Posts Tagged ‘optical illusions’
Closing All My Tabs Before the Nuclear War Links
* Welp. Here we go. To Launch a Nuclear Strike, Donald Trump Would Follow These Steps. Could Trump help unleash nuclear catastrophe with a single tweet? As one Republican Hill staffer said to me, “if we get Gorsuch and avoid a nuclear war, a lot of us will count this as a win.” Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable? In North Korea, ‘Surgical Strike’ Could Spin Into ‘Worst Kind of Fighting.’
* Meanwhile, in the war that stopped being fun.
* President Trump has sent private messages to Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. How Will The Mueller Grand Jury Handle Classified Information?
* Unlearning the myth of American innocence.
* ♫ Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high… ♫
* The modern suburb in America began as a means of providing abundant and comfortable housing to white Americans and has now evolved into a carefully tuned media surround — replete with ubiquitous screens running alarmist commercial media — that seeks to sustain that apartheid at any cost. But just as the media elevated a man to the presidency only to have him turn around and name it the “enemy of the people,” the built environment of suburbs is riven with contradictions that will ultimately be its undoing.
* It’s so strange to me that anyone talks about anything in The Handmaid’s Tale *but* the epilogue. That’s the whole thing.
* Say it again: The Problem Is Capital.
* Worrying development for academic freedom.
* The JCC Bomb-Threat Suspect Had a Client.
* Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus.
* Can You Distinguish These Real British Places From Fake Ones an AI Made Up?
* Ideology at its very, very purest.
* I’ve said this about movies like Pacific Rim, and I think it’s absolutely the fantasy at the heart of Game of Thrones as well: The ultimate enemy of all humanity is coming—climate change—and we will stop it by dropping a nuclear bomb on it.
* Maybe the media should stop doing free promotion for all the worst creeps in the world.
* “Respondent did not realize that advertising a ‘women’s-only’ screening was a violation of discrimination laws,” the theater wrote to the city. “Respondent has a very strict non-discrimination policy in place, but this policy did NOT include a specific prohibition against advertising.”
* Another streaming service you’ll have to subscribe to. What does this mean for the Daredevilverse?
* This head-spinning optical illusion will melt your brain.
* American Chess Is Great Again.
* Finally, the movie you can barely remember has four sequels you’ve find incredibly stupid…
Wednesday Night
* Vu has an update on yesterday’s most important story: it was Tolkien vs. Lewis.
* Seems fair: Pennsylvania State University’s ousted president Graham B. Spanier received $3.25 million in taxable compensation for 2011 – including a $1.2 million severance payment given in the wake of his forced resignation that year, the university announced on Wednesday.
* A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives. Miracles and wonders: Shane “Primer” Carruth is working on a new film.
* Only immortal jellyfish can save us now.
* Warren Buffet proposes a minimum tax for the rich.
* A new report from international NGO Global Witness suggests that, in the past decade, 711 individuals have been killed while defending land and forest rights. 106 of these deaths allegedly came in 2011, with the number killed almost doubling over the past three years.
* Crazy-good anamorphic optical illusion.
* Retiring Minnesota grocery store owner gives his stores to his employees.
* And a map of life expectancy by country. The US doesn’t crack the top 25…
Thursday! Wisconsin, Optical Illusions, the Death of the Public University, and More
* Some genuinely breaking news: Wisconsin’s anti-union bill was just struck down for violating the state’s open meetings law.
* …the curious thing about this report is that it dances around policy questions, but doesn’t ask a single one directly, or name a single policy that has shaped the higher education landscape. “The public” is asked to confine its thoughts to individual success; “college presidents” are asked to ruminate on the mission of college. But the two are never articulated as part of the same system, or as having a mutual set of interests that are social and organically intertwined. And this, I would argue, is because neoliberal government policies, and right-wing political demagoguery, have sold the ideology of “low taxes” and “small government” so successfully that the moral commitment of the state to nurture an educated citizenry has entirely evaporated from the equation.
* Ohio hates John Kasich. But GOP voters love Herman Cain; he’s outpolling Pawlenty now, and nearly tied with Gingrich and Ron Paul.
* Steve Benen notes that Jon Huntsman is so liberal he could probably be a credible candidate in the Democratic primary in 2016. As I noted on Twitter the sad thing is that’s really as strong an argument against Democrats as it is for Huntsman.
* And just a little bit of awesome: your optical illusions of the year.
Our Brains Don’t Work 2010
Finalists from this year’s Illusion of the Year contest. The third-place winner in particular has some really amazing wrinkles. Via MeFi.
Other Stuff
* For the Democrats, [the Miranda capitulation] will surely end up being one of the darker moments of the Obama presidency — not because it’s necessarily so terribly meaningful (at least compared to ending Too-Big-to-Fail), but because it represents a new low on the utter-lack-of-balls front.
* BP’s latest solution to the Deepwater Horizon disaster: just chuck some garbage down there.
* Unholy abomination watch: Virginia seeks toll booths on I-95.
* And a preview of Scientific American‘s 169 best optical illusions special issue. Via Boing Boing.
