Posts Tagged ‘Occupy Wall Street’
Friday!
* ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. The power of #YesAllWomen. Media monsters gotta monster.
* Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF.
* Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive.
* American jails have become the new mental asylums – and you’re paying the bill.
* “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that. I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.” Modern-Day Slavery in America’s Prison Workforce.
* Scenes from the school reform scam in Newark.
In fact, not a cent of Zuckerberg’s money has gone toward hiring counselors, social workers or nurses. Meanwhile, “there have been DRAMATIC cuts to wraparound services,” wrote Mike Maillaro, Newark Teachers Union’s director of communication and research, in an e-mail. Last year, every attendance counselor in the district was eliminated.
Hawthorne Avenue reports losing eight support staff members since 2011, including a guidance counselor and two instructional coaches. The school has neither a music teacher nor a librarian.
Zuckerberg’s money would instead “create systemic education reform in Newark.” In 2011, it was reported that a full third of the foundation’s cash had found the pockets of consultants. As Dale Russakoff recently reported in a lengthy New Yorker article, that total now sits at about $20 million.
Though a smattering of grants have benefitted local causes—after-school yoga ($31,000), book drives ($1.2 million), new district schools ($2.1 million) and sundry others—over 40 percent of the money granted to organizations has left the state. Outside talent and recruitment agencies, for instance, raked in over $4 million to align district staffing with Anderson’s politics.
* In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good.
* Black legislators in North Carolina are blasting a provision in the State Senate’s budget bill that they say is an attempt to force the closure of Elizabeth City State University, a historically black institution, WRAL News reported.
* The Intractability of Op-Ed Habits.
* Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say. Even Middle-Class Students Have Poor Odds of Graduating From College. 2 Years On, Two-Thirds of This Graduating Class Aren’t Financially Self-Sufficient. How to end the college class war.
* Making Olin’s problems worse, the school’s only subject, engineering, is very expensive to teach. Unlike other schools with a broader array of programs, Olin cannot subsidize engineering students by charging their classmates the same tuition for cheaper majors such as English and sociology. At many schools — although they may not know it — liberal arts majors are in effect helping to underwrite the high cost of science and technical education.
* All This: Mad Men and the Persistence of the Old Regime. As good as it gets: Mad Men and neoliberalism. Mad Men‘s Robert Morse on Dancing Into the Sunset. Mad Men’s Trudy Campbell is a KGB Spy. The Matt Weiner Interview. As fun as this show is, it’s about some pretty grimy shit.
* In an attempt to emphasize heterosexuality, fear or hatred of homosexuals and misogynist language developed. The bro, in short, is a culture-wide defense mechanism against the gay.
* Back to the top of the order: Let’s Debunk Scientific Racism, Again.
* Most Doctors Would Refuse Their Own Aggressive End-Of-life Treatments.
* Judge Orders Antitrust Suit Against NCAA to Go to Trial Next Month.
* BREAKING: The rule of law is a joke.
* Government files reveal official campaign of spying against Occupy Wall Street.
* Nobody Wants To Host The 2022 Olympics.
* So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. A Pushback on Green Power. What Will Climate Change Deniers Say…?
* The religious right, who liked to call themselves the “moral majority” at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn’t Roe v. Wadethat woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from “segregation academies”—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued.
* Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature (2014). Just clap your hands if you believe in job training!
* It doesn’t get better: Sorry, nerds: Fraternity brothers have more fulfilling lives later on.
* Incoming Title IX Mess: Duke Student Sues For Diploma After He’s Expelled for Sexual Assault.
* Angus Johnston’s Content Warnings.
* Two great tastes! NCAA Teams Up With Defense Dept. on $30-Million Concussion Study.
* Cruel optimism watch: Hulu In Talks To Pick Up New Season Of Community.
* And nothing good will happen anymore: Alfonso Cuarón says he won’t be directing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Saturday!
* Two from Jacobin: Gendered conceptions of credit and reward are written into the structures of intellectual property law. Don’t Mention the (Class) War.
* Malcolm Harris and Nathan Schneider talks Occupy Wall Street.
* Rhetmap.org maps rhet-comp jobs from the MLA Job Information List.
