Posts Tagged ‘Italy’
Feeling a Little Coronavirusty — Links
* This Twitter thread on the Imperial College modeling calling for 18 months or more of suppressive action was some of the most bracing reading on coronavirus I’ve seen yet. (This Buzzfeed article has a summary if that’s more your speed.) We are living through a nightmare. We’re not going back to normal. (UDPATE: Here’s a critique of the Imperial College study that got a lot of people spooked, including me, arguing that a few weeks of lockdown plus contact tracing and monitoring *can* prevent reemergence of the outbreak.)
* How long will social distancing for coronavirus have to last? Deciphering the pandemic: a guide to understanding the coronavirus numbers. How the US stacks up to other countries in confirmed coronavirus cases. The Single Most Important Lesson From the 1918 Influenza.
* 18% have lost jobs or hours in the last month. You Should Be Absolutely Terrified About the Economy. A Frantic Few Days for Restaurants Is Only the Beginning. Baseball Shutdown Sends Minor Leaguers Into Uncertain Future. The World of Books Braces for a Newly Ominous Future. Amazon’s Supply Chain Is Breaking and Small Businesses Are Screwed. There’s no one to pick the fruit. As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens Its Spread. It Has All Gone to Hell. Coronavirus is an indictment of our way of life. America is a sham. Big Pharma is ready.
Unemployment claims filed in Ohio:
Last Sunday: 536
This Sunday: 11,995
Monday: 36,645For tens of thousands of Ohioans the economic crisis is already here. We should have already voted on the House-passed bill.https://t.co/xCAUPzhgGW
— Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) March 18, 2020
* To stop a coronavirus quarantine recession, economists say send everyone cash—now. Romney! Dem Senators! Bernie Sanders Proposal for $2 Trillion Coronavirus Emergency Plan Includes $2,000 Direct Monthly Payments to Every American. He’ll just have to beat the Democrats to do it.
I was trying to figure out why this point wasn’t absolutely obvious to people but finally realized the point of the utterance is “blah blah blah blah I don’t need a check” https://t.co/K6gk4kg7Wq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 17, 2020
Haunted by family legends of great-grandparents who lost the stock to save the house, which they then lost anyway, or maybe it was the other way around, the point is they lost everything
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 16, 2020
We can only exist where capitalism is not. And this crisis is opening up such spaces. The question is whether it becomes a way to get back to "normal," or whether it wakes us up that "normal" wants us dead.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 16, 2020
banal point but it’s moments like this you realize our entire society is based on one premise: spend or die
— Quinn Slobodian (@zeithistoriker) March 16, 2020
* First confirmed patient in R.I. talks about surviving coronavirus. A Frontline Physician Speaks Out on the Coronavirus.
* Evers orders bars, restaurants closed; schools closed indefinitely. Vegas shuts down. Then: Spring breakers pack Florida beach despite coronavirus pandemic. Now: $6 flights to Fort Lauderdale.
* New York Is Now the Epicenter of the Coronavirus Crisis in the U.S. New York Will Be The Next Italy, But Doesn’t Have to Be.
Jerry's girlfriend demands to know if they're at "quarantine level"; George and Elaine pretend to date to get around the Uber pool ban; Kramer pretends to be an epidemiologist on twitter and gets retweeted by the President etc etc https://t.co/ZyHk2W1lWI
— Eric Lach (@ericlach) March 17, 2020
* They Went Off the Grid. They Came Back to the Coronavirus.
* COVID-19 and Collective Childcare.
* Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918.’ How Trump snapped out of coronavirus delusion mode. The Mar-a-Lago hot zone. Priorities. With masks at the ready, ICE agents make arrests on first day of California coronavirus lockdown.
* Some good news: Ventilator Maker: We Can Ramp Up Production Five-Fold. Coronavirus vaccine test opens with 1st doses. New cases and deaths in Italy may have reached their plateau.
* Isis issues coronavirus travel advice: terrorists should avoid Europe.
* Student advocates say coronavirus-related directives to move off campus threaten to reinforce existing inequalities and put disproportionate burdens on low-income and international students, among others. Why not simply make your online courses as human as possible? Coronavirus and the ruptured narrative of campus life.
* Social media giants warn of AI moderation errors as coronavirus empties offices. Coronavirus Is Changing Podcasting, Fast.
* Now is the time to overreact.
* …a properly dialectical critique does not criticise the reality of capitalism for failing to live up to its ideals; it criticises the ideals of capitalism for their, more or less hidden, reflection of that reality. What a dialectical critique shows is that better things aren’t possible, if we index possibilities to what appears possible according to the world as it is. But what it also shows is that better things are not only necessary, but real: a better world does not exist in the thwarted ideals of the present, but in the real processes that might abolish that present.
* Planet Plastic: How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. The Mad Men of Climate Denial. Coronavirus Lockdown May Save More Lives By Preventing Pollution Than By Preventing Infection. Welcome to the LEGOpocene.
* Chindogu are inventions that defy concise explanation. They aren’t useful. But they aren’t completely useless either. Their creator, Kenji Kawakami, describes them as “un-useless.” The Ten Tenets of Chindogu.
* The Rise of Impossibly Cute and Wholesome Games.
* Joe Biden has now essentially won the Democratic nomination. Ugh.
* Wrestlemania in a time of coronavirus.
* And Friday can’t get here fast enough. Save us, Nintendo!
