Posts Tagged ‘gold’
Another Loose Firehose of Weekend Links!
* I’ve been so busy this little bit of clickbait isn’t even timely anymore: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. And this one isn’t timely either!
* New China Miéville story, in Salvage.
* A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis.
* Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever.
* How to Support a Scholar Who Has Come Under Attack.
* Guns, Prisons, Social Causes: New Fronts Emerge in Campus Fights Over Divestment.
* The final budget numbers that University of Wisconsin campuses have been dreading for months were released late Monday, prompting a mad scramble on campuses to figure out the winners and losers. Wisconsin’s Neoliberal Arts.
* In other words, states would be required to embrace and the federal government would be obligated to enforce a professor-centered vision of how to operate a university: tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand. Sanders for president!
* Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature.
* 11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities. “Quality of life” almost barely sneaks in as a criterion at the end.
* On Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.
* Deep cuts: Why Do TV Characters All Own the Same Weird Old Blanket?
* The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.
* The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms. In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%” The effects persist “even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”
* The Verdict on Charter Schools?
* “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Letter to My Son.
* What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
* On June 8, CNN unveiled “Courageous,” a new production unit and an in-house studio that would be paid by advertisers to produce and broadcast news-like “branded content.”
* Social networking and the majority illusion.
* “Colleges’ Balance Sheets Are Looking Better.” Happy days are here again!
* My Severed Thumb and the Ambiguities of Technological Progress.
* So much for “most unpaid internships are illegal.”
* Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?
* From the archives! Liberalism and Gentrification.
* From the archives! The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.
* “Zach Anderson” is the latest outrageous story from the sex offender registry to go viral.
* Prisoner’s Dilemma as pedagogy.
* In its 2015-17 budget, the Legislature cut four-year college tuition costs by 15 to 20 percent by 2016 — making Washington the only state in the country to lower tuition for public universities and colleges next year.
* The end of “weaponized anthropology.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 20: Pivot.
* Tumblr of the week: Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].
* New Jersey congressman pitches the least substantive response to the student debt crisis — SO FAR.
* Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.
* Thousands Of Children Risked Their Lives In Tanzania’s Gold Mines For $2 A Day.
* Kotsko has been blogging about his latest turn through the harassment grinder. He’s taking on Big Santa, too. He just doesn’t care.
* Climate science and gloom. But at least air conditioning might not be that bad.
* Weird day for computers this week. Anyway we should put algorithms in charge of everything.
* Scenes from the Olympic scam, Boston edition.
* Sci-Fi Crime Drama with a Strong Black Lead.
* The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an attachment that requires you to print them at home. The original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life – has mutated into exotic versions of itself. The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.
* The initial, back-of-the-napkin notes for Back to the Future 2 and 3.
* Nice try, parents! You can’t win.
* What my parents did was buy us time – time for us to stare at clouds, time for us to contemplate the stars, to wonder at a goiter, to gape open-mouthed at shimmering curtains of charged particles hitting the ionosphere. What it cost them can be written about another time. What I am grateful for is that summer of awe.
* The “gag law also forbids citizens to insult the monarchy and if someone is found guilty in a defamation or libel case, he or she can face up to two years in prison or be forced to pay an undetermined fine,” local media outlet Eco Republicano reported as the public expressed its anger against the law introduced by the ruling Popular Party.
* Wisconsin Democrats sue to undo the incredible 2011 gerrymander that destroyed the state.
* Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders. This is good, but still much too timid — he could free many times as many people as he’s freeing and still barely make a dent in the madness of the drug war.
* EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print.
* The central ideological commitment of the new Star Wars movies seems to be “well of course you can’t really overthrow an Empire.” Seems right. (Minor spoilers if you’re an absolute purist.)
* Brian K. Vaughn will write an issue of The Walking Dead.
* Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world.
* So you want to announce for the WWE.
* This isn’t canon! Marisa Tomei is your Aunt May.
* I’m not happy about this either.
* A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving, or, Our Brains Don’t Work. I got it right, though I doubt I would have if it hadn’t been framed as a puzzle.
* Your time travel short of the weekend: “One-Minute Time Machine.”
* Or perhaps post-apocalyptic Sweden is more your flavor.
* Another round of the polygamy debate.
* Everything You Thought You Knew About Nic Cage’s Superman Film Is Wrong.
* Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer.
* And then there’s Whitesboro.
* The Lost Girls: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.
* Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer.
* 7,000 Fireworks Go Off at Once Due To Computer Malfunction.
* Sopranos season eight: How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp.
* I never noticed how sexist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. Preach.
* Aurora is out! Buy it! You don’t have to take my word for it! Excerpt! More! More!
* And there’s nothing sweet in life.
Wednesday, Oh, Wednesday
* There’s nothing inherently fascist in Žižek’s call for an elite cadre of benevolent dictators to rule us like kings. Why, it says so right there in black and white:
There is absolutely nothing inherently ”Fascist” in these lines – the supreme paradox of the political dynamics is that a Master is needed to pull individuals out of the quagmire of their inertia and motivate them towards self-transcending emancipatory struggle for freedom.
