Posts Tagged ‘miracles’
Weekend Links!
* Star Trek and Lovecraft. Via r/daystrominstitute.
* The worst threat to higher education is its administration.
* Judge Rules Against Marquette Professor Over Public Rebuke of TA.
* Police Officer Who Fatally Shot 15-Year-Old Texas Boy Is Charged With Murder.
* Delta boots family off red-eye flight, threatens kids with “foster care.”
* Thank your parents: GOP Health Bill Jeopardizes Out-of-Pocket Caps in Employer Plans. The New Study That Shows Trumpcare’s Damage. Senate won’t vote on House-passed healthcare bill.That makes it more likely they’ll be able to pass something, unfortunately. Every Republican who voted for this abomination must be held accountable. Mail me to the GOP. It just gets worse every day.
* It just gets worse, every day.
* A Principal Is Accused of Being a Communist, Rattling a Brooklyn School.
* Not even the dead will be safe if our enemy is victorious: You could soon be able to relive Hillary Clinton’s defeat every week on TV.
* Why would you bother doing Inhumans if you can’t do Medusa’s hair?
* HBO is developing 4 different Game Of Thrones spin-offs.
* The executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Seth Baum, and his colleagues describe what they call a double catastrophe scenario whereby an initial catastrophe, such as a major war between states that causes societal collapse, disrupts the regular injection of aerosols into the stratosphere, thereby causing a second catastrophe involving the climate. The latter event could induce widespread famines, social unrest, and economic meltdowns — or, at the extreme, it could precipitate a runaway greenhouse effect that turns Earth into an uninhabitable hellish cauldron like our planetary neighbor Venus. The result would be human extinction. In a phrase, once a stratospheric geoengineering program has been established by anyone, anywhere, it must not be interrupted for any reason, especially not abruptly. But one or more interruptions cannot be ruled out, hence the existential danger.
* The cold equations: Disney started over on Star Wars: Episode IX after Carrie Fisher’s death.
* It didn’t work. There’s only four types of people, and three of them are bad. True story. Don’t be nervous, they said. The three pillars of Canavanism. Another caption that works for any New Yorker cartoon. There will be no miracles here.
* And teach the controversy: how long ago and far away was it, really?
Happy Happy Monday Monday Links
* I just draw it for myself. I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it’s kind of depressing. TCJ: The Bill Watterson Interview (1989).
* “Nada”: The comic adaptation of the short story that inspired They Live!
* Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114. Taking the “over” on whether there’ll still be human beings alive in a hundred years, I guess…
* Anthropocene or Capitalocene?
* It was the final night of Uncivilization, an outdoor festival run by the Dark Mountain Project, a loose network of ecologically minded artists and writers, and he was standing with several dozen others waiting for the festival’s midnight ritual to begin.
* Terrible New York Times article on a fascinating topic: the “year zero” project of cultural destruction in Mali.
* Aboriginal rights a threat to Canada’s resource agenda, documents reveal.
* In order to pay for his son Cole’s life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught. Eighteen years later, his family, and the man who prosecuted him, are still working to set him free.
* Women prisoners sterilized to cut welfare costs in California. Of course it was illegal.
* Half of New York City Teens Behind Bars Have A Brain Injury, Study Finds.
* Every once in a while Matt Yglesias still writes something good: The case for confiscatory taxation.
* Carceral leftism: jail time for wage theft?
* Piketty reviews from James K. Galbraith and Doug Henwood.
* Synanon’s Sober Utopia: How a Drug Rehab Program Became a Violent Cult.
* Inside the “certified miracle” that will make Pope John Paul II a saint.
* The Case for Drawing and Doodling in Class. Can’t we just medicate this impulse away?
* The liberal version of unskewing the polls is declaring victory in election cycles that are years away. We’ve got them right where we want them!
* College is probably cheaper than you think, though that’s not saying much.
* I Ran the Pyongyang Marathon.
* Powdered alcohol: what could possibly go wrong?
* Your personal information is worth just $0.16.
* Coming out as a porn star. From Vox, the site dedicated to explaining the news with clarity and specificity traditional news outlets can’t afford.
* Meanwhile, at a traditional news outlet: Can the Klan rebrand? They’ve tried before. Kudos, CNN, you remain the absolute worst.
* Hugo nominees 2014. If you know who Vox Day is, you know how messed up things are about to get.
* Criminal Cab Driver Mastermind (Allegedly) Evaded 3,000 Tolls.
* Abandon all hope watch: “The Democrats have a mega-donor problem.” Why can’t these naive billionaires see that Democrats who won’t support good policy are better than Republicans who oppose good policy!
