Posts Tagged ‘Joe Biden’
Wednesday Night Links!
* Journal Sentinel columnist James Causey was a third-grader at Samuel Clemens Elementary School. The problems of the city would play out with his classmates.
* Teen’s brothers witnessed his ‘violent, senseless’ death in Texas police shooting, family says.
* Flint puts 8,000 people on notice for tax liens for unpaid water bills.
* Ah, the holy mystery of free speech, with its inscrutable twists and turns.
* Today in academic controversies. I’m hard-pressed to think of a recent issue where my Facebook feed divided so evenly for and against.
* NASA, here to help: Science Fiction Space Technology Terms.
* Contingent No More: An Academic Manifesto.
*Democrats Can Retake the House in 2018 Without Converting a Single Trump Voter. Of course, they can lose that way, too… And speaking of losing. The coming clown show. I would have thought Gillibrand would be an instant frontrunner. Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer. More on that last link here.
* A noncriminal mother of four was deported. Now in Mexico, she fears for her safety.
* Well, this seems fine: Donald Trump on whether he could start war with North Korea: ‘I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.’ How Trump Could Get Fired.
* The Whole World Is Now a Message Board.
* Why does a newspaper employ opinion columnists at all?
* Thor-centric podcast from Miles while Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is on hiatus.
* A Rare Journey Into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a Super-Bunker That Can Survive Anything.
* Finally someone said it: Let’s end compulsory schooling and stop forcing education ‘down everybody’s throat.’
* How your selfie could affect your life insurance.
* Shock finding: Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* Even more shocking! Men Are Less Moral after Exposure to Images of Sexy Women, Research Finds.
* Teach the controversy: Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Seems harsh.
* Mike Pence — IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!
Thursday Links!
* Deadline extended: Special Issue: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Narrative, Characters, Media, and Event.
* CFP: Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction.
* After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.
* The banality of evil in Baltimore.
* “Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles.” Every revelation in this story is stunning. Trump leans on ‘fake news’ line to combat reports of West Wing dysfunction. Donald Trump says all negative polls about him are fake news. Check out this fake news about voter fraud. Yemen Withdraws Permission for U.S. Antiterror Ground Missions. Milwaukee passes resolution opposing Trump travel ban. White House rattled by McCarthy’s spoof of Spicer. White House Denies Report That Bannon Had to Be Reminded He Wasn’t President Amidst Travel-Ban Chaos. Probably best to put this in writing ahead of time. The simple fact is that Trump has never had real friends in the sense you or I think of the term. Never Believe the Republicans’ B.S. Ever Again. How Each Senator Voted on Trump’s Cabinet and Administration Nominees. Five Theses on Trump. To Stephen Miller, Duke University Class of 2007.
* Elsewhere in Duke News! Bernie and the Duke Grad Student Unionization Movement.
* Apparently those who support income redistribution through aggressive top marginal taxation are still willing to accept union busting and poor parent shaming before considering direct infusions of cash. No matter how lofty their rhetoric, there is an intuitive desire within mainstream American liberalism to believe that the trouble in education is not so obvious as poor people not having enough money to do well—but rather, that poor parents are to blame for not being enough like middle class ones. DeVos Was Inevitable. Democrats reject her, but they helped pave the road to education nominee DeVos.
* The 10 US colleges that stand to lose the most from Trump’s immigration ban. American Universities Must Take a Stand.
* The Nervous Civil Servant’s Guide to Defying an Illegal Order.
* Meet Antifa, the Most Reasonable People in America.
* The Wisdom of Science Fiction in the Age of Trump.
* “All the pieces of the neo-Nazi solution to climate change already exist.”
* Dakota Access Pipeline Is Back On, Skipping Environmental Review.
* The New Yorker celebrates the great Mo Willems.
* Much has been written about the toxicity of internet “call out” culture over the past five years. But less has been said about the prevalence of efforts to fire people, one of that culture’s creepiest and most authoritarian features.
* Doctor Strange Has Now Made More Money At Box Office Than Man Of Steel. DC is really bad at this.
* Liberalism looks and feels like a waiting period that may never end. A primary purpose of this tactic is to allow policymakers and elites to announce their intention to do something about a problem while hoping the problem goes away on its own as public attention dies down or as they move on with their careers.
