Posts Tagged ‘national security’
Weekend Links!
* My upcoming Studies in Genre course has been cancelled because it has been rendered superfluous.
* I realized I’d never gotten around to adding Paradoxa 28 to the sidebar. Check it out, if you haven’t yet!
* Cuban highlighted English, philosophy, and foreign language majors as just some of the majors that will do well in the future job market. “The nature of jobs is changing,” Cuban said.
* Love as Political Resistance: Lessons of Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler. Parable Of The Sower – Not 1984 – Is The Dystopia For Our Age.
* Wikipedia vs. the deletionists.
* Style guide: the look of white supremacy.
* This was beautiful: Coed CYO hoops team defies archdiocese order to kick girls out, forfeits season.
“Is your decision to play the game without the two young ladies on the team, or do you want to stay as a team as you have all year?” asked parent Matthew Dohn. “Show of hands for play as a team?”
Eleven hands shot up in unison. No one raised a hand when asked the alternative.
Assistant coach Keisha Martel, who is also the mom of one of the girls, Kayla Martel, reminded the team of the consequences. They had been told that playing the girls would mean the rest of the season would be forfeited.
“But if the girls play, this will be the end of your season. You won’t play in the playoffs,” she warned.
“It doesn’t matter,” one boy replied and others echoed, before the team began to chant, “Unity!”
In the crowd, supporters cheered along. Several parents began to cry.
* Scenes from the Day without Latinos in Milwaukee.
* What It Feels Like When Your World Ends: Rebecca Evans on Black Wave.
* How many pounds do you need to be able to life to teach a literature class?
* The Trump White House Is Screwed, Big League. Justice Department warned White House that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail, officials say. Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence. Warren v. Flynn. Taking a Step Back. The Fog of Trump. What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like. Republicans Won’t Stand Up and Stop President Trump. So you want to brief the president. That’s a hell of an act. Democrats Demand Mar-A-Lago Membership List. As Presidents Live Longer, Doctors Debate Whether To Test For Dementia. Authoritarian government watch: 6/10. The Great Government Breakdown Has Begun. A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon.” Trump Official Obsessed Over Nuclear Apocalypse, Men’s Style, Fine Wines in 40,000 Posts on Fashion Style. The press conference from Hell. Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill? Admit it: Trump is unfit to serve. ‘President Supervillain’ Puts Trump’s Quotes in Red Skull’s Mouth, and It’s Disturbingly Perfect.
* Pitting class against race in the Age of Trump. Shadow of the Plantation.
* Before the Flood: Karel Čapek and the Destructive Drift of History.
* Fantasies of the deep state.
* Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade.
* Russia has secretly deployed a new cruise missile that American officials say violates a landmark arms control treaty, posing a major test for President Trump as his administration is facing a crisis over its ties to Moscow.
* ICE detains a woman at a courthouse receiving an order of protection, likely after receiving a tip from her alleged abuser. ICE shows up at a women’s shelter. ICE Agents Arrest Men Leaving Alexandria Church Shelter. Why Did ICE Arrest & Imprison a 23-Year-Old DREAMer and DACA Recipient Living Legally in the U.S.? Trump Considering Using National Guard for Immigration Raids. How new is this? Is ICE Out of Control?
* Well this all seems in order: EPA nominee Scott Pruitt won’t say if he would recuse himself from his own lawsuits against the agency. He’s since been confirmed, of course.
* Shocked, shocked to find gambling in the casino: Maybe College Isn’t the Great Equalizer. (More here.)
* Same joke but new study confirms that voter ID laws are very racist.
* Academics, your moment is here: Depression Is an Unlikely Advantage in the Fight Against Fascism.
* The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* I’ll allow it: There’s Going to Be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Comic Book.
* So preoccupied with whether they could, etc: Woolly mammoth on the verge of resurrection, scientists say.
* Though this one is pretty good too.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About a Women’s Strike.
* What if we pretended something that was obviously an effect of wealth were biological? I think it might look a little something like…
* Obamacare Repeal Could Cripple Efforts To Combat The Opioid Epidemic. Paul Ryan wants to bring back lifetime limits. Millions now rely on these plans, and we should defend them until we can win something better. But we also shouldn’t entertain any illusions: the ACA marketplaces rest on a flawed health care ideology that tellingly attracts many adherents on the Right, including Ryan.
* News you can use: The 8 Most Inaccurate Depictions of Mars Ever Put on Film.
* The surgeon who wants to perform a head transplant by 2017.
* Marquette in the news! Marquette Law alum chosen as the first black Bachelorette.
* Lost Essay Reveals Winston Churchill Was Almost Certain Aliens Exist. He met the Daleks! It’s canon.