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2020 at 8:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1918, academia, America, Animal Crossing, capitalism, childcare, chindogu, class struggle, climate change, college, coronavirus, Democratic primary 2020, Donald Trump, ecology, epidemic, Facebook, games, Grand Canyon, How the University Works, inventions, ISIS, Italy, Joe Biden, kids today, Mar-a-Lago, moderation, New York, Nintendo, off the grid, pandemic, parenting, Pee Wee Herman, podcasts, politics, professional wrestling, quarantine, revolution, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, social distancing, social media, Spanish flu, terrorism, the economy, UBI, unemployment, vaccines, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, Wrestlemania
My My My My Corona
* How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts. U.S. Hospitals Prepare for Coronavirus, With the Worst Still to Come. The Coronavirus Outbreak Is About To Put Hospital Capacity To A Severe Test. Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus. The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors. Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. Terrified Doctors Sound Alarm on Coronavirus. 40 coronavirus deaths in US as Disney parks to close, March Madness canceled. The Dos and Don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ This Is Not a Snow Day. Our new life of isolation. Cancel Everything. The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be ‘normal’ again. Italy: Don’t Do What We Did. ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response.
* Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression. Coronavirus Calls for an Emergency Rent Freeze and Eviction Moratorium. “We’re Not Going to Work Through Coronavirus.” The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic. That’ll solve it. Coronavirus Matters, The Stock Market Doesn’t, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us. Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency. The Coronavirus Puts the Class War Into Stark Relief. Even Greg Mankiw thinks we need a UBI to get through this. Alone against the virus. In a Plague Year.
This is the most serious crisis the world has faced since 1945 and it is entirely unprepared. Our economic systems simply cannot function with an extended period of social distancing. Huge segments of the economy won’t last the next two weeks if we don’t start thinking fast.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2020
I really haven’t heard anyone talk seriously about what is going to a gig-economy, hourly-wage country when huge segments of ordinary life just shut down completely for who knows how long.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2020
Rent is due in 17 days. Do you think workers in the industries being impacted by this are getting paid enough for rent between now and then? What about May rent, 47 days from now, when we might still be doing this?
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2020
I was 21 in 2001. I’m 40 now. Global politics has been in a catastrophic, ever-worsening death spiral more or less the entirety of my adult life. It’s a little hard to come to terms with.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 9, 2020
* Coronavirus is mysteriously sparing kids and killing the elderly. Understanding why may help defeat the virus. Why Covid-19 is so dangerous for older adults. We Simply Do Not Understand Why. ‘If I’m Going to Get Sick and Die, I Might as Well Do It at Disney World.’ Are the olds okay?
* Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Vaccines. The News Isn’t Great.
* The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments. As the Coronavirus Scrambles Colleges’ Finances, Leaders Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst. Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. What about the health of staff members? What about international student visas? Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do? And the link every academic has already seen: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.
Coronavirus presents college administrations with no easy options, but it can’t be good for the brand to evict the people going into catastrophic debt for an education with one week’s notice and a promise of a slapped together email chain in lieu of the classes they paid for.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2020
not to beat this dead horse but it seems like every elite college in the country has simultaneously decided that eviction law, the ADA, accreditation, visa law, and ordinary common sense no longer apply https://t.co/6rDn8EumUi
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2020
In the fall, when all this is hopefully over, universities need to really examine how piss poor their emergency plans are, how those piss poor plans disproportionally harm low-income and international students and how badly they communicate and execute those plans.
— roxane gay (@rgay) March 11, 2020
Telling your students “leave campus today and take your laptop” is not a plan!
— roxane gay (@rgay) March 11, 2020
this is a whole education in how the university works https://t.co/2HLliBedOT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 11, 2020
Side note: an institution summarily evicting its students and then having them shot in the street when they get upset about it is about as pure a distillation of the relationship between the neoliberal university and its students as one is likely to find
— Alex Young (@Alex_T_Young) March 11, 2020
* Coronavirus Is The Nightmare Situation People Worried About When Trump Won. A Seattle lab uncovered Washington’s coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators. A Map Of The Coronavirus Exposures In Trump’s Orbit In Just Two Weeks. The Trump Presidency Is Over.
* Prisons and jails are vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks. New York Prison Labor Makes Hand Sanitizer, Prepares to Dig Graves if Coronvirus Worsens. COVID-19 is shining a bright and extremely unflattering light on the condition of the social safety net in America.
* South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths.
* A COVID-19 Homeschooling Curriculum.
* The ebook of Priscilla Wald’s Contagious is now free at Duke University Press.
* 12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Movie We Need Right Now. Teach the controversy, I say.
I have such a different reading on this moment. I’ve always seen the scientist as being there to insure the virus spreads as scheduled, to preserve the power they have gained in the ruins https://t.co/JOk5qK8tiV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2020
* Lightspeed Magazine has “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for all your apocalyptic needs.
* http://sfra.org/Coronavirus-News.
* Probably the single biggest problem I have.
Let’s see what else is in the news.
* William Gibson on the apocalypse: It’s been happening for at least 100 years. Several Global Tipping Points May Have Arrived.
* What about this? I’ve been asked to be a co-editor with Nisi Shawl on the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Octavia E. Butler’s works.
* CFP: A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam. CFP: Science Fictions, guest ed. Takayuki Tatsumi.
* The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism. The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope. Joe Biden’s secret governing plan. Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won’t end well this time either. The other swing voter. Our First Hundred Days Could Be A Nightmare.
tired: Bernie hasn’t been vetted! Trump will eat him alive!
wired: It is inappropriate to discuss Biden’s positions, record, or fitness for the presidency, and how dare you
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 8, 2020
* Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Testaments.
* Captain Pike Star Trek Spinoff Series Reportedly in Development. Star Trek: Picard offers some answers on its worst episode yet. I don’t think things are quite this dire but the series is running out of time to right itself.
* Watchmen watch: Nothing ever ends.
* The circle of academic life.
* Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.
* Autism therapy: His Reality Is a Mock Village Where Everybody Knows Him.