* Peter Frase on the perils of wonkery. And then there’s Kotsko’s take:
* The NCAA’s Perfectly Fair Rules.
* Despite three generation of survivalist horror in mass media, “Sociologists have shown that people tend to behave very admirably under the pressure of a disaster; panic and anti-social behavior are fairly rare.”
* “Public higher education, which educates 70 percent of students in the United States, is about to cross a historic threshold,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “For the first time ever, students will pay a higher percentage of the operating costs… than state governments.”
But the system of federal financial aid is constructed in such a way that putting together strict “maintenance of effort” requirements — requiring states to keep funding public higher education in order to receive federal dollars — is difficult because states receive relatively little money for higher education from the federal government. As a result, previous maintenance of effort requirements have been “nibbling at the edges,” Madzelan said.
* Who is promoting Alex Jones?
* The Gold Collapse Is Personally Costing Ron Paul A Fortune.
* And the headline reads, “New Hampshire Lawmaker Calls All Women ‘Vaginas.’” I mean really.
Post *All* the Links
A big post, catching up from most of last week:
* Science fiction on the BBC: A brief history of all-women societies.
* Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe.
* News from MLA! Dissing the Dissertation. Anguish Trumps Activism at the MLA.
* News from my childhood: Another new version of Dungeons & Dragons is on the way. MetaFilter agonizes.
* News from the Montana Supreme Court: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government…”
* News from the future right now: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal.
* How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
* Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda.
* How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive entertainment.
* Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.
* While genomic research on the super-old is in its very early stages, what’s fascinating is what the researchers are not finding. These people’s genomes are fundamentally the same as other people’s. They are clearly very special, but not in ways that are obvious.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955.
* The headline reads, “Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed.”
* Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported.
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum.
* Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses. Keep in mind: that’s their defense.
* Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term.
* Romney: Elected office is for the rich.
* How banks and debt collectors are bringing dead debt back to life.
People who stop paying bills earn lousy credit ratings but eventually are freed of old debt under statutes of limitations that vary by state and range from three years to 10 years from the last loan payment.
But if a debtor agrees to make even a single payment on an expired debt, the clock starts anew on some part of the old obligation, a process called “re-aging.”
So if borrowers again fall behind on their payments, debt collectors can turn to their usual tools: letters, phone calls and lawsuits. By restarting a debt’s statute of limitations, the collectors have years to retrieve payments.
* Wells Tower: In Gold We Trust.
* Epic Doctor Who Timeline. More here.
* Battlestar Galactica: Totally planned. See also.
* The cast of Community plays pop culture trivia.
* “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”
* Classified docs reveal why Tolkien failed to win ’61 Nobel Prize!
* Solve the Fermi Paradox the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal way.
* And you probably already saw Paypal’s latest outrage, but man, it’s a doozy.
Occupy Wednesday
* The Occupy Oakland general strike seems to have been really pretty amazingly successful. The view from Twitter. Another. And here’s Matt’s picture again, having gone viral through me by way of @zunguzungu and @rortybomb. Half those pageviews are rightfully mine, Matt!
* General strikes in U.S. history.
* Arguments not taken seriously that should be: A federal court is being asked to grant constitutional rights to five killer whales who perform at marine parks — an unprecedented and perhaps quixotic legal action that is nonetheless likely to stoke an ongoing, intense debate at America’s law schools over expansion of animal rights.
* When advertising works too well: the strange case of Axe Body Spray.
* Women hold slightly more than half (52.3 percent) of creative class jobs and their average level of education is almost the same as men. But the pay they receive is anything but equal. Creative class men earn an average of $82,009 versus $48,077 for creative class women. This $33,932 gap is a staggering 70 percent of the average female creative class salary. Even when we control for hours worked and education in a regression analysis, creative class men out-earn creative class women by a sizable $23,700, or 49.2 percent.
* Legal Pain Killers Killed 15,000 People In 2008, Marijuana Likely Killed Zero.
* New Report Finds Vermont Could Save As Much As $1.8 Billion By 2020 From Shifting To Single Payer.
* Legendary Glenn Beck sponsor Goldline charged with fraud.
* Jon Corzine’s new firm likely to soon be charged with fraud. My father reminded me today that one universe over Jon Corzine never got in a horrific car accident as a result of his state police driver texting on the highway—which means he’s still the governor of New Jersey, which means he’s cruising towards a run for the presidency in 2016. In this universe he’s probably going to go to jail. It’s hard to think of another public figure whose life has hinged so completely on such a fluke event.
* In thirty years, college tuition has tripled.
* The worst part of the catastrophic implosion of the Hermain Cain candidacy is that he was the only one with a chance of stopping China from getting the bomb. None of the other candidates are even talking about this issue.
* And J.K. reveals she wanted to kill off Hagrid, too. You fiend!
Gerry Canavan 