* Is it really time to teach 1984?
* “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”
* Another apocalypse: The oceans are losing oxygen.
* The New Star Wars: Aftermath Novel Reveals the Pitiful Fate of Jar Jar Binks. This bummed me out a lot, actually.
* Incredible: Suspect in North Korea killing ‘thought she was taking part in TV prank.’
* Of course you had me at “Squid Communicate with a Secret, Skin-Powered Alphabet.”
Monday Morning Links
* I was delighted to find Octavia E. Butler on Locus’s 2016 Recommended Reading List. And you can vote for it as nonfiction book of the year! Make Ursula work for it.
* Eight works of science fiction that present tyrants (not all of them human).
* I’d taken England off my list of countries to flee to, but perhaps I could be coaxed.
* Madness at the National Security Council. The Spy Revolt Against Trump. ‘A Sense of Dread’ for Civil Servants Shaken by Trump Transition. How To Deal with Reichstag Fire Fears in the Age of Trump. Twilight of Mike Flynn. Meanwhile, Trump is doing international diplomacy in the public dining room at Mar-a-Lago. “We have at most a year to defend American democracy, perhaps less.” Trump’s two-year presidency. Two years. Jesus. Shitgibbon.
* One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason, respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until catastrophe inevitably strikes. This is what I mean by the idea that we are living through an emergency.
* We have been shy about stating the obvious: that something is terribly and uniquely wrong with this president. His powers weaponise the problem. We can all see it. We can all feel it, too. Donald Trump is the walking, talking, hate-tweeting embodiment of the howling identity crisis afflicting the entire United States.
* Federal agents conduct immigration enforcement raids in at least six states. What it’s like to be arrested by ICE. Fear and panic. Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos’ deportation to Mexico from Arizona this week was the last chapter of a long nightmare for her family. It began in 2008 with a knock on the door by sheriff’s officers. And they finally found an undocumented immigrant who voted. For Abdulkarim Jimale, escape was the only way to survive. Trump’s immigration order means bureaucrats have to decide who’s a “real” Christian. #KnowYourRights. What Geology Has to Say About Building a 1,000-Mile Border Wall. How big a deviation is this from Obama?
* The initial estimate is here: Trump’s wall will cost more than a year of the space program that we’re also not going to have anymore.
* Asylum seekers fleeing the US into Canada. Losing Hope in U.S., Migrants Make Icy Crossing to Canada. Newcomer centre has no more room for border-crossing refugees.
* Revealed: FBI terrorism taskforce investigating Standing Rock activists.
* Shock report: Republicans are completely morally depraved. But don’t worry, the Democrats have got this.
* * Everything is about Trump now.
* Well, it’s come to this: a geoengineering plan to refreeze the Arctic Circle. We may live in a post-truth era, but nature does not. Simple equation shows how human activity is trashing the planet.
As for hedge funds and other high-cost alternatives, “the whole two-and-20 model” — in which investors typically pay 2 percent of assets under management and 20 percent of any gains — “is ridiculous,” Mr. Morris said. “The cost structure is outrageous. As they say on Wall Street, ‘Where are the customers’ yachts?’ I’m not going to play that game.”
* A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone.
* Hello old friends: Foreground objects in adventure game scenery.
* lol x2: Geraldo Rivera quits post after Yale removes slavery supporter’s name.
* Amazon now controls 46% of all e-commerce in the United States.
* A brief history of the gerrymander.
* Why does the United States still let 12-year-olds get married?
* How American women fell behind Japanese women in the workplace.
* A brief history of punching Nazis in Marvel Comics.
* AI and the end of the middle class.
* Rio’s Olympic Park, 6 months after games.
* Reframing Faculty Criticisms of Student Activism.
* Milwaukee offers America’s longest-lived experiment with urban-school vouchers, but their mixed legacy is not a story you’ll frequently hear from lawmakers and advocates currently championing the spread of private school–choice programs across the country.
* Double majoring will not save you. Only the great god STEM will save you. All praise STEM!
* And this is great, like everything they do: Arnie, Usidore, and Chunt play Gauntlet.
Fritrump Links!
* Trump’s America Conference at University College Dublin.
* Midwest area research opportunity: Horatio Alger Fellowship for the Study of American Popular Culture, Northern Illinois University.
* See Marquette University’s $600M plan to transform its Milwaukee campus.
* Teens sue Wisconsin over nightmare conditions in juvenile jails.