* We Asked Sci-Fi Writers About The Future Of Climate Change.
* Within a decade, according to a 99-page white paper released today, Uber will have a network—to be called “Elevate”—of on-demand, fully electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. Instead of slogging down the 101, you and a few other flyers will get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in about 15 minutes—for the price of private ride on the ground with UberX. Theoretically.
* The Singularity has already happened.
* 150 Years to Alpha Centauri. But it’s no place to raise your kids.
* Make stamp-collecting great again.
* Teaching is not longer a middle class job. College professor isn’t either, pretty much anywhere but a town like Milwaukee.
* The Arc of History Is Long But Republicans Are Moving To Scrap Rules That Limit Overdraft Fees.
* A clever study showing how protests impact election outcomes, using rain.
* A general strike could transform American politics. But we’re nowhere near being able to call one.
* Capitalism is struggling to reproduce the misery and terror required for worker compliance.
* Even baseball hates baseball.
* Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy.
* I don’t think there’s been a better postmortem on the election, and what it means for the coming decades, than this by Mike Davis: The Great God Trump and the White Working Class.
In addition, as Brookings researchers have recently shown, since 2000 a paradoxical core-periphery dynamic has emerged within the political system. Republicans have increased their national electoral clout yet have steadily lost strength in the economic-powerhouse metropolitan counties. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output — just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.”
* Trump believes his base desires cruelty above all else. Here is today’s case study.
* “Uncle Biden” has done a lot to mask the fact that the real Joe Biden fought desegregation, wrote the 1994 crime bill, and appeared to side with Clarence Thomas over Anita Hill during Thomas’s confirmation hearings. The hyper-competent “Texts From Hillary” made it more difficult for the real Clinton to rebut charges of shadiness and corruption, and also served to mask over the fact that she had never won a closely fought election. Liberal Fan Fiction.
* When Details in a Story Can Put People at Risk.
* He speaks for us all: “Man found stuck in waist-deep mud has no idea how he got there, officials say.”
* The best news anybody’s gotten since 1997.
* What it’s like to lose your short-term memory.
* Ubiquitous surveillance watch.
* A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months. Oh, well, that explains everything, doesn’t it.
* Rick and Morty and Bojack and existentialism.
* Yes Weekly interviews the great Fred Chappell.
* What a horrible night to have a curse.
* And this is a really good start, but I’m sure we can find a way to do worse.
Thursday Night Links!
* My brilliant colleague Ainehi Edoro was chosen as one of the most 100 influential Africans.
* The Octavia Project. And elsewhere in the VanderMeers’ vast empire…
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler at ALA 2017.
* More fighting over tenure and post-tenure review at Wisconsin.
* Teaching the controversy: Listening While Feminist: In Defense of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
* We’re gonna need a better gerrymander: If Democrats want to solve the problem of legislative maps that are biased against them they need to pursue a strategy that is more likely to produce maps that compensate for geography.
* “It is striking to see how committed they are to allowing this train wreck to occur,” he said. “And more surprisingly, how little careful attention has been given (at the top at least) to just how vulnerable—given Bush v. Gore—the current (system for counting votes in the) electoral college is.” But wait! There’s more! Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump.
* Trump vs. conflicts of interest: Maybe the Answer Is That He Can’t Divest.
* How Many Generals Is Too Many? I think the number is worrying, but agree with Kevin that the central issue is that he has chosen an extremely popular, recently retired general for DoD. Civilian control of the military is an important value, or it used to be.
* This is bad: Trump Launches Tweet Attack on Carrier Steel Union Boss for Fact-Checking Him. (UPDATE: This is what happens when Donald Trump attacks a private citizen on Twitter.) This is bad: Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr. CEO Tapped as Labor Secretary. This is bad: Trump Considers FDA Chief Who Says People Should Use Medicines “At Their Own Risk.” This is bad: Trump to be part-time president, keep lucrative job with Celebrity Apprentice. This is bad: Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable?
* This one though I do approve of: Chris Christie has the lowest approval rating one pollster has ever found for a state governor.
* There are no second acts in American life, they said.
