Posts Tagged ‘Petraeus’
Ain’t No Sunday Like an MLA Sunday Links
* In case you missed them: the syllabi for my spring classes, which start tomorrow.
* Meanwhile MLA saves its best panel for last: 759. Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. Today at 1:45!
* On March 11-12, 2015, the Humanities Division at Essex County College will host its Spring 2015 Conference, “Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism.” This two-day conference offers space for writers, musicians, artists, and academicians to explore, expand upon, and rethink the implications of speculative humanities. This year’s conference will feature a special emphasis on the life, work, and influence of Octavia E. Butler.
* #MLA: An Economist’s Critique of Job Market for English Ph.D.s.
* The MLA should give Jonathan Goodwin a Lifetime Achievement Award for this post about midcentury MLA job ads. Check out his Twitter feed for more.
* Really, though, huge shoutout to all the literary critics heading home today.
* #FreeCommunityCollege. Did Obama Just Introduce a ‘Public Option’ for Higher Education? Angus is happy. Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? Of course, it’s a Republican plan. And there’s a catch. Or two.
* Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege.
* $18 billion in job training = lots of trained unemployed people.
Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.
* Securitization, risk management, and the new university.
* Administrators, Authority, and Accountability.
* Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University.
As leverage, Silvia Federici outlines the two-part process of demanding a wage for previously uncompensated labor. The first step is recognition, but the ultimate goal is refusal. “To say that we want money for housework” she says, “is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity” (Wages Against Housework). Another way to say this is: it is only with the option of refusal that not-publishing is meaningful.
It is clear that “publish or perish” is undergoing a speedup like all other capitalist work. We must all struggle for a re-valorization of living labor. And in the first step against publication’s command over living labor, we agree with Federici, who demands that “From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it” (Wages Against Housework).
* Exclusive: Prosecutor in Serial Goes On the Record.
* The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live.
* Scenes from the class struggle inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.
* Debt collection as autoimmune disease.
* Male Senators Banned Women From Senate Pool So They Could Swim Naked. Until 2008.
* Wow. F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus.
* “It’s clear he hasn’t been very lucky with the ladies the last few months,” West said of his client.
* Nightmare terror attacks in Nigeria using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.
* Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don’t Know What to Do About It).
* Great moments in matte paintings, at io9. I had no idea the warehouse from Raiders was a matte either, though in retrospect of course it was.
* New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.
* Rave drug shows great promise in treating depression once thought resistant to drug therapy. I hope they found some way to control for the curative effects of glowsticks.
* How Wes Anderson’s Cinematographer Shot These 9 Great Scenes.
* Here comes Wet Hot American Summer: The Prequel Series.
* The kids aren’t all right: Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think.
* “Men, what would you be willing to give up to live a couple decades longer?”
* Dad creates drawings based off of quotes from his toddler daughter.
* How LEGO became the Apple of toys.
* We Wish These Retrofuturistic Versions Of American Cities Had Come True.
* Every episode of Friends at the same time.
* And exciting loopholes I think we can all believe in: “He was doing research for a film,” said Sherrard. “It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual.”
Friday Night Links!
* New Study Predicts Year Your City’s Climate Will Change.
* Hacking, War and the University. Hackers, War and Venture Capital.
* The sequester is a government shutdown which never ends.
* An accidentally published, unredacted document from a lawsuit against the TSA reveals that the Taking Shoes Away people believe that “terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports.” Of course that’s not to say they’re not doing very important work.
* New Jersey to allow gay marriage.
* The state-local-federal divide means even when progressive laws get passed they don’t count.
* What your country is best at.
* Six Decades of the Most Popular Names for Girls, State-by-State.
* High-speed trading algorithms poised to eat the bond market.
* Elliott Sailors was a blond bombshell with the prestigious Ford modeling agency and had curves that graced Bacardi billboards around the world. But when jobs dried up in an industry that considers 25 middle-aged, Sailors, 31, chopped off her blond locks and reinvented herself — as a male model.