* Like everyone, I mocked the tweet. Deep down, I never thought it could happen to me. Now I wish I had stopped to think things through, because I didn’t know how to respond. A terrorist had actually kidnapped my baby. By all indications, he had rigged the poor little tyke with a bomb set to go off in one hour. Somehow, miraculously, I had wound up in the same room with him. And now I faced a terrible choice: do I torture the terrorist, or let my baby be blown up, by the bomb that he had rigged the baby with, and then left the baby at some remote location while winding up in a situation where he could be tortured by me?
* Starvation in northern Nigeria’s Borno State is so bad that a whole slice of the population — children under 5 — appears to have died, aid agencies say.
* Amazing Twitter project: @Stl_Manifest.
* Astoundingly Complex Visualization Untangles Trump’s Business Ties. Trump: the lie list. Trump’s phone as security risk. Trump and the Republicans Are on a Suicide Mission Together. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era. You’re a little late. Is Trump Morally Unfit or Are We Facing a Constitution Crisis? Pretty dick move, Germany. This one’s unreal even by Trump standards. Sad! One week down.
* Not only is Obama, at only fifty-five, set to have one of the longest post-presidential careers of any president, but now freed from the shackles of the office — which often forced him to temper his true beliefs and triangulate — Obama can become the progressive hero his most fervent supporters always wanted him to be. Or so the theory goes.
* In a new book, The Blood of Emmett Till (Simon & Schuster), Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, reveals that Carolyn—in 2007, at age 72—confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. “That part’s not true,” she told Tyson, about her claim that Till had made verbal and physical advances on her.
* ND House passes eliminating reporting of small oil spills.
* Trump Has Never Been Popular.
* Mark Weston at Time pitches a tax strike until the coasts get adequate representation in government.
* What the Hell Is the Opening Crawl for The Last Jedi Going to Be?
* Why don’t we drink pigs’ milk?
* Why don’t some people get brain freeze?
* Ten Ways Reading The Silmarillion Makes The Lord of the Rings Better, Part 1.
* I write out of disarray, from a field of compatriots in disarray. We’re drifting like astronauts, distantly tethered by emails like the one I just got from a friend: ‘i feel like he is making everyone sick, and bipolar./i feel like I am so incredibly ill-equipped to deal with any of this./i’m taking blind advice from all comers without feeling like anything is remotely adequate./ i feel nostalgic for all of life before Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh Arizona Resort, Asks Rocks for “Guidance”’). At these moments we’re the special snowflakes we were wishing to see in the world, the canaries in our own dystopian coal mines. But we’ll brandish our sensitivities proudly (if not our safety pins, which may be too smug and lame a gesture), since they’re what we’ve got, and are anyway better than robotic numbness, better than ‘normalisation’.
* Paging Kim Stanley Robinson: Are scientists going to march on Washington?
* The starships of the future won’t look anything like the Enterprise.
* First as tragedy, then as farce, as the feller said.
* Great moments in headlines: Georgia lawmaker shot behind adult entertainment store; was carrying thousands of dollars in storm relief money.
* If you want a vision of Thanksgiving.
* And two Northwestern University professors have demonstrated it’s possible to be good at neither research nor teaching. Of course this is no news to me.
Skilled researchers and effective teachers are neither substitutes nor complements for each other — in fact, they have no relationship at all, according to a study by two Northwestern University faculty published by the Brookings Institution Thursday.
Friday Links!
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
Wednesday Night Links
* The Utopia symposium in the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is especially good, if I do say so myself. Featuring Raffaella Baccolini, Troy Bordun, Catherine Constable, L. Timmel Duchamp, Carl Freedman, Lisa Garforth, Dan Hassler-Forest, Veronica Hollinger, Alexis Lothian, Roger Buckhurst, Tom Moylan, Sharon Sharp, Steven Shaviro, Debra Benita Shaw, Rebekah Sheldon, Imre Szeman, Phillip E. Wegner, and Rhys Williams…
* Afrofuturism Reloaded: 15 Theses in 15 Minutes.
* Fear of an Ill Planet: On the Importance of Sickness and the Demands of Otherness.
* I think maybe every literally academic I know has been talking about this story.
* The Scalia obituaries keep coming: 1, 2, 3.
* Huge cuts to ethnic studies at SFSU.
* The Troubled Academic Job Market for History.
* Never in my worst dreams about the future of the university could I have imagined such a thing was possible: Chicago State University Cancels Spring Break.
* David Milch, the storied mind also behind ‘Deadwood,’ changed television. Now, according to a lawsuit, the racetrack regular has lost his homes, owes the IRS $17 million and is on a $40-a-week allowance. Still, his supporters stay close: “He’s brilliant.”
* Yay, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. Booooooo, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. In any event.
* Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime.
* “There no longer are any rules in the Supreme Court nomination process.” I’ll do you one better!
