Posts Tagged ‘law’
*More* Weekend Links? Can It Be?
* Jaimee’s amazing first book has a preorder page at Amazon. Book launches in October! See her webpage for some of her online poems in the meantime!
* The entire natural world is celebrating this event. Dolphins are riding whales off the coast of Hawaii.
* The latest at Marquette’s Haggerty Museum of Art yet.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 21 / Wednesday Night Fights: “Equity” vs. “equality.” Two words enter! One word leaves!
* Are universities in wealthy nations exploiting researchers from developing countries, treating them mainly as data gatherers instead of respected colleagues? And, wielding all the money and the clout, do Western academics fail to engage with their counterparts in emerging nations as true partners in the research collaborations?
* In the intensifying debate over whether to reduce federal government regulations on universities and colleges, one number has been at the forefront: $150 million. That’s what Vanderbilt University says a study found it spends each year complying with government red tape: 11 percent of the university’s entire budget.
* A University Without Shared Governance is Not a University.
* U. of Wisconsin Professor’s Tweets Draw Criticism From Her Own Colleagues. Another social media trainwreck for academia.
* From Open Humanities Press: Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies.
* Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* ‘Streets of Old Milwaukee’ to close for reimagining, sensory upgrade.
* Confessions of an Executioner.
* The Judy Greer effect: Why a ridiculously talented actress gets stuck with so many thankless roles.
* Watching ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ In The Era Of Mass Incarceration.
* One man’s journey from Sesame Street to the heart of truther collage art.
* Age at First Marriage and Divorce Risk.
* I know it usually seems like we’re living in the darkest timeline, but we need to remember every day that somehow we got spared The Amazing Spider-Man 3.
* Episode five of Telltale’s Game of Thrones arrives next week.
* Probably not a good sign — though I think I’m most upset that they made the robot so apologetic.
* xkcd reads sports rulebooks like I read sports rulebooks.
* Over a decade ago, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow laid the foundations for today’s effects-driven blockbusters. Why haven’t its creators made a film since?
* And warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable, say US scientists. Have a good weekend, everyone!
Four More
* So the claim is that the top-notch sociology students of America are unfamiliar with (and probably not of) the urban poor and they will learn empathy and be introduced to poor people through a made-up TV program. That seems a little broken.
* Some modest proposals for Arizona lawmakers.
* At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.
* And a brief history of female away team members: Redskirts.
This Was Monday
* All these worlds are yours, except Kepler 10-b. Attempt no landings there.
* Autonomous organization: In urban N.J. areas, few residents disrespect unwritten rule of reserving snow-cleared parking spots.
* Matt Taibbi gets introspective.
For my part, as a member of the political media, and a vitriol-spewing one at that, the Tucson shooting immediately made me ask myself the question: do I personally do anything to add to this obvious problem of a hypercharged, rhetorically overheated political atmosphere? And the unfortunate answer I came up with was, maybe. I’ve always told myself that what I do is different from what someone like Rush does, because I don’t target classes of people and try not to exempt anyone (even myself) from criticism, or favor either party.
I’ve also counted on the belief that anyone who’s willing to devote the mental energy to even follow whatever wild rhetoric I’m using is probably also smart enough to tell the difference between reality and hyperbole. I also hope that anyone reading my articles will get the underlying message that I’m pretty sure — I hope I’m sure, anyway — I’m conveying at all times, i.e. that violence is irresponsible, that we should use our brains instead of baseball bats to solve problems, etc.
But while I tell myself all these things, I also know that I would never talk to my wife or my mother the way I talk to Lloyd Blankfein. Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner.
To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.
* The University of California Student Association responds to news of an additional half-billion dollars in cuts to education in California.
* Short film of the night: “Three Minutes.”
* Infographic of the night: Dexter’s victims.
Select Links While I’m Away (Part 1)
* The team behind Logicomix explains structuralism.
* It really does look like health care will pass. The CBO score is good. The left is (mostly) happy again. The votes are (mostly) there. Insurance companies keep turning out to be totally terrible. Rahm is stretching for his totally undeserved victory lap. Alterman says Kucinich gets a victory lap too. Steve Benen thinks we all get one. Hooray!
* Obama Economic Team Outlook Presumes No Job Growth For All of 2010. Yes, we … oh, forget it.
* 1st Lt. Dan Choi arrested after chaining himself to the White House fence in DADT protest.
* Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness.
* A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Wow. More here.
* More March Madness: America’s Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tournament.
* NC-Sen: Richard “Dick” Burr still leads his opponents but remains under 50%. This is winnable.
* The Hobbit begins filming in June.
* Viacom is suing Google for hosting videos it uploaded to Google. (via and via) Related: When Wells Fargo sued itself.
* Please be advised Avatar is the work of the devil.
* Okay, fine, one more. That’s what Bea said.
Saturday!
* io9’s 20 best science fiction books of the 2000s. I say any list missing The Years of Rice and Salt, Accelerando, *and* Cloud Atlas is pretty deeply suspect.
* A federal judge has halted implementation of the ban on funding for ACORN on the grounds that the law is a bill of attainder.
* “Those scores on the prestigious test are in the same range as would be expected from children who never attended school and simply guessed at the answers,” said Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager of Detroit Public Schools, during a press conference Tuesday.
* David Rakoff’s oral history of the Gore presidency. A nice idea whose execution is marred by some badly forced jokes and a total inability to write like Jon Stewart, Josh Marshall, or anybody else.
* And the Morning News has your photos of abandoned shopping malls.