* Point/Counterpoint: How Sci-Fi and Fantasy Can Save the World. What Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump? Nothing.
* That’ll solve it! Or, if you prefer, only the super-rich can save us now.
* Worst Game of Thrones spinoff ever.
* …and the portions are too small!
* The Swing-O-Matic: Change the settings to see how shifts in party preference and turnout by different demographic groups would affect the 2016 presidential election.
* We need to admit that right-wing harrassment and conspiracy theories are baked into the business model of social media at this point. And with right-wing political hegemony for the foreseeable future, it will only get worse, because the range of “acceptable opinion” will shift even further to the right. Asking nicely and filling out all the proper paperwork will not change this underlying material reality.
* The tricky part is that many expect the expert agency’s views to change shortly after January 20th, when Trump’s O.C.R. is installed. (Dear Colleagues: Never mind, we take it back.) Come January, advocates of transgender rights, who have enthusiastically supported judicial deference to O.C.R., will have reason for an extreme pivot, given that the new O.C.R. is unlikely to view “sex” as an “internal sense of gender.” It is awkward now for Grimm’s lawyers to argue zealously for the notion that the agency knows best, when only weeks from now, and in coming years, that doctrine is more likely to harm than to help transgender students.
* Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines, our photojournalist documented 57 homicide victims over 35 days. And in case you’ve forgotten.
* Located in the city’s Girangaon (Village of the Mills) neighborhood, Trump Tower Mumbai illustrates every pathology of the neoliberal turn away from comprehensive city planning.
* What happens if someone dies on Mars?
* The arc of history is long, but New Jersey Will No Longer Seek to Collect Loans from Families of Dead Students.
* Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you.
* Harvard will not be a sanctuary campus. It’s for your own good, kids!
* Disney ought to pay this former employee for the movie rights to this AMA.
* Today in news from the mysteriiiiiiiious Orient: Japan’s sex problem is so bad that people are quitting dating and marrying their friends.
* Trump propaganda game getting real.
* Chimpanzees See Butts Like We See Faces.
* The ultimate fear isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes. From The New Yorker‘s “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”
* If Black Mirror Had a Showroom.
* This might be the worst science journalism piece I’ve seen in years.
* Scientists Think the Speed of Light Has Slowed, and They’re Trying to Prove It.
* Paradox Girl Is One of the Best Time Travel Series We’ve Read All Year. I bought these tonight on this recommendation and I can confirm it’s super fun.
* And this makes me feel worse about both extinction-level events and car crashes.
All the Weekend Links (100%)
* Jaimee has one of her phobia poems up at Drunken Boat’s “funny” issue: “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* CFPs: ICFA 36: The Scientific Imagination. Joss Whedon’s Comics. Assemble! The Making and Re-Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction.
* MLA Subcon is trying to raise some money for its operations at indiegogo.
* New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change. Speaking for all of Wisconsin: this does not bode well.
* I have to say I really like what Freddie says about privilege and merit here.
Instead, the point should be to ask people to see the ways in which all of our lives are conditioned by vast forces we cannot control, that these forces in general work to the benefit and hindrance of certain broad groups of people in a way that conflicts with our conceptions of justice, and that we can build a more just, more equitable world if we acknowledge that no one’s life is the product only of their work ethic and intelligence.
The long-term project of those who decry the role of unearned advantage in human society should not be to try and parse who is most and least privileged. The project should be to deny the salience of “merit” as a moral arbiter of material security and comfort. The very notion of just deserts– the notion that some people have legitimate accomplishments that we must celebrate because they represent “merit,” whatever that is, distinct from their privileges– is what has to die. There is no space where privilege ends and legitimate accomplishment begins. There is, instead, a world of such multivariate complexity that we can never know whose accomplishments are earned and whose aren’t. Instead, we should recognize the folly of tying material security and comfort to our flawed perceptions of other people’s value, and instead institute an economic system based on the absolute right of all people to food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education.
* Kazuo Ishiguro to publish first novel since Never Let Me Go. I am on board. More links below the photo!
* And on the other side of the spectrum: Margaret Atwood’s new work will remain unseen for a century.
* Shock, horror: Most college classes cost more online than on campus.
* The Classroom of the Future.
