Posts Tagged ‘Petraeus’
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.
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Blowing the academic labor reform movement wide open, CUNY announces bold new initiative to pay certain adjuncts $200,000 a year.
Monday Morning Links
* Scenes from the class struggle at CUNY.
* Quiggin’s Razor: If we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned, and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later, we would be right most of the time. Via Kevin Drum.
* The Real Petraeus Scandal: the compelled veneration of all things military. Via LGM. See also Spencer Ackerman: How I Was Drawn Into the Cult of David Petraeus.
* The New Yorker notices that it won’t be long before Texas will be a swing state.
“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”
The Republican Party’s electoral map problem.
But even in that silver lining for Republicans, you can see clouds. Arizona and Georgia, both of which Romney carried in 2012, gained seats in 2010 because of fast population growth, but Democratic dominance among Hispanic voters in each is expected to make them potential swing states in 2016 and 2020.
Their Southern politicians problem. The Washington Post‘s lengthy election post-mortem. Politico just can’t imagine where the GOP could be getting all its terrible journalism. Perhaps it will always be a mystery. Tom Tomorrow gets in on the action. “We Just Had a Clas War and One Side Won.” Worst class war ever.
* Young voters turned the tide for Brown’s Prop 30.
* Walmart Black Friday Strike Being Organized Online For Stores Across U.S. I’m staying home that day because I hate Black Friday and everything it represents in solidarity.
* Hurricane Sandy and the Disaster-Preparedness Economy.
It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.
* And Being Elmo makes Kevin Clash out to be a living saint. I hope his version of events turns out to be true. As someone just tweeted at me, I’m probably going to hell for even linking this story at all.
The credulity required to believe that Petraeus was going to say anything that the White House hadn’t written for him in the first place
The segment on Gen. Petraeus from the Daily Show last night is a fine example of the show at its best, skewering every aspect of Monday’s “long-awaited” report from the media’s long, mindless hyping of an essentially inconsequential event to the credulity required to believe that Petraeus was going to say anything that the White House hadn’t written for him in the first place.
The John Hodgman commentary segment is also very worthy of the show’s rightly sterling reputation, especially insofar as it highlights the constant re-/non-definition of success in Iraq such that no one has any idea what “success” is actually supposed to entail. Tim’s Orwell post is especially appropriate in light of all this—the drawdown in troops beginning in March due to the Army’s reaching its logistical limits, which was announced months ago, is now rebranded during the Petraeus speech as proof of the surge’s success. Chocolate rations up again.