* How academia reproduces privilege: the case of Harvard Business School.
* Cutting through the nonsense of college ranking structures to what really matters: 2013-2014 PayScale College Salary Report.
* What rape culture? Iowa pastor and youth counselor Brent Girouex, who claimed with a straight face that he was trying to “cure” teenage boys of their “homosexual urges” by having sex with them, has had his sentence reduced from 17 years in prison to sex offender treatment and probation.
* Special Report on Oklahoma State Football: Part 4 — The Sex.
* The Strangest and Most Tragic Ghost Towns from Around the World.
* And The New York Times reviews Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, all about atomic near-misses. I don’t know how we made it through the Cold War, except that one of the universes had to.
Fourth of July America Links USA USA
* How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Military. And they say literary criticism is useless.
* DHS immediately begins implementing green cards to gay couples, without stalling or dragging its feet or needing to be sued. Amazing. I’d have never predicted it.
* Heat maps of poverty in US cities, 1980-2010. At right: Milwaukee in 2010. “Whites are in blue; blacks yellow; Hispanics green; and Asians red.”
So far this offseason, around 450 Division I basketball players have announced they’re changing schools. This turnover has imperiled the sport, says Marshall University basketball coach Tom Herrion, who calls it a “transfer epidemic.” Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski says that “[k]ids don’t stick to the school that they pick and they want instant gratification.” South Carolina’s Frank Martin agrees: “Kids are not being taught to stay the course, be patient, to learn how to work and improve.” Adds Alabama’s Anthony Grant, “I don’t think it’s something any coach will tell you is good for the game.”
GREEDY NCAA PLAYERS DEMANDING RIGHT TO CHOOSE WHICH GROUP OF MILLIONAIRES WON’T PAY THEM FOR THEIR LABOR PLEASE CALL POLICE
* India has officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons, whose rights to life and liberty must be respected. Dolphin parks that were being built across the country will instead be shut down.
* An Open Letter to New Teach for America Recruits.
Many of you no doubt believe you are joining a progressive education justice movement, that is the message TFA sells so well. But I want you to understand clearly, TFA is not progressive. The kind of limited data-driven pedagogy, the fast-track preparation, the union-busting, the forced exploitation of your labor, the deep-pocketed affiliation with corporate education reform are all very conservative, very anti-progressive ideas. Look no further than TFA’s list of supporters/donors. The largest donations are from groups like the Walton Foundation, of Walmart fortune, which has a vested interest in the status quo of inequality, breaking unions, and keeping wages low and workers oppressed. Or notice the many partnerships with JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, the very institutions which caused the financial collapse and threw millions of Americans-including your future students’ families-into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and deeper poverty. These organizations choose to donate to TFA because TFA supports their agendas. If TFA was truly pushing back on the status quo of educational inequality, these types of donors would not only refuse financial support, they would be attacking a group which threatens their earning potential.
* Meanwhile, making the rounds again: Gates Foundation Funding Wrist Bracelets to Monitor Teaching Effectiveness. How to Write a Conservative Article about Education.
* The Humanities, Declining? Not According to the Numbers. Well, you know, you can prove anything using facts.
* “This is text from an actual email from an actual coursera professor to actual coursera students.”
* More than 260 colleges and universities in 40 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have students who are more likely to default on their loans than full-time freshmen are to graduate, an analysis of federal data shows.
* Bummer Watch Lightning Round: Fox News adopts George Zimmerman. Kevin Clash’s (One) Day in Court. Gitmo Detainees to Be Force-Fed at Night Out of Respect for Ramadan. The street value of black market ivory in China — up to $1,300 a pound — rivals that of cocaine or gold. And, of course, North Carolina. Oh, North Carolina.
* In New York, Blasi said, his security personnel did not have the police’s powers of arrest and don’t have the power to arrest and shoot lawbreakers, and the city police did not believe they had the power to enter this private space. During the Zuccotti crisis, Blasi said he dreamed of turning on fire hydrants, letting loose German shepherds and deploying blow torches. Ralph Blasi is a director of security for a real estate company. Fire hydrants, German shepherds, blow torches.