* One Tea Party leader has the plan to finally fix everything: just file a class-action lawsuit against homosexuality.
Sunday Links
* Maps that will change the way you see the world.
* Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization.
* Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream.
* Ideology at its purest: State bans rehab of orphaned wildlife.
* Devaji Tofa, community leader from Mendha Lekha, told Down To Earth that the traditions of the Gond tribal community to which the villagers belong, do not see land as property or something to be owned by individuals. “It is seen as a community resource.” The modern concept of private ownership has done a lot of damage to communities, said he. “With private ownership, people tend to get selfish and isolated.”
* Judge Throws Out Officers’ Convictions in Killings After Hurricane Katrina.
* The Arctic is on course for an ice-free summer within the next few decades, as scientists on Friday declared that sea ice in the region had fallen to one of the lowest annual minimums on record.
* Corey Robin: “Voldemort Comes to CUNY.”
So that’s where we stand. The delicate flowers of academic freedom at CUNY wilt before the jeers and jibes of a few students but warm to the blazing sun of the state. A four-star general who led two brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Eurasia, a former head of the CIA whose hazing rituals at West Point alone probably outstrip anything the NYPD did to these students, requires the fulsome support of chancellors, senates, and deans. But six students of color beaten by cops, locked up in prison for a day, and now facing a full array of charges from the state, deserve nothing but the cold silence of their university. So much tender solicitude for a man so wealthy and powerful that he can afford to teach two courses at CUNY for a dollar; so little for these students, whose education is the university’s true and only charge.
* Just a tiny sample of the radical incoherence the right gets away with. These statements are days apart.
Wednesday Links
* Run the university like a self-hating alcoholic: Who better to run a university than someone who absolutely despises the entire concept?
* McDonalds’ suggested budget for employees shows just how impossible it is to get by on minimum wage.
* The Elite Club Petraeus Just Joined: Rich people who make $1 a year.
* 7 Mind Blowing Moments From Zimmerman Juror B37′s First Interview. 4 George Zimmerman Jurors Publicly Distance Themselves From Juror B37. Juror B37 In The George Zimmerman Trial Isn’t Getting A Book Deal About The Trayvon Martin Case After All.
* I can’t help but feel that somewhere, somehow, The View lost its way.
* Questionnaire for would-be immigrants, tier 1 and tier 2.
* “The diet of the average American is almost entirely dependent on the existence of a vast, distributed winter–a seamless network of artificially chilled processing plants, distribution centers, shipping containers, and retail display cases that creates the permanent global summertime of our supermarket aisles.”
* And a Redditor has been perfectly spoiling the WWE for months. But is it all just a big swerve?
Friday 2, Special “Everything Is Terrible” Edition
* Geraldo Rivera Says All Six Jurors Would Have Also Killed Trayvon Martin.
RIVERA: I see those six ladies in the jury putting themselves on that rainy night, in that housing complex that has just been burglarized by three or four different groups of black youngsters from the adjacent community. So it’s a dark night, a 6-foot-2-inch hoodie-wearing stranger is in the immediate housing complex. How would the ladies of that jury have reacted? I submit that if they were armed, they would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did. This is self-defense.
A human being said this on purpose, on TV, in 2013: Black men are by definition such a grave threat that they are subject to summary execution by any one at any time.
* In a world where basic services are being cut, an emerging policing apparatus in the borderlands is flourishing. As Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman reported at TomDispatch in February, since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent $791 billion on “homeland security” alone, an inflation-adjusted $300 billion more than the cost of the entire New Deal.
* A federal judge has ruled to allow Chevron, through a subpoena to Microsoft, to collect the IP usage records and identity information for email accounts owned by over 100 environmental activists, journalists and attorneys. The oil giant is demanding the records in an attempt to cull together a lawsuit which alleges that the company was the victim of a conspiracy in the $18.2 billion judgment against it for dumping 18.5 billion gallons of oil waste in the Ecuadorean Amazon, causing untold damage to the rainforest.