* Q. How did you make the transition from professor to president? A. Maybe some of our problems in education today stem from the fact that someone like me is considered an unconventional choice. Maybe academic institutions should be run by academics, the way they used to be.
* Wisconsin inches closer to dubious obesity milestone.
* On Christopher Tolkien protecting The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales from New Line. I hadn’t realized that Peter Jackson was prohibited from making reference to those works in his films; that’s fascinating…
* If Pearson were trying to strike back against a researcher who told legislators that they were paying $100 million a year for tests that mostly measure test-taking ability, it would look an awful lot like what is happening to Walter Stroup.
* The New York Times pans a novel for being insufficiently pro-conquistador. The Economist wrings its hands over whether maybe we’re not being fair to slaveowners.
* The Justice Department will investigate the entire Ferguson police force. How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. Twitter Headquarters Has Painted #Ferguson On Its Office Wall.
* Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received “many” specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report.
* Feisal G. Mohamed and Cary Nelson debate the Salaita firing. Salaita and the Accreditors.
* This Is What It’s Like To Sit Through An Anti-Union Meeting At Work.
* Gaming doesn’t have a problem; capitalism has a problem. Rather than seeing them simply as immoral assholes or deluded consumerists, we should take gaming’s advanced wing of hateful trolls seriously as representatives of the reactionary shock troops that will have to be defeated in order to build a more egalitarian society in the games industry or anywhere else.
* Five myths about California’s drought. The news is not good, friends.
* Here’s Who Really Controls California’s Water.
* Staff at an Arizona gun range reportedly told investigators that the release forms signed by the family of a 9-year-old girl who accidentally killed her instructor with an Uzi last week were unavailable because they had been “blown away by the wind.” I’ve head less convincing excuses, I guess.
* Biden’s warning to ISIS militants: ‘We will follow them to the gates of hell.’ 200 U.S. troops headed to Ukraine for ‘peace-keeping exercise’ as Obama condemns Russian aggression.
* Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead.
* Today in the rule of law: Missouri May Have Lied Under Oath About What Drugs It Used To Kill People And When.
* But don’t worry: The system works. Antonin Scalia’s Favorite Murderer Is Innocent.
* Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones.
* L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA.
* NYPD Pays $33K to Settle Suit After Mistaking Jolly Ranchers for Meth.
* Police telling victims to solve crimes by themselves.
* In New York, a human rights lawyer has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD after she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk while waiting for her husband and kids to use the bathroom at a Times Square restaurant.
* The call to demilitarize police overlooks the longstanding link between policing and empire.
* The Worst Airbnb in the Universe: 22 Beds in One Apartment. Imagine this being your home. Imagine this being your neighbor.
* The fight for the Senate is getting weird y’all.
* For Parents Of Young Black Men With Autism, Extra Fear About Police.
* A horrifying new study says one in five women have been raped.
* “After the football season ended.”
* Vox says your revolution is over, the bums lost.
* Our congresswoman was arrested today at a fast food workers’ strike.
* For the first time ever, neuroscientists have demonstrated the viability of direct — and completely non-invasive — brain-to-brain communication in humans. Remarkably, the experiment allowed subjects to exchange mentally-conjured words despite being 5,000 miles apart.
* Science fiction classics in the news: Syfy Greenlights Six-Hour Miniseries Childhood’s End.
* BP May Be Fined Up to $18 Billion for Spill in Gulf. Almost 18 days revenue, less than a year’s profit…
* Workers At Coal Waste Landfill Told That Coal Ash Is ‘Safe Enough To Eat,’ Lawsuit Says.
* Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny. Joan Rivers and today’s comediennes.
* Downloaded Games Have A Larger Carbon Footprint Than Blu-Ray Discs. There’s some really questionable assumptions in here, but the argument that theres’s some point where this is true is an important one.
* A Child Helps Your Career, If You’re a Man.
Ms. Budig found that on average, men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women’s decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people’s labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.
* Here’s why CVS stopped selling cigarettes.
* Here’s why Twitter shouldn’t algorithmize users’ feeds.
* This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe.
* Bold new directions: Shazam will differ from other DC movies by being fun.