* A sad coda to an amazing story in the history of science: Nancy Wexler has confirmed that she has Huntington’s disease.
* Tough week for Alex Jones.
* And probably your word of the century: disinfotainment.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 14, 2020 at 6:31 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 12 Monkeys, academia, Alex Jones, America, apocalypse, autism, Bernie Sanders, class struggle, coronavirus, crisis, Democrats, depression, disinfortainment, Donald Trump, fires, gig economy, homeschooling, How the University Works, Huntington's disease, Italy, James Tiptree Jr., Joe Biden, LEGO, Library of America, Margaret Atwood, Nancy Wexler, Octavia Butler, online teaching, pandemic, pigs, plague, politics, pragmatism, Priscilla Wald, prison-industrial complex, prisons, public health, science, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, SFRA Review, social distancing, South Korea, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Super Mario, Terry Gilliam, the circle of life, the economy, The Testaments, transphobia, Twitter, UBI, vaccines, Watchmen, William Gibson
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
wishing I could make content this sublime pic.twitter.com/UYPNVI2m1C
— Slavoj “Claire’s Trophy Wife” Vibecheck (@zizekthottie) November 15, 2019
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
Venn diagram of people saying “the state is too technically incompetent to install a broadband connection” and people who say “the state should build and maintain a thermonuclear arsenal”
— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) November 15, 2019
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
— mugrimm 🦃 (@unabanned) November 14, 2019
* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.
* Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.
* Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.
* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.
"This wonderful economic system [in which] all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least."
— Iain M. Banks, describing capitalism in "The State of the Art"
— Michael Oman-Reagan (@OmanReagan) November 10, 2019
* If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.
* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.
* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.
* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.
* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.
Peter Pan has a song called “What Makes the Red Man Red?” where what makes them “red” is being super horny. It’s absolutely astounding that this has not been memory-holed. https://t.co/Rewnfj59JL
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 13, 2019
* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.
You've heard of "Garfield Minus Garfield."
You've seen "Garfield minus the last panel,"
You liked "Garfield but the last panel is him smoking,"
Now prepare your ass for…
"GARFIELD BUT THE MIDDLE PANEL IS CENSORED!" pic.twitter.com/RK6OsmGhhk— Connor 64 (@Superbconnor64) November 10, 2019
* Even nobodies have fans now.
* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.
* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.
* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 16, 2019 at 5:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, autotheory, Baby Boomers, banks, baseball, California, cancel culture, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, cheating, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, climate realism, comics, common core, deportation, digital feudalism, Disney, divorce, Donald Trump, electric cars, English majors, environmentalism, fascism, floods, games, Garfield, Google, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ice, immigration, impeachment, Italy, Jameson, John M. Ford, kids today, labor, literature, lunch debt, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, medical debt, Mexico, migrants, Milwaukee, minimum wage, Minnesota, mortgages, Naomi Klein, NASA, Netflix, New Jersey, Nickelodeon, Nobel Prize, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, OK Boomer, online advertising, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Oz, paradise, pardons, Peter Pan, plastic straws, podcasts, politics, prosecutors, race, racism, Republicans, Return to Oz, Rorschach, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, She-Hulk, slavery, sniff, social media, Sonic, Stephen Miler, streaming, surveillance, taxes, the Anthropocene, the archive, the courts, The Culture, the debt, the deficit, the law, the Midwest, the university in ruins, trans* issues, true crime, Uber, Ukraine, University of Wisconsin, vaginas, Venice, war crimes, war on education, Watchmen, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, Žižek
Four-Day-Weekend-Sized Links!
* CFP: Edited Collection on Ecohorror.
* Join English dept faculty, students, and alumni as we debate the question of our age: “Is GAME OF THRONES still good?”
* The five basic narrative conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. society, and New York vs. New Jersey.
* We are not as often reminded that homes and lives may have been saved if officials and policymakers had incorporated the recommendations of sound science in their outlook and preparedness plans. Which is why we need to add a third response to our evolving national post-catastrophic storm mourning ritual: Identifying and investigating the negligent officials who put the public in harm’s way by repeatedly ignoring crucial data and scientific evidence that can help prevent disaster.
* Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like. We’re Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming. How Washington Made Harvey Worse. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history. Texans to be hit with new insurance law making it harder to win contested claims, just one week after Harvey. Why Ordinary Citizens Are Acting as First Responders in Houston. From June. Stop snitchin’. The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that unfold for years. What the Harvey flooding would will look like where you live. How Humans Make Disasters Worse. Within and against capitalism.
Holy crap.
And the rain is still falling.#climatechange pic.twitter.com/gdbzK8RyaJ
— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) August 28, 2017
I spent a fair amount of time reporting on Sandy recovery and the one big takeaway: for most people the hardest part was *after* the storm
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2017
Happy September everyone pic.twitter.com/zCVcG4QWRT
— Moira Donegan (@MegaMoira) September 1, 2017
* Hundreds dead in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, while millions have been forced from their homes and 18,000 schools shut down across the region. More Than 1,000 Died in South Asia Floods This Summer.
* Time to Decriminalize Pot in Wisconsin.
* Distracted-Boyfriend-Meme Photographer Tells All.
* New Gilded Age Watch: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. Read the thread.
* I try not to be a Pollyanna about these things but I seriously thought we were done with Erik Prince forever.
* Avengers assemble: Mueller taps the IRS and the State of New York to find crimes he can charge Trump and associates with that Trump can’t just pardon. Fascinating stuff: Legal Challenge to Arpaio Pardon Begins. And this one, wow: Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey.
* Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.
* ICE Is Abusing the ACLU’s Clients Because They are Fighting Trump’s Deportation Machine. ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody. Decorated Marine vet may be deported, despite likely U.S. citizenship. GOP lawmaker aims to force vote to protect Dreamers. Everyone can do their part: UK Government’s attempt to deport Afghan asylum seeker fails after pilot refuses to take off.
