Posts Tagged ‘Nagasaki’
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.
* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.
* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.
* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.
* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
All the Monday Links!
* Look alive, Octavia Butler scholars! 2015-16 Fellowships at the Huntington.
* Exciting crowdfunding project on disability and science fiction: Accessing the Future.
* If what we were fighting against in World War II were not just enemy nations but fascism and militarism, then did the atomic bombs that massacred the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — coming as a grand climax to our “strategic bombing” of European and Asian cities — help bring us victory? Or defeat?
* The Sheep Look Up: 7 Things You Need To Know About The Toxin That’s Poisoned Ohio’s Drinking Water. Farming practices and climate change at root of Toledo water pollution.
* Newborns laugh in their sleep, say Japanese researchers.
* Common sense solutions to alt-pop song problems.
Problem: We all want something beautiful, man I wish I was beautiful.
Solution: Diet, exercise, and plastic surgery.
* Op-ed: Adjuncts should unionize.
* What colleges can learn from journalism schools. English departments seem particularly well-positioned to apply some of these lessons.
* Meet The Sexual Assault Adviser Top U.S. Colleges Have On Speed Dial.
* Understanding college discounting.
* The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”
* Emirates becomes first major international airline to suspend all flights to virus-affected region. Why you’re not going to get Ebola in the U.S.
* When Moral Panics Collide! GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination.
* The Golden Age of Comics Is Now.
* Just another weekend in Milwaukee.
* IRS Agrees To Monitor Religious Groups For Political Campaigning.
* How an honors student became a hired killer.
* A Thai surrogate mother said Sunday that she was not angry with the Australian biological parents who left behind a baby boy born with Down syndrome, and hoped that the family would take care of the boy’s twin sister they took with them. Honestly, I think I’m pretty mad at them.
* Is Howard the Duck Really Marvel’s Next Franchise? A Close Look at the Evidence.
* They say Western civilization’s best days are behind it, but Bill Murray will star as Baloo in Disney’s live-action The Jungle Book.
* Ever tried. Ever meowed. No matter. Try Again. Meow again. Meow better. Beckittens.
* Filming is apparently wrapping on Fantastic Four, but they didn’t even have a teaser trailer for Comic-Con. This film must be a complete disaster. Can’t wait!
* Why are we impeaching Obama today?
* The third Lev Grossman Magicians book ships tomorrow. Soon to be a TV show, maybe!
* Presenting the all-new, all-different Ghostbustrixes.
* Always remember: The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.
* And it took its sweet time, but the Singularity is finally here.
Finally Back in Milwaukee Links
* The fact that animals were for a long period of European history tried and punished as criminals is, to the extent that this is known at all, generally bracketed or dismissed as amere curiosity, a cultural quirk.
* Arrested Development Season 4 episode titles revealed.
* H.P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Young Writers.
* January 1, 1946: two Marine divisions faced off in the so-called Atom Bowl, played on a killing field in Nagasaki that had been cleared of debris.
* The future is bright at Monsters University. I agree wholeheartedly with my Marquette colleague who hopes there’s a ton of confusion about MU in the future.
* Traxus and Kotsko on Django Unchained. Bonus Kotsko New Year’s Resolution! Stop paying attention to non-stories.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?
* The Death of the American Shopping Mall.
* The Penn State shitshow continues: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett will announce a federal lawsuit against the NCAA tied to the historic sanctions levied against Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Corbett will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning in State College, Pa., to announce the suit, which will be filed by the state.
* “I don’t think I would do a terrible job at a Han Solo backstory. I could do that pretty well. But maybe that would be better as a short.” An interview with Wes Anderson.
* The Macroeconomics of Middle Earth.
* Could going to Mars give future astronauts Alzheimer’s disease?
* Can being overweight actually make you live longer?
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
* A moment of dreaming about higher education.
* And Jaimee has some new poems up (with rare audio!) at Unsplendid.
Joachim Radkau on the (Historical) Lack of an Anti-Nuclear Movement in Japan
…Japan, however, lacked a great nuclear energy controversy. That’s very strange for a number of reasons: Japan is the first and so far only victim of nuclear weapons. When the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 was hit by the fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test in 1954, this scandal gave impetus to the international protest movement against nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere. The Japanese mainland, moreover, is far more densely populated than Germany: correspondingly, the residual risk of nuclear technology is higher. On top of that, Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. In the United States, the regional earthquake danger was the key argument of the first initiatives against a nuclear energy project at Bodega Bay in California. For yet another and more unique reason, conditions in Japan were amenable to anti-NPP protest: because the Japanese electronics industry—herein more forward-looking than the German one—from very early on concentrated not on nuclear technology but rather on electronics, nuclear power never had a “national” argument in favor of it. On the contrary: the reactors had to be imported from the United States.