* The marshmallow test became an important part of psychology canon. But a study in 2012 suggests that the children in the experiment did not necessarily differ in their ability to resist temptation. Instead, it was their trust in the researcher to return with the promised marshmallow that differed.
* And the headline reads: Human head transplants? Neurosurgeon says ‘we have the technology.’ All right, damnit, I’m in.
Unexpected Boxing Day Links!
My baby’s selfish decision to start vomiting ruined my plans to finally see The Hobbit. So instead I’ll clear some tabs:
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine me and @adamkotsko arguing about revenge in Tarantino, forever.
* The End of the Community College English Profession.
* Jeopardy! is running its online contestant search again.
* Meritocracy watch, from the archives: In both data sets, Krueger and Dale, like other researchers, find that students who attended more selective colleges tend to earn higher salaries later on than those who attend less selective colleges. However, the researchers not only looked at the schools that students attended but also where they were accepted and rejected. They found that where a student applies is a more powerful predictor of future earnings success than where he or she attends.
* The Heat, The Avengers, and the peculiar American love of the overdog.
* Surreal Illustrations for Fairy Tales that Don’t Exist Yet.
* Eminem, master of Donkey Kong.
* Wikipedia’s timeline of the far future.
* Thomas Frank blames academia for Occupy’s failures. Now the lead editorial of the next Jacobin is devoted to denouncing Frank.
* A report from NRO’s annual cruise.
* FBI Considered It’s A Wonderful Life Communist Propaganda. Don’t ever change, you lovable scamps!
* 12 Obvious Science Findings of 2012.
* Could a captive tornado power an entire city? What could possibly go wrong?
* STUDY: Antarctica Is Heating Up Even Faster Than Previously Thought.
* Pulp Scifi Under Japanese Totalitarianism.
* And a few days late: Santa’s privacy policy.
Thursday Night Links
* Why did small business owner and gamer dad Mike Hoye spend the last few weeks hand-tweaking the text in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so that the main character was referred to as a girl instead of a boy? As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”
* Romney Adviser: Not a Single Person on the Campaign Thought He Would Lose.
* What You Can Get for $228,646,000. I could have lost them basically everything for half that.
* Nate Silver explains that malapportionment in the Electoral College may actually be flowing the Democrats’ way in the near-term:
The problem for Republicans is that in states like these, and others like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in terms of the Electoral College.
By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states – both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada – have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are favored in them.
* I really don’t understand why Rolling Jubilee is worth doing. Why would we give the banks free money for bad debt they’ve already written off?
* The pros and cons of a Casablanca sequel. Spoiler alert: there is no possible pro.
Thursday Night Links
* Last week, a hopeful prospect showed up at LSU’s July football camp. He posted an impressive 4.46 40-yard dash, and he earned a scholarship offer from the Tigers’ coaching staff for his efforts. It’s a scene that plays out on college campuses every single summer, although this offer was different for one main reason — Dylan Moses has yet to start eighth grade.
* Our brains work in interesting ways: Hugo cured a man’s stereoblindness. Take that, Aaron Bady!
* NYPD Used Force On Occupy Protests ‘Without Apparent Need Or Justification’ 130 Times.
* It’s like Warhol said: In the future, every movie will star Chloë Moretz.
* There’s always money in the banana stand.
* And Ron Howard tweets the very best picture in the world.
Batman Is At Least Fascist-Curious
In my humble opinion, this act — this decision to not end poverty because you might release a weapon into the public sphere — demonstrates the real driving force for the movie’s morality, sense of history, and its understanding of civic virtue: the violence within, which must be contained. On the one hand, to say that we could solve all problems of human need and want, but we won’t, because it might become a bomb, is to assert that inequality is not what creates the specter of violence (it’s also, oddly, a lot like the argument that “people don’t kill people; guns kill people!”). The threat of violence is prior and separate from complaints over inequality, however much they might claim to motivate it. And indeed, this was the lesson of the first movie, the lesson Bruce Wayne learned from the death of his parents: you can build an awesome Keynesian super-train and fix Gotham’s economy forever, but some random street criminal will still murder you, because. Better to invest in a secret police force.
Gerry Canavan 