Trump is tormenting Dreamers at this point by declining to tell them when/how/whether he’ll upend their lives https://t.co/RHj9LuuSYJ
— Elise Foley (@elisefoley) September 1, 2017
* Incredible video of a cop abusing a Utah nurse without justification.
* Never off-brand: Mnuchin Doesn’t Endorse Placing Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill.
* Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege.
* The Looming Decline of the Public Research University.
* AAUP: University of Tampa Should Immediately Reinstate Lecturer Fired Over Tweet. Online Harassment of Faculty Continues; Administrators Capitulate.
* The Strategy of Appeasement on Right-Wing Harassment. And from the archives: Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
I want to play a thought-game.
Imagine your great-great-great-grandfather kills a man, steals his farm, and holds his family hostage.
— death by boomerang (@therisingtithes) September 1, 2017
* If White supremacy has no place on an American college campus, then we cannot continue to provide safe harbor to its symbolism. If universities are going to be agents of change, then we must think about our role beyond promoting dialogue. Promoting dialogue is important. But if our primary response is to provide a space to have difficult conversations on sensitive topics, we are little more than pay-to-play community centers. In this moment, in this context, we need our universities to show ethical leadership, to promote the highest of human values through direct, affirming action. Ethical leadership means that Nazis and other White supremacists are not welcome on our college campuses because our universities recognize our right to dignity and personhood as more important than any poorly argued right to free speech.
* So you’ve just gotten tenure.
* Ideology at its purest: All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.
* Bucking FDA, Peter Thiel funds “patently unethical” herpes vaccine trial.
* Rare instance of the heirs doing what I said in Luminescent Threads they never do: destroying the author’s unfinished works. It’s a pleasing spectacle, but still, who wouldn’t be happy to know it was all an act and the work was still out there somewhere.
* It’s shocking, but somehow not at all shocking, that the pundit class — not to mention the FBI — has already convinced itself antifa is just as bad as these guys.
and i gotta say, even after all of this, watching every blowhard with a platform "denounce" anti-fascism still fucking sucks
— Thinkpiece Bot 🌹 (@thinkpiecebot) August 30, 2017
* The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of free speech.
* We’re Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR.
* A people’s history of the White Walkers.
* The enduring legacy of Zork.
* Your SF short of the week: Echo//Back.
* I bet this does really well: Drew Barrymore Will Produce a Female-Centric Horror Anthology Show for the CW.
* Facebook has been making people feel so bad lately they’ve even stopped using Facebook.
* Global warming everywhere but in my cold, cold heart.
Brand new "cool outbreak tendency" map shows that central + Northeast U.S. particularly exposed during September, West Coast not so much. pic.twitter.com/qSQkQFsTFT
— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) August 31, 2017
* Trump is toxically unpopular. He still might win in 2020.
* No amount of Trump White House speculation is going to keep me from feeling happy Sheriff Clarke is out.
* Tired: Subprime mortgages. Wired: Nonprime mortgages.
* Collocations of ‘cock’: What corpus linguistics tells us about porn writing.
* I like my coffee like I like my ceaseless inner monologue.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 2, 2017 at 9:18 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, actually existing academic bias, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, antifa, apocalypse, asylum, Bangladesh, Blackwater, Bob Mueller, capitalism, CFPs, Charlottesville, class struggle, climate change, coffee, collapse, conflict, CRISPR, democracy, denialism, deportation, depression, disability, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, Drew Barrymore, Ecohorror, ecology, Erik Prince, Facebook, fascism, FBI, FDA, flooding, Foxconn, free speech, futurity, Game of Thrones, general election 2020, gerrymandering, Gilded Age, Google, Harriet Tubman, Heather Heyer, horror, Houston, How the University Works, Huntington Library, Hurricane Harvey, ice, ideology at its purest, immigration, India, IRBs, IRS, Italy, James Comey, John Kelley, KKK, language, legalize it, mad science, marijuana, Marquette, memes, Milwaukee, Nazis, Nepal, New Jersey, New York, New York Times, nonprime mortgages, Octavia Butler, pardons, Peter Thiel, police brutality, police violence, politics, porn, Prince, public universities, purple, reparations, science fiction, science fiction studies, Sheriff Clarke, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, short film, slavery, Steven Mnuchin, teaching, tenure, Terry Prachett, the courts, the CW, the fire next time, the law, the university in ruins, there's only one story and we tell it over and over, time travel, University of Tampa, Utah, vaccines, war crimes, war on drugs, war on education, wellness, white privilege, white supremacy, White Walkers, Wisconsin, words, Zork
Monday Morning Links!
Gorblex-12’s log, day 5875. We have now replaced 95% of human society with cartoonish nonsense, and literally none of them have noticed.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 4, 2016
* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”
* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?
* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.
* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.
Entire #DAPL project has to be killed to avoid h2o contamination of Missouri and Mississippi rivers. pic.twitter.com/T3qo97ee6B
— Katherine Franke (@ProfKFranke) December 4, 2016
* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?
* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.
* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.
* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.
* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.
* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.
TFW you're aboard a 747 and the pilot has never flown any kind of plane before and he feels *great* about this.
— Fritz Bogott (@fritzbogott) December 4, 2016
It’s hard to imagine a way that Trump could signal “I’m very dangerous, do not give me any power” more than he has. https://t.co/6LCL4uhGo3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 2, 2016
when your day's going ok for five minutes then you remember all over that trump's about to be president pic.twitter.com/fE6hcIq6Ed
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 4, 2016
* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump — general.”
* Identity politics and the alt-right.
* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”
* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.
if you die in an Internet conspiracy theory, you die in real life
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 5, 2016
* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.
* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.
* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.
* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.
* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?
* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.
* Understanding survivorship bias.
* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.
* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?
* What does elephant taste like?
* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.
* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.
* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.
* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.
* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.
* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.
* Every villain is the hero of their own story.
* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 5, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 3%, academia, actually existing media bias, America, America is already great, animals, astronauts, Barack Obama, Black Bolt, black elephants, black swans, Book of Genesis, Brazil, Bush, CFPs, chess, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, China, Chinese science fiction, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, clones, cloning, cognitive bias, conspiracy theories, cynicism, Dan Harmon, data, Democrats, Department of Education, Donald Trump, eating meat, ecology, Electoral College, elephants, empathy, Ernest P. Worrell, European Union, every villain is the hero of their own story, Fidel Castro, Frederick Douglass, general election 2016, George Lucas, Great Man Theory, guns, hate crimes, health care, How the University Works, Humphrey Bogart, identity politics, immigration, Italy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ken Liu, literary studies, literature, Marquette, mass shootings, Michael Flynn, monopolies, music, my scholarly empire, my teaching philosophy, Nazis, Never Let Me Go, news, North Carolina, obituary, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, paranoia, pipelines, Pizzagate, podcasts, police, politics, Prince, protest, race, racism, Random Serling, Random Trek, religion, resistance, Rogue One, Saladin Ahmed, scams, science fiction, Seinfeld, SFRA, socialism, Southern Poverty Law Center, Springsteen, Star Wars, Steve Bannon, story circle, superpowers, Supreme Court, survivorship bias, Tawain, the alt-right, the humanities, the Internet, the Philippines, the presidency, The Three-Body Problem, Thomas Friedman, trans* issues, true crime, Uber, War on Christmas, war on drugs, Westward, when they go low we go high, Wisconsin
Friday Links Part Two Has Sent Layoff Notices to All Employees
* With state funding cut off due to the ongoing budget impasse, Chicago State University has announced all 900 employees, including the university president, are receiving layoff notices. This is stunning.
* On the other side of the country and the other side of pessimism: SFSU pledges to maintain funding for College of Ethnic Studies. “College faculty, however, said the financial boost promised Thursday won’t cover all of its costs.”
* The Secret History of Deadpool.
* R-Rated Superhero Stories Are Inherently Revisionist.
* Nobody ever said creeping fascism has to mean no laughs. Well, maybe one person said.
* Sci-Fi/Fantasy “Best Of” Lists: A Visualization.
* A Statistical Analysis Of Stephen Colbert’s First 100 Episodes Of ‘The Late Show.’
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2016 at 2:58 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Berlusconi, Chicago State University, Colbert, comics, conspiracy, Deadpool, Donald Trump, drivel, ethnic studies, fascism, film, frauds, hoaxes, Italy, JonBenet Ramsey, Katy Perry, Late Show, laughs, Marvel, Nicholas Meyer, science fiction, SFSU, Star Trek, superheroes, television, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, Wrath of Khan
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
1) There’s a disabled character visible2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 19, 2015 at 7:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, altac, Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Jackson, animal personhood, animal rights, Apple, ASLE, Atlanta, Auschwitz, austerity, autism, bankers, banks, Batman, BBC, Bechdel test, body cameras, books, capitalism, cash, Catholicism, CFPs, charter schools, Chevron, class struggle, college basketball, college sports, comics, Commissioner Gordon, Cooper Union, cultural preservation, David Chase, DC Comics, Department of Justice, desegregation, disability, Disney, dolphins, dystopia, ecology, English, entrepreneurs, environmentalism, Episode 7, Eric Harris, Expanded Universe, FBI, feminism, Fermi paradox, film, Game of Thrones, Gawker, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, graduate school, graduate student unions, Green Planets, Harry Potter, hate-watching, HBO, history, Hitler, homelessness, homeschooling, hope-watching, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ideology, Illinois, intelligence, Israel, Italy, Jesus, job creators, kids today, Los Angeles, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, misogyny, money, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, NCAA, negative interest rates, neoliberalism, New York, nightmares, North Carolina, nostalgia, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, nuns, Obi-Wan, Occupy Cal, oil, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, PhDs, photography, Poland, police, police corruption, police state, police violence, politics, pop culture, Princess Leia, Princeton, prison-industrial complex, privatization, privatize everything, privilege, race, racism, radio, religion, rendementsdenken, Return to Oz, RFK Jr., Robert Heinlein, run it like a sandwich, Sad Puppies, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Sea World, SETI, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, Sopranos, standardized testing, Star Wars, student debt, SUNY, Superman, Sweet Briar, television, terror, the Amazon, the contemporary, the courts, the Force, The Force Awakens, the Holocaust, The Joker, the law, The Left Hand of Darkness, the past is another country, the Pope, they, toilets, trailers, tuition, UC Davis, unions, University of Amsterdam, University of Oregon, Ursula K. Le Guin, war on drugs, war on education, white people, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words, worrying, Yoda
Wednesday Links! No Fooling.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 17: Brand/Branding/Rebrand.
* Jackson was paid $7.1 million in 2012, more than any other college president in the nation, and continues to be paid at that level. Just in case you don’t click through, the headline to that piece reads “Report: R.P.I. facing $1 billion in debts, liabilities.” So you know she’s worth every penny of that salary.
* But did you know the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gets less than half the public money per student that Madison Area Technical College gets and less than a third of what goes to Milwaukee Area Technical College?
* And speaking of UWM: After Extinction, at UWM April 30-May 2.
* Meanwhile, at Duke: Response to President Brodhead and Provost Kornbluth. The original incident is described here.
* Unsettling the University, at UCR April 2-3.
