, WTF, yes means yes, you know for kids, Zionism
Special Bonus Monday Links – Do Not Read – Full of Bees
* It takes special gumption to argue not all US interventions are horrors in support of intervening in a horrorshow caused by US intervention.
* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.
* Jacobin breaks kayfabe: The story of pro wrestling in the twentieth century is the story of American capitalism.
* The swelling of the federal government’s communications bureaucracy to more than 3,000 workers reflects a “public relations state” designed to keep pace with the news cycle and politicize government messaging, experts say.
* Salon says once a cheater, always a cheater.
* The Systemic Implications of the Salaita Case.
* Hillary Clinton 2016: Because the Forever War Won’t Forever Itself.
* We Have a Rape Gif Problem and Gawker Media Won’t Do Anything About It.
* As @jbouie says, “with the critical exception of the situation of African-Americans” is the ultimate “to be sure” of all time.
* Probably the first time I’ve ever linked to anything at National Review approvingly: It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police.
* Afrofurism: Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson’s computations have influenced every major space program from Mercury through the Shuttle. She even calculated the flight path for the first American mission to space.
* The kids are all right: Mo’Ne Davis, 12, Leads Philly Team To Little League World Series.
* Just how deep does the rabbit hole go? 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
* The Saved by the Bell renaissance has claimed Arya Stark.
* The Marvel-Fox rights fight as autoimmune disorder.
* Can colleges do anything about parties and “tradition”?
* And this may not be the future we wanted, but it’s the one we have: Civilians in Abandoned McDonald’s Seize Control of Wandering Space Satellite.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 11, 2014 at 1:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, Afrofuturism, alcohol, America, American exceptionalism, Annie Hall, Annie Hall 2, Barack Obama, baseball, capitalism, cheaters, class struggle, college, Don't mention the war, forever war, Fox, futurity, Game of Thrones, Gawker, general election 2016, GIFs, Hillary Clinton, history, intellectual property, Iraq, ISIS, Jacobin, Jezebel, John McCain, Katherine G. Johnson, kayfabe, Little League, love, Marvel, Michael Brown, military interventionism, NASA, outer space, places to invade next, police brutality, police violence, professional wrestling, race, racism, rape culture, satellites, Saved by the Bell, sequels, Steven Salaita, tenure, the public relations state, William Gibson, Woody Allen, X-Men
Monday Morning Links
* CFP: SFRA 2015: The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.
* CFP: Paradoxa: The Futures Industry.
* Concerned about the Eaton SF/F archive at UCR.
*Ferguson, Missouri Community Furious After Teen Shot Dead By Police. Family of Michael Brown, Teenager Shot to Death By Ferguson Police, Talks About His Life. Michael Brown remembered as a ‘gentle giant.’ Now, riots.
* Black Life, Annotated. Further reading.
* Life as a victim of stalking.
* The Obligation to Know: From FAQ to Feminism 101.
Abstract: In addition to documenting and sharing information geek culture has a complementary norm obliging others to educate themselves on rudimentary topics. This obligation to know is expressed by way of jargon-laden exhortations such as ‘check the FAQ’ (frequently asked questions) and ‘RTFM’ (read the fucking manual). Additionally, the geek lexicon includes designations of the stature of the knower and the extent of what he or she knows (e.g., alpha geek and newbie). Online feminists, especially geek feminists, are similarly beset by naive or disruptive questions and demonstrate and further their geekiness through the deployment of the obligation to know. However, in this community the obligation reflects the increased likelihood of disruptive, or ‘derailing’, questions and a more complex and gendered relationship with stature, as seen in the notions of impostor syndrome, the Unicorn Law, and mansplaining.
* Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction.
* What Makes Nigel Richards The Best Scrabble Player On Earth.
* What It’s Like to be a Doctor in a Supermax Prison.
* Teaching The Merchant of Venice in Gaza.
* Inside online communities for non-offending pedophiles.
* While emailing with a colleague yesterday, I realized that I had never really written about the so-called “spacecraft cemetery” of the South Pacific, a remote patch of ocean water used as a kind of burial plot for derelict satellites.
* Dispute Between Amazon and Hachette Takes an Orwellian Turn. Amazon Gets Increasingly Nervous. In which Amazon calls you to defend the realm.
* What happens when a female writer asks a question on Twitter about women’s health.
