Posts Tagged ‘Glenn Beck’
Midweek Links!
* Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds: X-Wing, Tie Fighter Are FINALLY Getting Digital Re-Releases. I don’t meant to brag but I was the very very best in the world at this game, back when.
* CFP at the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at UWM. This year’s theme is “the unbearable.” Keynotes by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman!
* How Not to Defend the Liberal Arts.
* Higher Education and the New Brutalism.
We live in the age of a new brutalism marked not simply by an indifference to multiple social problems, but also defined by a kind of mad delight in the spectacle and exercise of violence and cruelty. The United States is sullied by a brutalism that is perfectly consistent with a new kind of barbaric power, one that puts millions of people in prison, subjects an entire generation to a form of indentured citizenship, and strips people of the material and symbolic resources they need to exercise their capacity to live with dignity and justice. Academics who speak out against corruption and injustice are publicly demeaned and often lose their jobs. At the same time, the Obama administration criminalizes public servants who expose unethical behavior, the violation of civil liberties and corruption.
* Elsewhere in the richest society in the history of the world: How many homeless S.F. schoolkids? Enough to fill 70 classrooms.
* When I was a black woman, I was hated. Now, as a black man, I’m feared.
* Priscilla Wald on Media Treatment of Ebola. How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere.
* Any grad student could have told you: drunk people are better at philosophy.
* Tufts and Unionized Adjuncts.
* Scenes from the competency-based education scam. And the for-profit scam.
* UNC-Chapel Hill Should Lose Accreditation.
* Free education is not a crazy dream; some countries already have it. We should too, or we face a future where the study of literature or art becomes a luxury available to the rich alone.
* Some things mankind was never meant to see. More links below!
* Watch a New York Woman Get Catcalled 108 Times in Less Than One Day.
* You Can Buy This Abandoned CT Town For Less Than A Brooklyn Apartment.
* 30 Philip K Dick Stories That Should Be Movies.
* Voight-Kampff test for college admissions.
* ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ Is Now an Actual College Class. I’d take that. I know I could teach it.fe
* Someone finally said it: I Don’t Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men.
* Yosemite Lifehacks. Recommended.
* There’s no anti-college nonsense so aggressively silly that the Washington Post won’t push it.
* How the culture of assessment fuels academic dishonesty.
* US currency reimagined to celebrate ideas, not the dead. Still more links below!
* The Race to Nowhere In Youth Sports.
* You Can Still Eat This Corgi In Pennsylvania, Thanks To The NRA.
* Krypton TV Series In The Works. The CW Is Making A Young Shakespeare Vs. Witches TV Show.
* But it’s not all terrible ideas: I’m cautiously optimistic about Marvel Phase III. Black Panther! Captain Marvel!
* Halfway through this review of William Gibson’s The Peripheral I broke my no-buying-books rule and bought the book.
* Milwaukee hosts first Fantasticon comic convention.
* The NFL Concussion Settlement Is Pure Evil.
* The end result is always the same. You do all this work just to get money. So fuck it: Why not skip everything and just start making currency?“
* The Dartmouth (America’s Oldest College Newspaper) issues a rare correction.
* Damning every damnable river on Earth: what could possibly go wrong?
* When Russell Brand Met David Graeber.
* Martin Jarvis, professor of music at Charles Darwin University in Australia, claims some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s best-loved works were actually written by his wife.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking, Study Says.
Tuesday!
* C21’s book on Debt is finally almost out. My essay draws on the bits of the Polygraph introduction I wrote and is about ecological debt.
* Syllabus minute: I have W.H. Auden envy.
* MOOC Completion Rates: The Data.
* How neoliberal universities build their football stadiums.
Some projections showed Athletics might not be able to make payments starting in the 2030s when the debt service balloons. The debt is structured so that for the next 20 years, Cal only needs to make interest payments on the debt. The principal kicks in in the early 2030s, resulting in payments between $24 million and $37 million per year.