* But what also became clear was that she and I have radically different visions of what constitutes the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System and how it might be preserved and protected. Through the course of our conversation it became increasingly clear to me that in the current situation in Wisconsin we find ourselves in what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “a differend,” a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement.” Despite all parties–Regents, chancellors, faculty, staff, students, and alumni–being committed to the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System, it seems impossible to agree upon a rule of judgment or any set of criteria by which to adjudicate our different visions of what that well-being would look like.
* Dept. Names More Than 550 Colleges It Has Put Under Extra Financial Scrutiny.
* Salaita lawyers: ‘No doubt’ that UI, prof had agreement for employment.
* Over time, however, more and more departments failed to meet that standard; last year some 60 units were out of compliance, according to information gathered by the union. At Bridgewater State University, one of the worst offenders, for example, adjuncts taught more than 15 percent of courses in 16 large departments in 2014-15. Some 50 percent of classes in the English department were taught by part-time faculty, along with 40 percent in math and computer science. In philosophy, it was 63 percent of classes. Bridgewater officials did not respond to a request for comment.
* Google Maps turned your streets into Pac-Man yesterday, though I can’t imagine how anyone could have missed this news.
* The Entire History of ‘Doctor Who’ Illustrated as a Tapestry.
* 24 Rare Historical Photos That Will Leave You Speechless.
* California Snowpack Hits All-Time Low, 8 Percent Of Average.
* Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men.
* Chomsky: The Death of American Universities.
* There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
* The Trevor Noah train wreck.
* “Lutheran pastor resigns after being linked to threatening email.” That’s… something.
* Italian grandmother causes illness with cocoa expired in 1990.
* Why You Should Really Be Afraid of the Zombie Apocalypse.
* Gas Siphoning Coverup May Have Caused East Village Explosion. Jesus Christ.
* But there’s at least one unforeseen upside when all episodes are released at once: The writers don’t get the chance to self-correct in the middle of the season.
* The Long And Terrible History Of DC Comics Mistreating Batgirl.
* The Americans renewed for season four. Hooray!
* Study: Not Many Disco Songs About Daytime. But of course more work is required.
* Oh my God, Becky, look at this vigorous debate among scholars about the true origin of the straight male preference for a curvier backside.
* I can”t believe they’re bringing this thing back: The X-Files Could Have Ended With a West Wing Crossover.
* And Paul F. Tompkins picks his best episodes from a prolific podcasting career. My tragedy is I’ve heard all these. Perhaps you’ve heard he’s got a new one out today…
Written by gerrycanavan
April 1, 2015 at 8:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, After Extinction, apocalypse, arson, art, austerity, auteur theory, Batgirl, branding, butts, buzzwords, California, Center for 21st Century Studies, China, cocoa, conferences, crossovers, cyberbullying, Daily Show, DC Comics, Department of Education, Detroit, disco, Doctor Who, Duke, English departments, evolutionary psychology, expiration dates, fire, Google Maps, history, How the University Works, iPhones, Italy, John Pat Leary, Kimmy Schmidt, Michael Jackson, Milwaukee, mismanagement, music, natural gas, neoliberalism, Noam Chomsky, Pac-Man, Paul F. Tompkins, philosophy, photography, podcasts, Pokémon, police corruption, police state, prank calls, race, racism, religion, Russell Crowe, sex, Sir Mix-a-Lot, snow, Spontaneanation, Steven Salaita, tapestries, tenure, The Americans, the courts, the law, The Onion, train wrecks, Trevor Noah, true crime, UC Riverside, UIUC, UWM, West Wing, Women in Refrigerators, words, X-Files, zombies
Weekend Links!
* The commentators calling $3,000 salaries evil a century ago would have an aneurysm at the sight of coaching contracts today. Deadspin found last year that college football coaches were the highest-paid state employees in twenty-seven states. (Basketball coaches held that status in another thirteen.) The salary inflation is a direct product of increasing college sports revenue, thanks in large part to massive television deals. Because the colleges and their athletic departments are nonprofit, they need to spend the money they bring in, and since they can’t pay players, there are only so many places that money can go. Head coaches and other athletic staffers are direct beneficiaries.
* My Favorite Graph of 2014: The Rise and Rise of the Top 0.1 Percent.
* Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion.
* Elsewhere in the richest society ever in the history of the world.
* David Harvey and Leo Panitch: Beyond Impossible Reform and Improbable Revolution.
* North Korea, Sony, and stenography.
* The successful attempt to reduce fat in the diet of Americans and others around the world has been a global, uncontrolled experiment, which like all experiments may well have led to bad outcomes. What’s more, it has initiated a further set of uncontrolled global experiments that are continuing. Editorial in the British Medical Journal.
* A new study from Stanford looks at what happened in Italy, when a 1961 law doubled the number of students in STEM majors graduating from the country’s universities.
* …when people claim that the “free market” system outproduced Soviet Communism, what they are saying is that markets more effectively produced discipline. It was more successful at imposing patterns of human action and restriction conducive to military and economic production than a command economy was capable of imposing.
* “Why Is My Curriculum White?”
* If Tom Joad is alive after 1945, what is his future? Am I the only who sees him becoming a conservative like most of his fellow ex-sharecropper migrants and voting for Goldwater in 64? Grapes of Wrath fanfic at LGM.
* Neill Blomkamp’s Secret Alien Movie Looks So Good We’re Furious.
* Math Suggests Most Cancers Are Caused By “Bad Luck.”
* Florida: We’re The Worst. Arizona: Not So Fast.
* And then there’s Wisconsin. Pregnant woman challenging Wisconsin protective custody law.
At the clinic, a urine test showed Loertscher was pregnant, and also revealed her past drug use. Another test confirmed she had a severe thyroid condition.
