Posts Tagged ‘Nepal’
Four-Day-Weekend-Sized Links!
* CFP: Edited Collection on Ecohorror.
* Join English dept faculty, students, and alumni as we debate the question of our age: “Is GAME OF THRONES still good?”
* The five basic narrative conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. society, and New York vs. New Jersey.
* We are not as often reminded that homes and lives may have been saved if officials and policymakers had incorporated the recommendations of sound science in their outlook and preparedness plans. Which is why we need to add a third response to our evolving national post-catastrophic storm mourning ritual: Identifying and investigating the negligent officials who put the public in harm’s way by repeatedly ignoring crucial data and scientific evidence that can help prevent disaster.
* Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like. We’re Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming. How Washington Made Harvey Worse. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history. Texans to be hit with new insurance law making it harder to win contested claims, just one week after Harvey. Why Ordinary Citizens Are Acting as First Responders in Houston. From June. Stop snitchin’. The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that unfold for years. What the Harvey flooding would will look like where you live. How Humans Make Disasters Worse. Within and against capitalism.
* Hundreds dead in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, while millions have been forced from their homes and 18,000 schools shut down across the region. More Than 1,000 Died in South Asia Floods This Summer.
* Time to Decriminalize Pot in Wisconsin.
* Distracted-Boyfriend-Meme Photographer Tells All.
* New Gilded Age Watch: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. Read the thread.
* I try not to be a Pollyanna about these things but I seriously thought we were done with Erik Prince forever.
* Avengers assemble: Mueller taps the IRS and the State of New York to find crimes he can charge Trump and associates with that Trump can’t just pardon. Fascinating stuff: Legal Challenge to Arpaio Pardon Begins. And this one, wow: Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey.
* Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.
* ICE Is Abusing the ACLU’s Clients Because They are Fighting Trump’s Deportation Machine. ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody. Decorated Marine vet may be deported, despite likely U.S. citizenship. GOP lawmaker aims to force vote to protect Dreamers. Everyone can do their part: UK Government’s attempt to deport Afghan asylum seeker fails after pilot refuses to take off.
* Incredible video of a cop abusing a Utah nurse without justification.
* Never off-brand: Mnuchin Doesn’t Endorse Placing Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill.
* Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege.
* The Looming Decline of the Public Research University.
* AAUP: University of Tampa Should Immediately Reinstate Lecturer Fired Over Tweet. Online Harassment of Faculty Continues; Administrators Capitulate.
* The Strategy of Appeasement on Right-Wing Harassment. And from the archives: Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* If White supremacy has no place on an American college campus, then we cannot continue to provide safe harbor to its symbolism. If universities are going to be agents of change, then we must think about our role beyond promoting dialogue. Promoting dialogue is important. But if our primary response is to provide a space to have difficult conversations on sensitive topics, we are little more than pay-to-play community centers. In this moment, in this context, we need our universities to show ethical leadership, to promote the highest of human values through direct, affirming action. Ethical leadership means that Nazis and other White supremacists are not welcome on our college campuses because our universities recognize our right to dignity and personhood as more important than any poorly argued right to free speech.
* So you’ve just gotten tenure.
* Ideology at its purest: All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.
* Bucking FDA, Peter Thiel funds “patently unethical” herpes vaccine trial.
* Rare instance of the heirs doing what I said in Luminescent Threads they never do: destroying the author’s unfinished works. It’s a pleasing spectacle, but still, who wouldn’t be happy to know it was all an act and the work was still out there somewhere.
* It’s shocking, but somehow not at all shocking, that the pundit class — not to mention the FBI — has already convinced itself antifa is just as bad as these guys.
* The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of free speech.
* We’re Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR.
* A people’s history of the White Walkers.
* The enduring legacy of Zork.
* Your SF short of the week: Echo//Back.
* I bet this does really well: Drew Barrymore Will Produce a Female-Centric Horror Anthology Show for the CW.
* Facebook has been making people feel so bad lately they’ve even stopped using Facebook.
* Global warming everywhere but in my cold, cold heart.
* Trump is toxically unpopular. He still might win in 2020.
* No amount of Trump White House speculation is going to keep me from feeling happy Sheriff Clarke is out.
* Tired: Subprime mortgages. Wired: Nonprime mortgages.
* Collocations of ‘cock’: What corpus linguistics tells us about porn writing.
* I like my coffee like I like my ceaseless inner monologue.
Monday Morning Links!
* The first cut of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ was over 3 hours long. I’m sure that would have solved all the problems.
* Science Fiction and the Urban Crisis.
* In short, riots aren’t counterproductive because they do not achieve their goals. They are counterproductive because they are an expression of those who are already-counterproductive, those “individuals committing the violence,” those ever-ready to riot.
* Starfleet as the Federation’s “Dumping Ground for Orphans.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18.5: “Peaceful Protest.”
* Wow: Rebuilt slave sites being unveiled at Jefferson’s Monticello.
* The U.S. Civil War ended 150 years ago, but once a year, deep in the sugar cane fields of southern Brazil, the Confederate battle flag rises again.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably. They’re banning Sherman Alexie? Come on.
* Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity.
* Executive Who Presided Over Nonprofit’s Fall Seeks $1.2 Million Payday.
* The names of the chemical elements in Chinese. More links below the chart.