* San Diego Mayor Refuses To Step Down Despite Admitting To Sexually Harassing His Female Coworkers.
* I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume and landed a job.
* David Petraeus’s CUNY course description, Are We On the Threshold of the North American Decade:
In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will examine in depth and then synthesize the history and trends in diverse public policy topics with a view towards recommendations for America’s leadership role in the emerging global economy.
Because you definitely hire a disgraced former general for his opinions on the global economy. It seems to me like CUNY is paying Petraeus $150K to prepare to run for president; the point of the course is to give Petraeus the ability to speak about the economy with credibility.
* But there’s one tiny flicker of light in all this darkness: Netflix and Arrested Development officially enter the “conversation” phase about a fifth season.
All the Midweek Links
* The headline reads, “37 Million Bees Found Dead In Ontario.”
* As fully intended by its authors, a federal judge has blocked Walker’s abortion bill.
* Also in that’s-the-whole-point news: Undocumented Worker Alleges Wage Theft, Ends Up In Deportation Proceedings.
* Living nightmares: I Got Raped, Then My Problems Started.
* Duke University Agrees To Expel Students Who Are Found Guilty Of Sexual Assault.
* British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows.
* State Department Admits It Doesn’t Know Keystone XL’s Exact Route.
* The 2 Supreme Court Cases That Could Put a Dagger in Organized Labor.
* Insurers Refuse To Cover Kansas Schools Where Teachers Carry Guns Because It’s Too Risky. Maybe my plan to force gun owners to carry liability insurance would have worked after all.
* Nearly 1 in 6 Americans Receives Food Stamps.
* The cause of the crash landing of a Boeing 777 in San Francisco is still unclear. But pilots say they had been worried about conditions at the West Coast airport for a while. An important flight control system had been out of service for weeks. No One’s Talking About the Flight Attendant Heroes in the SFO Crash.
* Great moments in neoliberalism: Chris Christie’s Boondoggle.
* A University’s Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers.
* Against Oregon’s delayed tuition scheme: 1, 2. Just putting everything else aside:
1. It is not pragmatic. The two most difficult challenges it raises are how to fund its initiation and how to collect on the money loaned. Nowhere do its proponents explain where Oregon will get the estimated $9 billion needed to start the program, or how the state will ensure that graduates repay.
* CUNY Faculty Protests Hiring of David Petraeus.
* Designer Looking For People To Do Their Job Without Pay (Anywhere).
* A hundred years before Dracula, there was Carmilla.
Meeting first in their dreams, Laura and Carmilla are bound together in the original female vampire romance. What can Laura make of an ancestral portrait that resembles her mysterious new friend or the strange dreams she experiences as she is drawn ever closer to this beauty of the night?
* Holy @#$%, Michael Jackson almost starred in a Doctor Who movie. Second choice (the legend goes) was a little-known stand-up you may have heard of, Bill Cosby.
* Other Doctor Who ideas that seemingly make no sense at all: We almost got a live Doctor Who episode.
* Disaster: Donald Glover will only appear in 5 of 13 Community episodes.
* The Ender’s Game Boycott Begins. Orson Scott Card cries out for tolerance and understanding.
* Empire watch: China builds the largest building in the world, complete with internal sea shore.
* Meanwhile: Florida may have accidentally banned access to the Internet.
* A Detroit area school district has erupted in protest over the discarding of a historic book collection that is said to contain more than 10,000 black history volumes, included films, videos, and other artifacts. The blame, according to residents of Highland Park, a small city surrounded on nearly all sides by Detroit, belongs to Emergency Manager Donald Weatherspoon, who claims the collection was thrown out by mistake but that the district cannot afford to preserve it.
* Can we stop worrying about millennials yet?
* Midwestern Dad Could Be Deported For Smoking Marijuana Fifteen Years Ago.
* How the actors relaxed on the set of The Wire.
* And an important link for my particular demographic: Twelve Colorful Words That Start with Z.