Medical officials shared the findings with the county social services personnel, who subsequently went to court and had a guardian ad litem appointed for Loertscher’s 14-week-old fetus.
Social workers asked Loertscher repeatedly to release her medical records to county officials, and said that if she didn’t, she would be jailed until she had her baby, which would then be put up for adoption.
* Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?
* UNC-Chapel Hill Firing Professor Over Academic Fraud Scandal.
* Lines mankind was never meant to cross: LEGO Awarded 3D Printing Patent, May Allow Users to Print Own Bricks.
* The NYPD is Ironically Proving that Most of Their Police Work is Completely Unnecessary. The Benefits of Fewer NYPD Arrests.
* And Traci Reardon and J.W. Stillwater have a good old fashioned New Year’s Sentiment Off.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 3, 2015 at 8:53 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, Alabama, Alien, America, Arizona, austerity, bad luck, Barry Goldwater, Bill Gates, cancer, class struggle, Coach K, college basketball, college football, college sports, Comedy Bang Bang, David Harvey, democracy, diets, ethnic studies, film, Florida, food, free markets, Gates Foundation, hacking, Handmaid's Tale, health care, homelessness, How the University Works, Italy, just raise taxes, kids today, LEGO, low fat, Margaret Atwood, marriage equality, math, military-industrial complex, NCAA, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, New York, North Korea, NYPD, Okies, pedagogy, podcasts, police, police state, politics, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, revolution, riots, scandals, science fiction, sentiment off, Sony, STEM, syllabi, teaching, the courts, The Grapes of Wrath, The Interview, the law, the rich are different from you and me, the richest nation in the history of the world, the wisdom of markets, Tom Joad, Twitter, UNC, Wisconsin
Weekend Links!
* Marquette University invites applications for the Arnold L. Mitchem Dissertation Fellowship Program. Mitchem Fellowships seek to help increase the presence of currently underrepresented racial and cultural groups in the U.S. professoriate by supporting advanced doctoral candidates during completion of the dissertation. The fellowships provide one year of support for doctoral candidates who are well into the writing stage of their dissertation work, are U.S. citizens, and are currently enrolled in U.S. universities. In addition to library, office and clerical support privileges, Mitchem Fellows receive a $35,000 stipend plus fringe benefits, research and travel monies for the 2015-16 academic year. The teaching load is 1-0.
* UC-Riverside Call for Postdoctoral Fellow: “Alternative Futurisms.”
* NEH watch: Save the Overseas Seminars.
* When Harvard is one of the worst colleges in America: colleges ranked by social mobility index. Marquette doesn’t come out looking all that great by this standard either, though it does beat both Duke and Case Western by a good bit. (Greensboro, oddly, seems not to have been ranked at all.)
* If I can’t dance: U.C. Berkeley set to pull plug on anarchist’s archive.
* Student loan borrowers are not getting enough help avoiding default, according to a report released Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Meanwhile, the Nation reports: Should You Go to College?
* Against Carceral Feminism. I agree with @DavidKaib that “carceral liberalism” is the more important frame here; there’s no reason to single out feminism when so much of liberalism across the board is carceral in its orientation.
* Then the drought ate all the sportsball.
* Youth Are on the Frontlines in Ferguson, and They Refuse to Back Down.
* The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem.
* A people’s history of Gamergate. The Routine Harassment of Women in Male Dominated Spaces. Brianna Wu: It Happened to Me. ‘We Have a Problem and We’re Going to Fix This.’
* 4 Reasons Why A Travel Ban Won’t Solve The Ebola Crisis. Why travel bans will only make the Ebola epidemic worse. Why An Ebola Flight Ban Wouldn’t Work. And yet I would guess one is only a few days off.
* Peak Meritocracy: Andrew Cuomo thinks being the son of a former governor has been a “net negative” for his political career. If only we could somehow harness the radical cluelessness of these people and use it for productive ends.
* Two reports on outcomes for humanities majors could serve to reinforce two disparate beliefs about the field: one where they are seen as a viable path to a successful career, and another where they are seen as a track to a low income and few job prospects. The gender gap is vitally important here.
* Italy Just Pulled Out of Recession Because It Began Counting Drug and Prostitution Revenue.
* John Grisham, completely full of shit.
* Report: Airbnb Is Illegal, Rapacious, & Swallowing Lower Manhattan.
* Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa.
* Podcast interview with out-of-character Stephen Colbert, as he transitions towards taking over The Late Show.
* Another great Superman deconstruction from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Paradise is always just five years off: 3D printed mud houses will soon be an option in impoverished countries.
* John Siracusa reviews OS Yosemite.
* White House Seeks Advice On “Bootstrapping A Solar System Civilization.”
* And what has been seen cannot be unseen: Spider Burrows Into Dylan Thomas’s Appendix Scar & Up Into His Sternum.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 18, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Airbnb, alternative futurism, anarchism, Andrew Cuomo, Apple, archives, Arnold L. Mitchem Fellowships, Berkeley, California, carceral feminism, carceral liberalism, class mobility, class struggle, college rankings, CWRU, default, diversity, drought, drugs, Duke, Ebola, Emma Goldman, English majors, epidemic, Ferguson, futurity, Gamergate, Great Recession, Harvard, How the University Works, income inequality, indigenous futurism, Italy, John Grisham, kids today, Marquette, meritocracy, misogyny, Missouri, NASA, NEH, neoliberalism, nepotism, OS Yosemite, outer space, pandemic, podcasts, police brutality, police violence, politics, pornography, postdocs, prostitution, race, radical cluelessness, rape, rape culture, rent to own, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sexism, sexual harassment, sharing economy, social mobility index, solar system, space colonies, spiders, sports, St. Louis, Stephen Colbert, student debt, Superman, supervillains, the courts, the humanities, the law, travel bans, UC Riverside, UNCG, water
Late Night Sunday B-B-B-Bonus Links! May Cause Depression!