* The Washington Post‘s Police Problem.
* Judith Butler’s talents are wasted on a “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” piece that really should be obvious to everyone.
* The most amazing thing about this exchange is that Sam Harris thinks he won this argument so completely he needed everyone in the world to see.
* The headline reads, “Nepal’s Kung Fu Nuns Have Refused To Be Evacuated – They’re Staying Back To Help Victims.”
* “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Disability in Game of Thrones.”
* Porn data: visualising fetish space.
* Ideology at its cutest (hat tip: Justin I.): Vermont Teddy Bear introduces Bernie Bear.
* Big Bird Actor: I Almost Died on the Challenger and I Cry in the Suit.
* Report: Cop Dismissed Freddie Gray’s Pleas for Help as “Jailitis.”
* Christie signs law greenlighting fast track sale of N.J. public water systems.
* The Great Victoria’s Secret Bra Heist of Pennsylvania.
* Behind the scenes of the Game of Thrones map.
* It’s always worse than you think: The CIA has been organizing clandestine TED Talks.
* “Cool” is a bit of a moving target. Sixty years ago it was James Dean, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he sat on a motorbike, glaring down 1950s conformity with brooding disapproval. Five years ago it was Zooey Deschanel holding a cupcake.
* “Social media trend sees men ditching sit-ups for snack cakes.” My moment has arrived!
* Tesla unveils a battery to power your home, completely off grid.
* I hate to link to an SNL bit, but their parody of a Black Widow movie was really pretty good.
* Area X novella coming… eventually. I liked the first book in the trilogy much, much more than the latter two, but I’m still in.
* Can 3D printing save the rhino? Seattle-based bioengineering start-up Pembient believes it can. The company plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D printed rhino horn in an effort to stem the number of rhinos killed for their horns. But conservationists fear that the plan may backfire, undermining their own efforts to cut the demand for such products in China and Vietnam, the main black markets for rhino horns.
* The coming DC Cinematic Universe trainwreck, Suicide Squad edition.
* A University Is Not Walmart.
* Trustees are basically heroes, and the Chronicle is ON IT.
* And LLAP, Grace Lee Whitney.
Sunday Night Links!
* But trains loaded with millions of gallons of crude oil thread the thickly populated areas of some of the nation’s biggest cities. Including Milwaukee.
* Love Song for a Neoliberal University: StarbucksU.
* Corinthian Colleges Inc. shut down its remaining 28 for-profit career schools, ending classes for about 16,000 students, in the biggest collapse in U.S. higher education.
* I’m not anti-technology, or anti-innovation. And I think traditional colleges are deeply flawed. But I am very, very much against expanding the money-laundering side of our financial aid system. And that is the coal mine into which the ASU-EdX canary is being lowered.
* Surge Pricing for Your Entire Life.
* On the deep grammar of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
* Hell didn’t exist, so we built it: the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
* What It’s Like to Be a Girl in America’s Juvenile Justice System.
* This is the toxic tribalism that repeats itself over and over throughout the West. Western victims are mourned and humanized, while victims of Western violence are invisible and thus dehumanized. Aside from being repugnant in its own right, this formula, by design, is deeply deceptive as propaganda: It creates the impression among Western populations that we are the victims but not the perpetrators of heinous violence, that terrorism is something done to us but that we never commit ourselves, that “primitive, radical and inhumanely violent” describes the enemy tribe but not our own.
* When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.
* Tom DeLay: People keep forgetting that God ‘wrote the Constitution.’
* Can We Preserve the Ferguson QuikTrip? Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company.
* Entire Treasury Department Competing For Same Goldman Sachs Job Opening.
* 23 maps and charts on language.
* Before And After: Earthquake Destroys Kathmandu’s Centuries-Old Landmarks.
* How Well Does ‘Daredevil’ Handle Disability Issues?
* Tetris: The Unauthorized Biography.
* An Abandoned Island in The Middle of NYC.
* Native Hawaiians are fighting off an invasion of astronomers. The Heart of the Hawaiian Peoples’ Arguments Against the Telescope on Mauna Kea.
* And some local interest from the Decolonial Atlas: The Great Lakes in Ojibwe.
Procrastination Won’t Procrastinate Itself
* 1959 memo lists government regulations for Yeti hunting.
1. Royalty of Rs. 5000/- Indian Currency will have to be paid to His Majesty’s Government of Nepal for a permit to carry out an expedition in search of ‘Yeti’.
2. In case ‘Yeti’ is traced it can be photographed or caught alive but it must not be killed or shot at except in an emergency arising out of self defence. All photographs taken of the animal, the creature itself if captured alive or dead, must be surrended to the Government of Nepal at the earliest time.
3. News and reports throwing light on the actual existence of the creature must be submitted to the Government of Nepal as soon as they are available and must not in any way be given out to the Press or Reporters for publicity without the permission of the Government of Nepal.
* What could possibly go wrong? We Need To Start Running Schools Like Hedge Funds.
* The SAT never failed; why, it’s never really been tried!
* The Unbearable Lightness of Precarious Employment.
* Sarah Kendzior vs. the Boomers.
* Campus is about to be completely taken over by March Madness.
* And what could possibly go wrong? Billionaire unveils new ‘Titanic II’ cruise ship design.
Gerry Canavan 