* Usually this sort of mythologizing isn’t caught fast enough to be traced: The Evolution of the Myth of the Sanders “English Only” Chant.
* Social media, the new mind control.
* Polls and Trump’s Supporters. My word.
* Elsewhere in dystopian backstory: The Virginia Senate has passed legislation that would transform all law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth into secret police, quite literally, a dangerous step in the direction of unaccountable and non-transparent government. No other state has gone as far as the Senate bill would take Virginia into the realm of secrecy where it concerns state and local police.
* When the Public Defender Says, ‘I Can’t Help.’
* Nobody, but nobody, can trip over their own feet like Obama.
* The Huntington Tumblr has a few pictures up from one of Octavia Butler’s horse stories.
* The contested legacy of Stan Lee.
* A People’s History of #CancelColbert.
* Nice work if you can get it: Rutgers president gets a $97,000 bonus.
* The Oscars Forgot to Nominate The Force Awakens For Best Picture.
* Why Professor Indiana Jones Never Published His Research.
* Ok, sold: Margaret Atwood’s Next Book Is a Prison-Bound Take on The Tempest.
* Well, that doesn’t sound so bad… Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries.
* Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist.
* On the plus side, we are living through a golden age of theme parks.
* Rosemary G. Feal will step down as executive director of the Modern Language Association next year after 15 years in that job, the group announced on Wednesday.
* Fermi Paradox watch: maybe life is that rare.
* But mostly Fuller House evokes a smut-free porn parody, with sexualized adult versions of characters who, in the collective psyche, are frozen in amber as children. Elsewhere on the Onion‘s Full House porn parody beat.
* “Dogs and Certain Primates May Be Able To See Magnetic Fields.” Tell no one my secret.
* Breastfeeding is probably really not that big a deal.
* Winning the lottery can also bankrupt your neighbors.
* Twilight of saying “Aycock” at Duke and UNCG.
* KSR coverage in American Literature: “Forms of Duration: Preparedness, theMars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change.”
* Why Is Inver Hills Banning Union Activist From Campus?
* The Problematic, Sexist Subtext of Laughing at Hitler’s Alleged Micropenis.
* Lev Grossman on Narnia and grief.
* The best news I’ve gotten all year: Milwaukee’s Air and Water Show postponed until 2017.
* Blade Runner 2 is an abomination that should never have been made, but I am interested to see how they deal (or don’t) with the Deckard/replicant issue.
* And Philip K. Dick is just straight-up writing our reality now.
Monday Morning Links!
* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”
* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.
* Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical.
* I just can’t believe “crip theory” is really a brand with staying power, but it’s showing up in job titles now.
* Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship.” Oh, if only it were “creeping!”
* All Things Must Pass: McDonald’s franchisees say the brand is in a ‘deep depression’ and ‘facing its final days.’
* Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
* Teach the controversy: Is UC spending too little on teaching, too much on administration? More links below the chart.
* The Plan to Make California Wet By Bringing Back Beavers.
* Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.
* Free the cheese bandits. Free all political prisoners.
* I still think Democrats are severely discounting the possibility that Clinton gets indicted.
* Vox, the website that explains the news, suggests Nordic genetic superiority might explain Denmark’s social institutions. Interesting, but not dispositive! I get that this is supposed to be a troll, but all the same…
* Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money.’
* Fukushima Looks Like An Apocalyptic Ghost Town 4 Years After The Nuclear Disaster.
* A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month.
* I’ll allow it: Larry David Fulfills Destiny, Plays Bernie Sanders In SNL Cold Open. Bonus David Content! Larry David’s Daughter’s Instagram Will Make You Wish She was Your Best Friend.
* Beowulf vs. Satan vs. Grendel vs. Dracula.
* I’ve seen this movie: Aer Lingus Passenger Flips Out, Bites Fellow Passenger, Dies.
* And somehow I always knew it would end like this: Japan Engineers Design Robotic Bear to aid in Assisted Suicide.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* Muppet Fairy Tales. Why isn’t this a book or long-running television series yet?
* Presenting the Rust Belt Justice League.
* The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.
* To explain the behavior of “the left,” Bergen offers this theory: “From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.” In other words, progressives are slavishly supportive of “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades” because they have deluded themselves into denying this reality and continue to pretend he’s some sort of anti-war figure.
* Faith-based retirement. (via)
* 16 years, $185,000 in debt, ABD. Sad story. (via)
* Stephen King talks to Neil Gaiman.
* The secret art of Dr. Seuss.
* And the truth is out there: Seattle Attorney Andrew Basiago Claims U.S. Sent Him On Time Travels. I want to believe!
Gerry Canavan 