Posts Tagged ‘Raleigh’
Monday Morning Links
* An Illustrated Account of the Great Maple Syrup Heist.
* The 85 richest people on the planet are as wealthy as poorest half of the world.
* Slate has a memo from MLK following the desegregation of Montgomery’s bus lines.
* The problem, Berger concluded, was that “the Cubists imagined the world transformed but not the process of transformation.” It is that larger question – the process of actually getting to another world — that takes us beyond the artist and challenges the Left as a whole to cope with what can be done in this current moment of widespread disillusionment. Art in the Age of Fatalism.
* If we don’t greatly reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, or completely eliminate them, a major city is going to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon. It’s remarkable—it’s incredible!—that a major city hasn’t been destroyed since Nagasaki. We can confront this problem or we can accept that hundreds of thousands or more will be killed.
* 14 Things We Learned from Bill Murray’s Reddit AMA. Bill Murray says he tried mightily to save Garfield.
* About 100 demonstrators rallied Friday outside the Safety Building to denounce Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm for his decision not to issue charges in the death of Corey Stingley.
* Dropouts with heavy debt litter for-profit college landscape in Wisconsin, new report says.
* “The world does not understand the settlements,” Livni said in a Channel 2 TV news interview. “The peace negotiations are the wall stopping the wave [of international boycott pressure]. If there is a crisis [in the talks, that wave] will crash through.”
* Planet Likely to Warm by 4C by 2100.
* The Myth of the Deserving Rich.
* Responses to Grantland’s Trans Outing.
* Famous movie quotes recreated as pictograms.
* Book reimagines ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from a cat’s point of view.
* Debating executive salaries at MLA.
* Melville and the Language of Denial.
* The president is quoted today saying some things I never excepted a president to say.
* Even cough medicine is a lie.
* What if saving could be like a lottery?
* Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007. If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation. The National Review visits Appalachia, and somehow manages to blame welfare.
* Meanwhile: Heroin gains a deadly foothold in Vermont.
* The headline reads, “Thief drops urn containing Sigmund Freud’s ashes during break-in attempt.”
* Ultimate Slate Pitch? I Would Rather Lick a Toilet Seat Than a Cellphone.
* What’s Inside This Mystery House In North Carolina?
* Isn’t it pretty to think so? As Presently Constructed, GOP Cannot Win White House. More here. They say the Democrats can’t lose. I say give them a chance.
* The Average Human Wastes 22 Years Of Their Life… Sleeping.
* Why Expanded Universes Matter.
* I saw this movie: Starting next week, all Indianapolis-area hospitals will ban visitors with flu-like symptoms.
* Adjuncts exist, and the New York Times is ON IT.
* During World War Two, conscientious objectors in the US and the UK were asked to volunteer for medical research. In one project in the US, young men were starved for six months to help experts decide how to treat victims of mass starvation in Europe.
* Judge Dredd now enforcing jaywalking laws in New York, apparently.
* And someone left a laptop on a park bench.
The Koch Brothers in North Carolina
How the Koch Brothers Funded Public School Segregation.
The story starts back in 2009, when elections were held for four of the Wake County’s nine school board seats—enough seats to dictate the public school district’s agenda if all four board members wanted the same reforms. That’s where Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group founded and funded by the Koch brothers, came into play. AFP, as it’s known, swooped in to fund and organize on behalf of four candidates who sought to kill the district’s policy of bussing to ensure diverse, de-segregated public schools. The AFP-backed candidates ran against what they called “forced busing”—a phrase, the film points out, that dates back to George Wallace in the 1970s—and instead stressed that schools should educate only those who lived in the surrounding neighborhood.
Local reporters, some of whom are interviewed in the film, connected the push to eliminate bussing with the philosophies of AFP and its funders. “They’re definitely pushing an agenda to re-segregate these schools, but there’s also a real push toward privatization,” Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film.
Nukes in the U.S.
Study: U.S. States ‘Poorly Prepared’ For Radiation Emergency. I’ve been hoping the Independent Weekly takes this opportunity to investigate safety features at Shearon Harris, which (like the plants at Fukushima) stores its spent fuel rods on site.
Monday Links!
* Fredric Jameson previews his new book, Representing Capital.
You will now have understood that this distinction between politics and economics, between the achievable Utopia of the Utopian planners and the deep unconscious absolute Utopian impulse, is one between the social-democratic moment and the moment of communism. Communism can only be posited as a radical, even unimaginable break; socialism is an essentially political process within our present, within our system, which is to say within capitalism itself. Socialism is capitalism’s dream of a perfected system. Communism is that unimaginable fulfillment of a radical alternative that cannot even be dreamt.
* Unexpectedly, grad school lowers your blood pressure. It doesn’t seem right to me either.
* The GOP thinks not enough people are unemployed. Calculated Risk has a brief history of the current catastrophe.
* Wisconsin has some buyer’s remorse.
* More on hydrofracking: How radioactive is Pittsburgh’s drinking water? What’s fracking going to do to New York?
* First Big Coal Broke the Union. Then It Broke This Town.
* Trailer for the American remake of The King’s Speech.
* Scientists in Hollywood. The focus is on Natalie Portman and Mayim Bialik.
* And Jon Hamm, Superman. I’m sure yet another version of the origin story will be great, though.
The Pubic Option
Health care protesters in Raleigh take a much-needed stand against the pubic option.
There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh
The difference is that in Raleigh, in 1976, the Wake County Public School system was created to zone the suburbs and inner city together to ensure a continued healthy mix of social classes.
Infinite Linkdump Thursday
Truly this is a summer of infinite linkdumps. Things will only get worse once summer camp starts.
* Glad to see pseudo-liveblogging tenure denial II has the happy ending I was expecting.
* Raleigh slime monster update.
* The Universal Translator is here! This is pretty amazing.
* Push is a simple sidescroller with a unique “cosmic distortion” gimmick.
* ‘How Beckham Blew It’: Inside the L.A. Galaxy.
* Bank runs, Amish style. Not a hoax, not an imaginary story.
* Yo La Tengo rocks the Twitter.
North Carolina in the News!
A longtime reader sends this link to io9’s coverage of disgusting alien slime monsters living underneath Raleigh, North Carolina. Note: I’m not kidding; the video is, in fact, disgusting. Stay safe, Raleigh.
Advantage: Triangle
Raleigh is #1 and Durham #3 in Forbes‘s list of top cities for business and careers. Will Durham never climb out of Raleigh’s terrible shadow?
Gerry Canavan 