Posts Tagged ‘Genghis Khan’
Saturday Morning Links!
* CFP: (Un)Ethical Futures: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction.
* It gets wetter: Dissent on KSR’s New York 2140.
* Apocalypse Now: Science fiction writers on the end of the world on On the Media.
* Not Just Pussy Hats on the Climate March: Feminist Encounters with the Anthropocene.
* “I shared my toddler’s hospital bill on Twitter. First came supporters — then death threats.”
* Austerity refugees: “Why I Won’t Raise My Son in Illinois.”
* Billion-Dollar Lawsuit Claims Florida Broke Requirement to Match Donations to Colleges.
* Instead, the low income mobility in the United States and Britain is almost entirely due to the part of the parent-son association that is not mediated by educational attainment. In the United States and especially Britain, parental income is far more important for earnings at a given level of education than in Sweden, a result that holds also when controlling for cognitive ability. This goes against widespread ideas of the United States as a country where the role of ascription is limited and meritocratic stratification prevails.
* Kobach runs a matching program that appears to have its own high rate of errors. A recent study by political scientists at Stanford University found that Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program had 200 false positives for every actual double registration. The Kansas secretary of state’s office did not immediately return a call for comment on the program.
* Untreatable gonorrhoea ‘superbug’ spreading around world, WHO warns.
* What could possibly go wrong? Scientists recreate an extinct virus.
* The Happiest Place on Earth.
* A Look Inside Calexit, the Comic That Imagines California’s Secession From a Fascist US.
* Baltimore Sun plans to close City Paper.
* This seems normal and fine: Ivanka Trump takes her father’s seat at world leaders’ table during a G-20 meeting.
* Utah Ag-Gag Law Declared Unconstitutional.
* Grandma’s coming to live with you.
* What is best in life, Neoliberal Genghis Khan? American Holocaust (artist Andrew Spear, 2015). “At the Oxymoron Museum” was always my favorite Borges story. Ended after just one issue, I reckon. And this guy knows almost nothing about trucks.
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Lots of Thursday Links
* Santorum leading in Ohio. Obama leading everywhere.
* You had me at hello: Soviet Space Propaganda Posters.
* Part two of Boston Review‘s interview with David Graeber is up.
DJ: In my most cynical days as an academic, I thought of a professorship as the carrot that the establishment offers to make sure that smart people don’t run amok. “Give them a nice little office and a job that’s very stable, and put them in the ivory tower, and they won’t cause any trouble.”
DG: Did you ever read C.B. Macpherson’s theory of the university? It’s similar to that, and it’s actually quite clever. He makes the argument that universities have traditionally fulfilled a kind of court jester role. What is the problem you have if you’re the guy in charge, if you’re a king? It’s that you’re surrounded by yes-men. So there’s nobody there who’s going to tell you if you have a really bad idea. They’ll agree with anything you say. So you need someone who will actually point out when you’re going off the tracks. You’ll also need to make sure that person isn’t taken seriously. So you get a hunchbacked dwarf to tell you a silly rhyme, telling you why your plan is idiotic. And you get to know that your plan is idiotic and think about it, and everybody else says, “OK, hunchbacked dwarf, you talk to the king, that’s fine.” Universities are pretty much the same thing. They’re there to come up with all the reasons why current policies are misguided, why, you know, the current economic systems might not be ideal. They come up with all the alternate perspectives, but they frame it in a way that nobody takes it particularly seriously or can even understand it.
* Life Lessons from The Lion King.
2) The rest of us should be happy to be ruled over by a group of predatory overlords who will devour us whole should we become sick or weak. Someday, eventually, in a vague and symbolic manner, karma will even things up.
3) Physical strength and charm are the defining characteristics for a leader; someone smart is probably just evil anyway. Don’t listen to them.
* The Angel Problem. Via MeFi.
* Ever since I taught The Sheep Look Up last week I see something Brunner predicted in the news nearly every day. Today’s depressing entry: Air Pollution Linked to Cognitive Decline in Women. Now, the dataset was all women, so it’s probably really “air pollution linked to cognitive decline in everyone.” Enjoy your weekend!
* …over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multiagency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, vowing to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, and threatening to imprison state employees responsible for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts. “There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.”
* New Jersey expected to approve gay marriage; Christie vows veto.
* “All-male House GOP leadership gets all-male witness panel to agree that all-male Catholic hierarchy should set contraceptives policy.” More here, here, here…
* The Wisconsin Uprising, One Year Later.
* And the Telegraph profiles the Boss.
He does, however, see cause for optimism. “The Occupy Wall Street movement has been powerful about changing the national conversation. The Tea Party set the conversation for a while but now people are talking about economic equality. That’s a conversation America hasn’t had for 20 years.”
There is also a religious dimension to Springsteen’s latest songs. The album shifts towards the spiritual uplift of gospel music in its rousing finale, evoking Jesus and the risen dead. “I got brainwashed as a child with Catholicism,” joked Springsteen, who says biblical imagery increasingly creeps into his songs almost unbidden. “Its like Al Pacino in The Godfather: I try to get out but they pull you back in! Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
All the Things That Happened Today
* Sad news: Terrorist attack at Moscow’s busiest airport.
* Rumors are swirling that the Wachowskis may pull a Lucas.
* Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult.
* SOTU 2011: “How We Win the Future.” Warning: climate change may not exist in the future.
* Will big-name Republicans sit out 2012?
* The problem with regarding the photography of suffering as ‘pornography.’
* Killjoys keep debunking the “twin suns in 2012” Betelgeuse supernova story. Can’t I have just this one thing?
* Soccer science! As game theory predicts, legitimate falls far outnumber fake falls, Wilson reported at the meeting. Only 6% of the 2800 falls were highly deceptive dives. Players were two to three times as likely to dive when close to the goal, where the payoff was huge: Statistics show that there is an 80% chance of scoring from penalty kicks. Almost none of the highly deceptive dives resulted in free kicks against the diver. And referees were most likely to reward dives that occurred close to the goals—perhaps because the players were farther away and the deception harder to detect, he noted.
* James Kochalka is Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate.
* Headline of the day: Man admits mailing hundreds of tarantulas.
* I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it appears the Bush administration may have broken the law.
* Genghis Khan: history’s greenest conqueror?
Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion actually cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
So how exactly did Genghis Khan, one of history’s cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today’s environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.
Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world’s total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.
For certain values of “green”… Via MetaFilter.
* And also via MetaFilter: Vermont vs. corporate personhood. Republicans vs. the Internet. Rahm Emanuel gets Chicago’d. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. The United States of Shame. Teacher salary? Damn you North Carolina!
Gerry Canavan 