* On a crisp morning in late March, an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes filed into a cozy auditorium at the White House, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
* There’s A Hidden Timebomb In The Senate Rules That Will Go Off If A Supreme Court Justice Retires. But don’t you dare suggest anyone retire now to avoid disaster.
* Life is not a game. Neither is Candy Crush.
* Tumblr of the week: They Get It.
* This was the story of the Hurricane. Hurricane Carter’s dying wish.
* Marek Edelman: Last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
* I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load. If you can’t tell that an A+ student in anything is doing singularly impressive work I don’t think “rigor” is your strong suit.
* Beyond the quantum computer: temporal computing.
* Nebraska School Gives Most Idiotic Advice Ever to Deal with Bullies. Don’t defend yourself, don’t ask for help…
* Paging Margaret Atwood: Drug that wipes out vultures may cause an EU eco-disaster.
* The Farscape movie is happening.
* Why did the TV version of Game of Thrones change Jaime Lannster into a rapist? More here. I’d gotten the impression that Jaime’s arc in the novels goes from “does the worst possible thing imaginable in very first appearance” to “kind of heroic?”’; last night’s episode makes that reading seem impossible.
All of which is build-up to pointing out that in the book, the reunion between Cersei and Jaime is seen from Jaime’s point of view. And once we consider that, those moments when Cersei has questions of propriety in the middle of their love making can take on a more sinister tone. What if we’re being kept from the true horror of what Jaime’s doing because we’re inside his head?
* The politics of the liberal arts nanny.
* And the 26 Best Cities In The World To See Street Art. Below: Philadelpia.
Monday Morning Links
* Apocalypse now: University of Colorado research scientist Gabrielle Petron, who also works in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s global monitoring division, said the rate of increasing atmospheric methane concentrations has accelerated tenfold since 2007. She said it will take a few more years to determine whether the natural gas boom helps explain the change. Well thank goodness we’re putting a hold on natural gas extraction until we figure it out.
* On liberal hawks: Virtually all of the danger-to-the-nation warnings we’ve received in modern history prove to have been false, or overblown and hyped.
* But once something becomes a TED Talk, it becomes oddly unassailable. The video, the speech, the idea, the applause — there too often stops our critical faculties. We don’t interrupt. We don’t jeer. We don’t ask any follow-up questions. They lecture. We listen.
* Miracles and wonders: Doctors believe they have cured a baby of HIV for the first time.
* Limited edition of Fahrenheit 451 bound in asbestos so it wouldn’t burn.
* Looking back forty years after the Brooklyn acid attack.
* And Nate Silver finally weighs in: What Betting Markets Are Saying About the Next Pope.
Happy Canada Day
Happy Canada Day. Let’s celebrate with links.
* SEK considers Infinite Summer’s weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary “generations.” Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I’ve decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I’ve caught up to where I’m supposed to already be in the book.
* “Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial”: just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.
* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world’s least-fun summer camp.
* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here’s Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.
* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.
* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)
* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it’s been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I’m glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel‘s Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.
* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:
“Something worked very well,” said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.
Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“They’ve all got a few stories like this,” he said. “Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call ‘statistically improbable’ cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it’s not the only one.”
Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to “be the Doubting Thomas,” but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.
What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely “statistically improbable” from what is “genuinely miraculous”?
[Undisclosed Location]quinox
Today is the [Undisclosed Location]quinox, which means we’re halfway through the term. I could do this all summer. I’m not completely exhausted at all.
Clearing the decks this morning:
* What do the Dutch know that we don’t? Thousands of people in the Netherlands are preparing for the 2012 apocalypse.
* A judge has ruled that, legally speaking, Duke football completely sucks.
* Nothing makes me feel more curmudgeonly than agreeing with Christopher Hitchens about anything, but my god—you’d think Tim Russert had been president before he became the pope. And that’s before this stuff about miracles started.
* On the virtues of taking it slow as a novelist. Finally, my laziness patience has been vindicated!
* And good news from the world of science: the Large Hadron Collider probably won’t destroy the earth.
‘After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love’
If we didn’t play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn’t be in this room together. But we do… We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur…old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.
Of course we all grow up and we know “it’s only rock and roll”…but it’s not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.
So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, “Phantom” Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin’, pants droppin’, earth shockin’, hard rockin’, booty shakin’, love makin’, heart breakin’, soul cryin’… and, yes, death defyin’ legendary E Street Band.
The front page of brucespringsteen.net has Bruce’s obituary for Phantom Dan Federici.
Gerry Canavan 