* Every popular text eventually gets an “it was all just a hallucination” rewrite. Today it’s Harry Potter’s turn.
* New Girl at School Had to Wear “Shame Suit” After Dress Code Violation.
* Werner Herzog will guest star on Parks And Recreation.
* Nothing good will happen anymore: Actually, HBO didn’t commission more Flight Of The Conchords.
* Here’s something I should probably waste all my money on.
* New Miracleman Comics Stories (Including One by Grant Morrison) Coming Soon.
* This Map Shows How Hunting Wiped Out Whales In Less Than A Century.
* And FiveThirtyEight is there with a hot take: If Tony Survived The ‘Sopranos’ Finale, He’s Probably Alive Today.
Weekend Links!
* Call for applications: 2014—15 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* So Paul Di Filippo really liked Green Planets.
* Explaining Tuition Hikes at the University of Michigan. Construction Not Instruction: Bonds and Buildings at the Public University. 5 Links Between Higher Education and the Prison Industry.
* On trigger warnings and who gets to count.
* Journey to the Centre of Google Earth.
* The Lion King: A short history of Disney-fascism.
But the emotional trauma that Disney tries its damnedest to induce in young children is only the spadework for the ugly principles it feels it must implant in each new generation. Although the film takes place in an imaginary jungle, THE LION KING really expounds the Law of the Schoolyard: only the strong and the beautiful triumph, and the powerless survive only by serving the strong. As Disney sees it, children must not only acknowledge the supremacy of those born privileged and violent, the children must love them. The young must gaze in hushed veneration at the princely predators who stand ready to harvest the labor and flesh of their subjects. They must learn to giggle at the hopeless scampering of weak and stubby creatures as they dodge the jaws of their overlords. They must accept that true friendship means flattering those who would otherwise feast on their entrails.
* Climate denialism and the Outer Banks. These time-lapse maps show how much hotter the USA will be when you’re old.
* Was the U.S. Robbed Against Portugal? It Depends on What Time Means.
* You got your class-based analysis in my intersectionality NO you got your intersectionality in my class-based analysis
* Another exciting week of Good SCOTUS, Bad SCOTUS.
* Kunkel reviews Piketty. The circle is complete.
* Title Now Everybody Sue Everybody: expulsion and sexual assault at IHE.
* Democrats are the worst, Daily Show edition.
* Hillary Clinton 2016 and the Folly of the Left-Flank Push.
* If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here and lay their hands on me to enslave me. Did you think to terrify me by presenting the alternative to give my money to you, or give my body to Slavery? Then let me say to you, that I meet the proposition with unutterable scorn and contempt.
* The Star Wars museum is coming to Chicago.
* People aren’t worried about robots, they’re worried about who owns the robots.
* A New Bike Lane That Could Save Lives and Make Cycling More Popular.
* “You express amazement at my statement that ‘civilized’ men try to justify their looting, butchering and plundering by claiming that these things are done in the interests of art, progress and culture. That this simple statement of fact should cause surprise, amazes me in return.”
* What could go wrong? Missouri School Districts Start Training Teachers To Carry Concealed Weapons In Classroom.
* Former College Basketball Player Sues NCAA Over Concussions.
* ‘Think They Got Killed?’ 1964, L.B.J. and Three Civil Rights Icons.
* When Rambo was going to fight werewolves.
* Here comes Pacific Rim 2. Plus a cartoon! But we still live in a vale of tears.
* The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.
* Free at last: Oakland to decriminalize pinball.
* Kill Bill as an 8-bit video game.
Thursday Night Links
* Predictably outrageous: University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
* David Golumbia writes up UWM’s The Dark Side of the Digital conference.
* Pakistan Court Decision Finds US Drone Strikes Are ‘War Crimes,’ Which Are ‘Absolutely Illegal.’
* 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words.
* Issue 4.1 of Excursions is devoted to “Science/Fiction” (including a much-needed denunciation of the Jedi).
* Millennials aren’t lazy; they’re f*cked.
* The Ghetto Is Public Policy.
* Surprising literally dozens, Snapchat photos can be retried after all.
* ABC has apparently picked up Agent of SHIELD.
* And just when you thought the culture had scraped the bottom of the barrel: 24 is coming back.