How it is that Japan never experienced a large protest movement in spite all of this remains to be investigated. It concerns one of those questions upon which one first comes via international comparison. Supposedly, the main reason lies in the fact that no alternative to nuclear energy could be seen from the very start: Japan has no rich coal reserves at its disposal; the dependence on Chinese coal would have been a nightmare; the great oil resources of the world are far removed from Japan; and wind power, even in the land of typhoons, isn’t exactly a confidenceinspiring energy resource. That saving energy in the short term is by far the most effective energy resource was understood by the Japanese automobile industry, to their advantage, much earlier than in the German automobile industry (while the Japanese, since the end of the “wooden age” around 1960, preferred to have their interior heating provided by electricity—a scandal in the eyes of European energy conservation strategists!).
And Hiroshima? In Tokyo there is only a small, hidden, and seldom visited memorial for the victims of atomic weapons. The subject was, as one hears, never popular in Japan. The victims had to suffer under discrimination, and a “culture 176 The Anti-Nuclear Movement in Germanyof memory”—to use a fashionable word—never developed. As Europeans familiar with Japan relate, the Japanese prefer to display a composed cheerfulness and dislike speaking about misfortune and suffering. Whether or not this judgment is tenable in such a sweeping form is open to doubt, as one finds counter-indications in Japanese literature as well. But Arnold Toynbee, the British universal historian, was presumably right in his thesis that cultural successes indeed emerge as a response to challenge and crises. These challenges, however, can’t be too strong. In Germany’s experience, people became capable, first out of a certain temporal distance, of a creative working through of the terrible catastrophe that was Nazi rule and World War II. From Russia it was reported that the contamination of Lake Baikal, famous for its beauty, gave the environmental movement a strong impetus, but not, however, the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl—because Chernobyl struck at the core of a Russian national pride founded on leading technologies like Sputnik. Presumably, the atomic catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so immense that they could no longer be processed by many Japanese—only suppressed…
From the Polygraph archives: Joachim Radkau’s “The Anti-Nuclear Movement in Germany” (and Japan, and elsewhere…).
Letters of Note
Letters of Note is Strange Maps for correspondence. Recent entries include Robert Heinlein’s form letter for his fans, the telegram announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor, a letter warning of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a turn-of-the-century letter from Nikola Tesla announcing contact with another world.
Wednesday Links
Wednesday links.
* Scandal at UConn! The Plank says the story is peanuts; this sort of corruption is endemic to the NCAA.
* Cover Stories From the Most-Requested Back Issues of The American Prognosticator (1853–1987).
* Duke University professor and civil rights icon John Hope Franklin has died.
* Upright Citizens Brigade parodies Wes Anderson. Bastards!
* A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of the Second World War.
* The first unambiguous case of electronic voting machine fraud in the U.S.?
* Solitary confinement as torture.
* Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. How could the Romans think in terms of centuries but we can’t think past a single business cycle?
* Lots of people are linking to this letter from an AIG bonus recipient. The merits of the contracts aside—I’ve said before they should be enforced unless fraudulent or predicated on fraud—but I don’t think he helps his case much when he puts a number on it. His one-time after-tax “bonus” is more than I would have made in thirty years of adjuncting.
* David Brin wants to “uplift” animals, i.e., make them sentient. This is exactly why people don’t take science fiction seriously; it’s totally crazy, pointless, and cruel and it wouldn’t even work…
Lenin’s Tomb has a fantastic post on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, taking as his starting point this unfortunate but telling historical-cultural truth:
I think it’s telling that on this, as on a number of issues (Israel/Palestine for example), public opinion is kept so far in the dark for so long by historical mythology that is only belatedly undermined by revisionism and declassification that it results in such a massive gulf between what is academically known and what is generally understood. It is particularly the case on matters where historical events matter most for contemporary understanding.
But it’s the sheer raw data that makes this post so important, necessary and good.
The main findings of revisionist scholarship coincide with those of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, which concluded (in a widely quoted statement) that: “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Now, since there is no doubt that Russia would have entered the war on 15th August 1945, it would seem probable on the basis of that conclusion that a surrender could have been achieved even more quickly than this. And since the planned invasion by ground would not have occurred before 1 November 1945 (it was scheduled for the Spring of 1946), the claim that the bomb saved 500,000 lives that would have been lost in such an invasion doesn’t seem to be supportable. A second document, declassified in the Seventies, is a War Department study on the ‘Use of Atomic Bomb on Japan’ written in 1946. It found that “the Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies.” Even an early landinglanding on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu would have been only a ‘remote’ possibility, while the full invasion of Japan in the spring of 1946 would not have occurred. In fact, the belief that it was totally unnecessary to use the atomic bomb on Japan’s cities was shared by Eisenhower, who records telling Stimson that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bombs was completely unnecessary” and by Admiral William D Leahy, who opined that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
There’s a lot here, and for many people out there it isn’t new—but it’s still important.
If you finish there and you still want more, I’m happy to re-recommend Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing, the best book on the subject of aerial warfare I’ve ever read—”Airplanes and imperialism, genocide and global thermonuclear war: if you want to know the history of the twentieth century, this is the only book you need“—or else John Harvey’s Hiroshima, the classic on the subject, which I finally read earlier this summer and was quite impressed by.
Gerry Canavan 