Posts Tagged ‘Red Scare’
Weekend Links!
* Star Trek and Lovecraft. Via r/daystrominstitute.
* The worst threat to higher education is its administration.
* Judge Rules Against Marquette Professor Over Public Rebuke of TA.
* Police Officer Who Fatally Shot 15-Year-Old Texas Boy Is Charged With Murder.
* Delta boots family off red-eye flight, threatens kids with “foster care.”
* Thank your parents: GOP Health Bill Jeopardizes Out-of-Pocket Caps in Employer Plans. The New Study That Shows Trumpcare’s Damage. Senate won’t vote on House-passed healthcare bill.That makes it more likely they’ll be able to pass something, unfortunately. Every Republican who voted for this abomination must be held accountable. Mail me to the GOP. It just gets worse every day.
* It just gets worse, every day.
* A Principal Is Accused of Being a Communist, Rattling a Brooklyn School.
* Not even the dead will be safe if our enemy is victorious: You could soon be able to relive Hillary Clinton’s defeat every week on TV.
* Why would you bother doing Inhumans if you can’t do Medusa’s hair?
* HBO is developing 4 different Game Of Thrones spin-offs.
* The executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Seth Baum, and his colleagues describe what they call a double catastrophe scenario whereby an initial catastrophe, such as a major war between states that causes societal collapse, disrupts the regular injection of aerosols into the stratosphere, thereby causing a second catastrophe involving the climate. The latter event could induce widespread famines, social unrest, and economic meltdowns — or, at the extreme, it could precipitate a runaway greenhouse effect that turns Earth into an uninhabitable hellish cauldron like our planetary neighbor Venus. The result would be human extinction. In a phrase, once a stratospheric geoengineering program has been established by anyone, anywhere, it must not be interrupted for any reason, especially not abruptly. But one or more interruptions cannot be ruled out, hence the existential danger.
* The cold equations: Disney started over on Star Wars: Episode IX after Carrie Fisher’s death.
* It didn’t work. There’s only four types of people, and three of them are bad. True story. Don’t be nervous, they said. The three pillars of Canavanism. Another caption that works for any New Yorker cartoon. There will be no miracles here.
* And teach the controversy: how long ago and far away was it, really?
Thank God It’s Monday Links
* I have a pair of appearances in the new Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction: one the transcript of the archival research panel at the last ICFA, and the other a writeup of the Octavia E. Butler papers at the Huntington. Boing Boing liked it, so should you!
* Islam and Science Fiction: An Interview with Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad.
* Deadline extended: “In More’s Footsteps: Utopia and Science Fiction.”
* There’s only 37 stories, and we tell them over and over.
* The reason for the season: China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween – Socialism 2013.
* African American Review has a special issue devoted to Samuel R. Delany.
* The layoffs and program reductions will save Rider close to $2 million annually once the changes take effect next school year, the university said. The university has a $216 million operating budget and faces a current deficit of $7.6 million, a school spokesman said.
* In the Midst of Union Battle, Duquesne University Just Laid Off All but One of Its English Adjuncts.
* The Philosophy of Adjuncting: A Syllabus.
* A Florida college will force job applicants to bid salary.
* What I Learned From Cutting 300 Pages Out Of My Epic Trilogy.
* The Secret Lives of ‘Star Wars’ Extras.
* School and prison, school as prison, yes. But the most troubling possibility, I think, is school or prison. By using this locution, I don’t intend to invoke the uplift narrative that posits education as a means of avoiding criminality or, really, criminalization—a narrative that the “school-to-prison pipeline” concept has already undone. The or of my “school or prison” marks not a choice between alternatives but an identity produced through the indifferent interchangeability of functions.
* The more unequal your society is, the more your laws will favor the rich.
* Haruki Murakami’s Monopoly. And why not: Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter.
* How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Revived Modern Myth-Telling. The Catholic Fantasies of Chesterton and Tolkien.
* “It Follows”: Contemporary Horror and the Feminization of Labor.
* 53 years after his firing, college professor gets apology.
* Penny booksellers are exactly the sort of weedy company that springs up in the cracks of the waste that the Internet has laid to creative industries. They aren’t a cause; they’re a small, understandable result. Penny booksellers expose the deep downside to efficiency capitalism, which is that everything, even literal garbage and rare high art, is now as easy to find and roughly as personal as a spare iPhone charging cable.
* The Winner of the Latest GOP Debate Was, Hands Down, Patton Oswalt.
* We must resist the market forces destroying our universities.
* George Romero digs up a lost scene from Night Of The Living Dead.
* Teach the controversy: “The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.”
* And while we’re at it: Jar Jar Binks was a trained Force user, knowing Sith collaborator, and will play a central role in The Force Awakens.
* This Chart Shows How The US Military Is Responsible For Almost All The Technology In Your iPhone.
* Chimera watch: A Man is His Son’s Uncle, Thanks to a Vanished Twin.
* Google, Tesla, others wait for DMV’s self-driving rules.