Look, if it’s good enough for an idea man who settled out of court on securities fraud, it’s good enough for me.
* Kent State fires adjunct who built their journalism master’s.
* Ian Morris, psychohistorian.
* What If? on The Twitter Archive of Babel. The Twitter Archive of Babel contains the true story of your life, as well as all the stories of all the lives you didn’t lead….
* Proud Species Commits Suicide Rather Than Be Driven To Extinction By Humans.
* A People’s History of “Twist and Shout.”
* PPP: Russ Feingold Poised For Comeback, Could Top Scott Walker Next Year.
* Michael Chabon: Dreams are useless bodily effluvia. Nicholson Baker: Dreams are all we have.
* You and I are gonna live forever: 72 is the new 30.
* Settling nerd fights of the 1990s today: Is This the Smoking Gun Proving Deep Space Nine Ripped Off Babylon 5?
* The Star Wars Heresies: Star Wars and William Blake. Tim Morton’s essay in Green Planets has a similar impulse with respect to Avatar.
* And in even more insane mashup news: WWE Keeps Pressure On Glenn Beck.
Saturday Night Links
* The headline reads, “Glenn Beck Building Ayn Rand-Inspired Utopia.”
* Grief for Aaron Swartz: The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime.” Prosecutor as bully. How to Get a Job Like Mine.
* Aaron Bady saw Zero Dark Thirty.
* Quentin Tarantino talks to himself.
* And the US Treasury agrees with me about the trillion-dollar coin. It’s enough to make me rethink my whole position…
Thursday Links
* BREAKING: Weiner goes down.
* ’22 Elite College Sports Programs Turned a Profit in 2010, but Gaps Remain, NCAA Reports Says.’ Those “gaps” include the 98 Football Bowl Subdivision sports programs that lost a median $11.6 million last year, as well as losses at 100% of all Football Championship Subdivision programs and 100% of all Division I schools without football.
* Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in Al-Jazeera on the magical realism of body counts.
* Joan Walsh on the mirage of the Obama coalition.
* BREAKING: The “conservative movement” is a money-making scam.
Yesterday, Politico reported what an educated listener could’ve guessed: Right-wing radio pundits are paid by conservative organizations to mention them favorably. FreedomWorks pays Glenn Beck to talk about how great FreedomWorks is, Rush Limbaugh wholeheartedly endorses the Heritage Foundation because the Heritage Foundation pays him, and Mark Levin receives a check for telling you that donating to Americans for Prosperity will help defeat Obama.
* And confidential to Vancouver: really, it’s poor form to riot when you lose.
Wednesday!
* Now she’s just showing off: Duke’s own Julia Gaffield has found a second copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. I’m in that dissertation working group, by the way, so at least half the glory is mine. At least half.
* Ian Sales celebrates SF “mistressworks.” There’s a 91-book version here, on which Xenogenesis is still inexcusably absent.
* What happened to the peace movement?
* Huge turnout in the special election last night for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Right now the race is too close to call, with pro-labor candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg up by just a few hundred votes.
* Glenn Beck fired “transitioned off.”
* Alec Baldwin says next season of 30 Rock will be the last. NBC disagrees.
* And just coming over the wire: Donald Trump is as awesomely incompetent at politics as he is at business. I can’t wait for 2012.
Wednesday Politics Minute
Nate Silver says I shouldn’t be as annoyed at Jim Webb as I feel at the news that he’s retiring after just one term. Josh Marshall says I shouldn’t believe a return to Macacamania is inevitable, though I do. I will have to console myself with the fantasy that right-wing talk radio may finally be dying.
I can’t wait!
Monday Night!
* The latest Detroit atrocity: Detroit mayor shoots down idea for Robocop statue. When will that poor city finally get a leader with some vision?
* How “The Fridge” lost his way: Elegy for William “The Refrigerator” Perry.
* Football vs. labor: Will the NFL play next year?
* Dystopia watch: Disney Now Marketing To Newborns In The Delivery Room.
