Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘polling

And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too

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Friday Links!

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* Terrible news from UWM: The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) is facing an unprecedented attack on its very existence.

* CFP for SLSA 2016: “Creativity.”

The shift from a subordinate learner as a grad student to a would-be peer on the job market is one of the most predictable traumas in an academic’s life, inducing professional and emotional distress in almost everyone who encounters it. I think this is true, but I wish we would encourage graduate students not to think of themselves so much as students in the first place.

* Ursula K. Le Guin on the Game of Fibble. Played on a Scrabble board.

Raucous confrontation at SF State over ethnic studies cuts.

* Melissa Click has been fired by the University of Missouri Board of Curators.

Washington State Prof Charged With $8M Research Fraud.

* MFA vs CIA.

Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico (R-Grayson) said that books such as “Beloved” plant the seeds of evil in the minds of young people. This country’s gone completely mad.

* A 150-Year Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis.

* Nuclear waste dumped illegally in Ky. Poverty across Wisconsin reaches highest level in 30 years. Lead Warnings Issued for Pregnant Women, Kids in Jackson, Mississippi. Iowa Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Let Kids Have Handguns. America’s airlines are introducing a class below economy. America is pulling apart.

A woman who was arrested at a hospital over the summer for failing to pay court fines died the next day because she was deprived of water at the Charleston County jail, her family’s attorneys said Wednesday.

* We’ve all thought about it: High School Honors Student Was Actually a Creepy Adult Pretending to Be a Kid.

Facebook’s Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.

This goes with another point: drones are a signal departure from the impersonal destruction that typifies modern technologically advanced warfare, in which the attacker rarely perceives his individual victims. The drone pilot, in contrast, even though he is thousands of miles away, spends many hours closely observing his victim and those near him, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The stories are about both the killers and the killed.

A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. Counterpoint: A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

* The Mirror Universe: A Historical Analysis.

How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story.

* “Unintelligible yelling.”

* “Asteroid Will Pass Agonizingly Close To Earth.”

* In this article Huntington’s disease becomes the core of the case for editing genes, against even blindness on the other side. I wrote about it!

Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.

“I felt nothing,” she told me, smiling. “He was a dog thief, after all.”

Finally we find that 38% of Florida voters think it’s possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. 10% say he for sure is, and another 28% say that they are just not sure. Cruz is exonerated from being a toddler serial killer by 62% of the Sunshine State populace.

Monday Night Links

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* It’s been fifty years since the Greensboro Sit-Ins. Appropriate the city’s Civil Rights Museum, long vaporware, finally opened today.

* Bill Watterson has given his first interview since 1989. The grown-up Calvin & Hobbes post is still, by a good bit, my most popular post ever; there are, of course, many others.

* At right: The Ultimate Graphic Novel. Via SEK.

* Arrested Development with a laugh track. Bad, bad. Via that notorious AD fan, @drbluman.

* Defense as percent of GDP. Related: Visualizing Obama’s 2011 budget.

* Polling proves there are only five Republican states. Five too many, naturally.

* More Obama counternarrative: John Judis on rebuilding the federal bureaucracy. Kim Stanley Robinson hit this note more than once during his campus visit last week. (more on this in a bit).

* Counter-counternarrative: Obama’s new nuke push is a bad idea.

Sunday Links 2

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Sunday links 2.

* For all you IJers out there, Infinite Summer has your David Foster Wallace humor minute.

* Hate crime protection for the homeless? Hate crimes are, in general, a very thorny legal issue, but in light of so much violence directed specifically at the homeless it makes sense to see them as a class in need of additional protection.

* Terminator 4 was so good they’re going to make Terminator 5.

* Polling headline of the week: ‘GOP’s Rating with Latinos Falls to Margin of Error.’

* Rachel Maddow on the success of astroturfed right-wing protests since the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000. Via Cyn-C.

* And Eric Holder is still inching towards prosecution of the Bush administration, though in terms of scale and scope the proposed investigation remains far too cautious.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 9, 2009 at 7:21 pm

Stimulus Package

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My days of childishly giggles over the term “stimulus package” may soon be over: a deal has apparently been reached that can pass the Senate. Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight has some valuable first-month lessons for Obama, the most important of which is that bipartisanship is bunk.

Written by gerrycanavan

February 7, 2009 at 5:05 am