* Bikini islanders seek US refuge as sea levels threaten homes. But it’s not all bad news! No, Climate Change Won’t Make the Persian Gulf “Uninhabitable.”
* It really depends what the meaning of “interdisciplinary” is.
* I’ll allow it, but listen, you’re on very thin ice: Wes Anderson would like to make a horror movie.
* Things My Newborn Has Done That Remind Me of the Existential Horror of the Human Experience.
* After 40 Years, Dungeons & Dragons Still Brings Players To The Table.
* Really now, don’t say it unless you mean it.
* Huge if true: Milwaukee County Sheriff Predicts Black Lives Matter Will Soon Join Forces with ISIS.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life.
These Tuesday Links Surround Hate and Force It to Surrender
* Pete Seeger before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1955. This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. Some recent articles and profiles. RIP.
* CFP: New Directions in Sherlock.
* Amazing moment: Northwestern University athletes have filed for union representation with the NRLB. Now, I don’t think they’ll get it — so the really interesting question is what happens when they don’t.
* Rabon, a veterinarian, said he believes House Bill 930 is too weak. He said its standards for humane treatment could too easily be interpreted by a judge to apply to livestock as well as pets. “It can’t spill over to the animal husbandry in this state, which is an $80 billion industry – larger than the other top five industries in the state,” he said. “There is a LOT of money involved.”
* Freddie deBoer has a nice demonstration of how statistics don’t always tell you as much as you think.
* Instead of guaranteeing that poor undergraduates can get through college debt-free, the University of Virginia decided it’s going to make low-income students borrow up to $28,000.
* More on the brokenness of the Common Core.
* The new face of food stamps. Of the top five jobs projected to grow from 2012 to 2022, only one—registered nurse—provides an annual, full-time salary over $22,000.
* The Fantasy Politics of the Libertarian Alliance.
* BREAKING: The past isn’t done with you yet.
With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about their effectiveness, lawmakers in some death-penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.
* Kubrick’s alternate titles for Dr. Strangelove.
* Jonathan Banks is officially part of Better Call Saul.
* Lawsuit Blames Uber App for Death of 6-Year-Old Girl.
* West Virginia as colonized zone.
* Five years into his presidency, Obama has finally issued an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contracts. Can solving climate change be far behind?
* “Academic freedom” is a funny phrase: New York bill to punish ASA over Israel boycott picks up 48 supporters.
* Florida Man’s Very Own Backyard Gun Range Is Perfectly Legal.
* Marquette just got $10 million to build a new JesRes.
* An 83-year-old nun faces up to 30 years in prison for breaking into a nuclear weapons facility.
* Here’s why Ezra Klein left the Washington Post. This is my skeptical face, but good luck.
* Horrific: After Being Denied A Snow Day, University Of Illinois Students Respond With Racism And Sexism.
* The crisis is over! Colleges are rich again!
* Queens Library president gets $390G salary, luxe office makeover while shedding 130 jobs.
* BREAKING: Austerity politics don’t work. No one could have predicted!
* A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Birds Attack Peace Doves Freed From Pope’s Window.
* Let kids be kids: Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says. The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
* The invention of jaywalking.
* Understand academic labor the Brady Bunch way.
* Rebecca Schuman hangs up on her “calling.”
* And some linkbait I can never resist: 22 Unbelievable Places that are Hard to Believe Really Exist.
Tuesday Links
* Stanley Fish unexpectedly discovers academics are workers too.
* Chris Christie takes a hit from the NJ courts.
“The difficulty in addressing New Jersey’s fiscal crisis and its constitutionally mandated obligation to educate our children requires an exquisite balance not easily attained,” Doyne wrote. “Something need be done to equitably address these competing imperatives. That answer, though, is beyond the purview of this report. For the limited question posed to the Master, it is clear the State has failed to carry its burden.”
* Smart people who disagree with me about Libya: Juan Cole, Aaron Bady.
* But this, too, from Dylan Matthews:
…This is why Leon Wieseltier’s defense of the intervention is so infuriating. He mocks Ezra’s point on the relative benefits of spending money fighting Libya versus spending money fighting malaria, asking, “Did our inaction in Rwanda reduce the frequency of malaria in Africa?” The point seems to be that malaria eradication may be a better goal, but it’s not politically tenable, and in light of that, intervening in Libya is a good second-best option in humanitarian terms.
But one reason that humanitarian intervention is so much more politically tenable than anti-malaria spending is that Leon Wieseltier, most everyone else at The New Republic, and a whole lot of other liberal hawks in DC have made it their mission for the past 20+ years to make it politically tenable. If he and his comrades thought anti-malaria spending was a better idea, then they should have spent time arguing that instead. But they didn’t. And turning around when called on it and saying, “Well yes, this is a second best option” is really bizarre.
* And Mother Jones has your list of Communists Muslims in the State department. Remain vigilant, citizens! Traitors are everywhere.
Gerry Canavan 