* David Cole plays “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?”—almost by name!—in the New York Review of Books.
As Judge Hudson sees it, the health care reform law poses an unprecedented question: Can Congress, under its power to regulate “commerce among the states,” regulate “inactivity” by compelling citizens who are not engaged in commerce to purchase insurance? If it is indeed a novel question, there may be plenty of room for political preconceptions to color legal analysis. And given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, that worries the law’s supporters.
But the concerns are overstated. In fact, defenders of the law have both the better argument and the force of history on their side. Judge Hudson’s decision reads as if it were written at the beginning of the twentieth rather than the twenty-first century. It rests on formalistic distinctions—between “activity” and “inactivity,” and between “taxing” and “regulating”—that recall jurisprudence the Supreme Court has long since abandoned, and abandoned for good reason. To uphold Judge Hudson’s decision would require the rewriting of several major and well-established tenets of constitutional law. Even this Supreme Court, as conservative a court as we have had in living memory, is unlikely to do that.
The objections to health care reform are ultimately founded not on a genuine concern about preserving state prerogative, but on a libertarian opposition to compelling individuals to act for the collective good, no matter who imposes the obligation. The Constitution recognizes no such right, however, so the opponents have opportunistically invoked “states’ rights.” But their arguments fail under either heading. With the help of the filibuster, the opponents of health care reform came close to defeating it politically. The legal case should not be a close call.
* Did Bush cancel a trip to Switzerland out of fear of criminal prosecution? Probably not—but isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party finds another RINO: godfather of neoconservatism Bill Kristol.
* The end of the DLC. My inclination is to say “make sure you bury it at a crossroads so it can’t come back,” but of course Ezra’s more or less right: the DLC can safely disband because it won.
* The city-states of America, “those states where the majority of their populations lie within a single metropolitan area.” Via Yglesias, which has some light speculation on the politics of all this.
* On the Soviet Union’s rather poor plan to reach the Moon.
* Star Wars, with all those pointless words and images taken out. Note: falsely implies Chewbacca received a medal at the end of the film.
* Charles Simic: Where is Poetry Going?
“Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,” William Hazlitt wrote. One hopes that a poem will eventually arise out of all that hemming and hawing, then go out into the world and convince a complete stranger that what it describes truly happened. If one is fortunate, it may even get into bed with them or be taken on a vacation to a tropical island. A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge.
* An evening with J.D. Salinger. It ends pretty much exactly as you’d expect:
The three of us got into the cab. Joe gave the driver my address and when the cab began to move Salinger began walking, then running, alongside, still asking us to change our minds. He hit the cab—with his fist, I supposed—and the driver braked.
Joe said, “Drive on!” Salinger was looking in through the window beside me. “Stop. Please come back!” He was shouting now in the quiet street.
The cab moved and got through the intersection. Joe said angrily, “He’s absolutely crazy.”
* And the headline reads: Global food crisis driven by extreme weather fueled by climate change. Enjoy the century.
This Is Why Your Parents Are Totally Crazy Now
I don’t think I’d ever actually watched a full segment of Glenn Beck before this morning. My god. My god.
Saturday Afternoon Fever
* The Mayans Jawas predicted it: Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012.
* The Republican Study Committee wants to defund the arts. Entirely.
A group of conservative Republicans, called the Republican Study Committee, revealed a new plan on Thursday to cut federal funding for arts down to zero. This means the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be left in the cold. Not to mention the potential hit at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
* David Neiwart gets literary with Glenn Beck’s favorite poem.
But it’s really quite revealing that Beck NEVER gets Niemoller’s poem right. There are a number of different versions with slight variations, but the most common is this one:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.Then they came for the trade unionists ,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist…
* Also in Glenn Beck news: his latest target is receiving threats. She is 78.
* The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations. Obligatory Colbert flashback.
* Standing on Zanzibar: If the world’s population lived in one city.
Gerry Canavan 