* BREAKING: The NCAA Still Doesn’t Care About Athletes. The lawsuit that could change everything. The NCAA in Turmoil. How the O’Bannon Ruling Could Change College Sports.
* “The alternative to partition,” he said, “is a continued U.S.-led effort at nation-building that has not worked for the last four years and, in my view, has no prospect for success. That, Mr. Chairman, is a formula for war without an end.”
* World War I, as Paul Fussell famously argued, discredited what Wilfred Owen in a classic poem called “the old lie”: that it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. But what it has meant to shift allegiances from nation to “humanity” has changed drastically over the 20th century among those flirting with wider and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Namely, the highest goal shifted from the abolition to the humanization of war.
* Nothing Says “Sorry Our Drones Hit Your Wedding Party” Like $800,000 And Some Guns.
* Scenes From COCAL: A Conference for Contingent Faculty Looks to Seize Its Moment.
* Why Does the United States Have 17 Different Intelligence Agencies?
* Why not a three-day work week?
* What was it like to be on Supermarket Sweep?
* I was told on numerous occasions that I was going to face a general court martial on six or seven charges. Then word came down from Washington to discharge me quietly. An honourable discharge. Maybe the thinking was that the peace movement didn’t need a martyr.
* Yes, the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless.
* Elon Musk Reveals Open Source Design for 14,000 Mile-an-Hour Vacuum Tube Railroad.
* So much dBilown the memory hole: Reconsidering the Legacy of Bill Clinton.
* Philip K. Dick’s only children’s book finally back in print – with many subtle nods to his most famous SF work. But not in the US!
* Where’s the Diversity, Hollywood? Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blockbusters Overwhelmingly White, Male.
* John Oliver’s Search for New Voices in Late Night.
* The New York Public Library’s hilarious archive of librarians’ harsh children’s book reviews.
* Peter Frase talks Vonnegut’s Player Piano on the Old Mole Variety Hour.
* The A.V. Club is celebrating Clone High.
* Party Like It’s 1999: Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger.
* One of the weirdest episodes of Star Trek ever.
* Critical Theory after the Anthropocene.
* Tennessee Drug Tests Welfare Applicants, Discovers Less Than One Percent Use Drugs.
* Drilling Company Owner Gets 28 Months In Prison For Dumping Fracking Waste Into River. Sad that this would be so shocking.
* The Scott Walker Hypothesis. The Scott Walker Paradox.
* Giant urban sprawl could pave over thousands of acres of forest and agriculture, connecting Raleigh to Atlanta by 2060, if growth continues at its current pace, according to a newly released research paper from the U.S. Geological Survey.
* Island In Upstate New York Taken Over By Cats.
* Dream to revolutionize ostrich industry crumbles.
* What could possibly go wrong? Armed Right-Wing Militias Amassing Along Texas Border With State Lawmaker’s Blessing.
* But it’s not all bad news: Yellowstone Is Not Erupting And Killing Us All.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 11, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, amateurism, Amazon, America, Atlanta, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, capitalism, cats, CFPs, child abuse, children's literature, Chrono Trigger, CIA, Clone High, college sports, comedy, diversity, Don't mention the war, drones, drugs, Durham, Elon Musk, FAQs, FBI, feminism, film, forever war, futurity, games, Gaza, Gunsmoke, immigration, Iraq, Israel, J. Lloyd Eaton Collection, Japan, John Oliver, Kindles, literature, male privilege, medicine, megapolis, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, militias, misogyny, Missouri, moral panic, Myers-Briggs, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, NSA, nuclearity, NYPD, ostriches, outer space, Pacific Ocean, Palestine, Paradoxa, peace, peace movement, pedophilia, Peter Frase, Player Piano, police brutality, police state, police violence, prison-industrial complex, prisons, psychology, publishing, race, racism, Raleigh, retrofuturism, riots, satellites, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, Scrabble, Shakespeare, spacecraft cemetery, St. Louis, stalking, Star Trek, Supermarket Sweep, supervolcanoes, surveillance society, surveillance state, tasers, television, Tennessee, Texas, the 1990s, the abolition of work, the Anthropocene, the archives, the courts, the Internet, the law, The Merchant of Venice, The New Inquiry, the obligation to know, the South, theory, tracking, trains, Twitter, UC Riverside, unions, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on the poor, What could possibly go wrong?, what it is I think I'm doing, white privilege, Wisconsin, writing, Yellowstone, Yemen