* Alternet, against charter schools: Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed.
* Cops in Baton Rouge arresting people under a sodomy law overturned a decade ago. The police officers who are participating in this ought to be thrown in jail.
* Could a Private University Have Made a Difference in Detroit? It’s an interesting thesis but requires a bit more data than just a spitball.
* Reuters’ Climate Coverage Slashed Under “Skeptic” Editor. White House warned on imminent Arctic ice death spiral. Does Lake Michigan’s record low mark beginning of new era for Great Lakes?
* New Jersey Nightmare: A Mind-Boggling New Proposal Could Make The Next Superstorm Even More Deadly And Destructive. This is honestly insane:
Now, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, as coastal communities are still in the rebuilding process, Governor Chris Christie has a bill on his desk, S2680, that would give the green light to development on piers — all of which are now classified as high-hazard V-zone areas, according to FEMA’s new post-Sandy flood insurance maps.
* That’s one lesson delivered by San Jose State, though it’s unclear whether the school knows it. Of the $150 the students paid for each online course, the university kept only $40, with the rest going to Udacity.
* Competitive no-pay fellowship at Bard Graduate Center. (Don’t) apply today!
* But it’s not all bad news! Fast food workers will strike in seven cities tomorrow, including Milwaukee.
* An end to Limbaugh and Hannity? Where’s the anti-Kickstarter for this?
* After having bananas thrown at her during a political rally, Cécile Kyenge, Italy’s first black minister, told reporters that she would continue doing her job and that protesters should stop “wasting food.” Bananas. (Marc) Marone.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 28, 2013 at 10:45 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, America, Baton Rouge, charter schools, class struggle, climate change, denialism, Detroit, fast food, gay rights, Great Lakes, How the University Works, Hurricane Sandy, ice sheet collapse, internships, Italy, labor, Lake Michigan, Milwaukee, MOOCs, New Jersey, politics, race, Rush Limbaugh, San Jose State, Sean Hannity, strikes, talk radio, the Arctic, the courts, the law, Udacity, war on education, Wisconsin, xkcd
A Few for Sunday
Some of these I first saw at the triumphant return of zunguzungu’s Sunday Reading. You may have also seen his piece “The Grass Is Closed” on the arbitrariness of power this weekend, already linked everywhere.
* Chapel Hill anarchists occupy downtown building. Occupy Minnesota protestors occupy foreclosed home.
* UC groups endorse November 15 strike.
* An interview with Susie Cagle.
* The moral clarity of empire:
It’s over 800 billion dollars that we have expended [in Iraq]. I believe that Iraq should pay us back for the money that we spent, and I believe that Iraq should pay the families that lost a loved one several million dollars per life, I think at minimum.
* The Culturally Biased SAT: Hip-Hop Edition.
* From last week, but now more than ever: “Italy is now the biggest story in the world.”
* Except for this one: When do we hit the point of no return for climate change?
And, as the IEA found, we’re about five years away from building enough carbon-spewing infrastructure to lock us in and make it extremely difficult — maybe impossible — to avoid 450 ppm. The point of no return comes around 2017.
* Fat primates rejoice! Obese Monkeys Lose Weight on Drug that Attacks Blood Supply of Fat Cells.
* And I saw this the other day, but forgot to post it: Sam Harris on self-defense.
This is the core principle of self-defense: Do whatever you can to avoid a physical confrontation, but the moment avoidance fails, attack explosively for the purposes of escape—not to mete out justice, or to teach a bully a lesson, or to apprehend a criminal. Your goal is to get away with minimum trauma (to you), while harming your attacker in any way that seems necessary to ensure your escape.
Stay safe out there.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 13, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, California, climate change, Don't mention the war, ecology, empire, fatopia, foreclosure, hip-hop, How the University Works, Iraq, Italy, monkeys, Occupy Chapel Hill, Occupy Minnesota, Occupy Oakland, politics, power, protest, race, resistance, SATs, self-defense, strikes, student movements, the economy, the Euro, tipping points, violence, zunguzungu
‘Against pasta’
‘Against pasta’: a provocative excerpt from the Futurist writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Above all we believe necessary:
a) The abolition of pastasciutta, an absurd Italian gastronomic religion.
It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans, but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.
A highly intelligent Neapolitan Professor, Signorelli, writes: ‘In contrast to bread and rice, pasta is a food which is swallowed, not masticated. Such starchy food should mainly be digested in the mouth by the saliva but in this case the task of transformation is carried out by the pancreas and the liver. This leads to an interrupted equilibrium in these organs. From such disturbances derive lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism.’
Stick Figures in Peril
Investigating the origins of the bizarre warning sign below (originally found at Boing Boing) leads to the world’s coolest Flickr group, Stick Figures in Peril.
Here’s my entry, from our honeymoon:
A related group, Warning Signs, is something I’ve linked to before, but it too is awesome.
Aficionados should refer to “Signs of Life” in their copies of Backwards City #2 for more sign-related hijinx. I could put it online, but I feel weird about it; I don’t live there anymore.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 10, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with BCR, existential threat, Flickr, Italy, stick figures in peril, warning signs
Congratulations, Organized Crime!
Congratulations, organized crime! You are now the #1 economic sector in Italy.
The annual report was released by the Confesercenti, an association of small businesses. It says that through various activities — extortion, usury, contraband, robberies, gambling and Internet piracy — organized crime accounts for 7 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product.
“From the weaving factories, to tourism to business and personal services, from farming to public contracts to real estate and finance, the criminal presence is consolidated in every economic activity,” the 86-page report said.