Posts Tagged ‘revolution’
New Year, New Pandemic Links
Depressingly relevant New Years cartoon from exactly 100 years ago, at the end of our previous deadly pandemic. pic.twitter.com/aE3HBnwqgF
— Derf Backderf (@DerfBackderf) December 31, 2021
* Brace for Omicron. Wisconsin COVID-19 case counts matching levels not seen since November 2020. Omicron is spreading at lightning speed. Scientists are trying to figure out why. Where are hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients? Look up your state. After Vaccines: Where Covid Death Rates Have Risen. Omicron Is Pushing America Into Soft Lockdown. “Things will likely get worse, experts warn.” As Omicron Looms, These Colleges Will Start Their January Classes Online. Junior year. You don’t say. In this Midwestern diner, patrons are sticking with coronavirus.
It’s honestly amazing that the CDC released guidelines lowering the time you have to isolate after COVID and the only stated reason was “well, too many people were getting sick”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2021
not great https://t.co/EI0JJ53Q3B
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 3, 2022
* The pandemic killed so many dialysis patients that their total number shrunk for the first time in nearly half a century.
* Flood of Creative Works Enter the Public Domain on Jan. 1.
https://t.co/IAQPLJRZ6C pic.twitter.com/A6S0mYQdrv
— Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) December 24, 2021
Please note that Disney’s depiction of Winnie the Pooh is still under copyright. It’s the character from the books that entered the public domain.
— Tim X. Price (@timxprice) January 3, 2022
Red shirt on the bear, artists beware. If nude he be, your Pooh is free.
winniethepoohraunchysexcomedy.xxxversion.20220101draft.v3.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2022
* Absolutely beautiful, don’t even care if it’s true.
succinct explanation for why all the people who said online isn’t the future of higher ed were 100% right https://t.co/emMVfKMn9e
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2021
Universities and the ideals they stand for die when you starve departments based on engineered crises and then create a discretionary slush fund that exists entirely outside faculty control.
— Philip Rocco (@PhilipRocco) December 24, 2021
obviously going online mitigates (some of) the harms from teaching but the only way to truly help our most disadvantaged students is to abolish education altogether https://t.co/MKTBzFzkPT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 30, 2021
* How Will the History Books Remember 2021?
* Retired general recommends wargaming potential coup scenarios. That’s just prudent!
* America’s Electoral Future. What elections?
* Redistricting is Going Surprisingly Well for Democrats. Oh, honey.
* The Twitter Putsch. The Big Lie.
* John Roberts, Democratic hero. Joe Biden Has Been Very Good for the Military-Industrial Complex.
* Milwaukee ranks 2nd in poverty level among top 50 most-populated cities in U.S.
* Non-Mortgage Household Debt in the United States, 2003-2022.
* Fast-Moving Wildfires Burn Hundreds of Homes in Denver Area. ‘We Are in a Climate Emergency.’
* ‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All. The climate apocalypse is real, and it is coming. The trap of climate optimism.
I was thinking about the climate and the "it doesn't even feel like Christmas" tweet and then I remembered this off-the-cuff answer I gave to a Q&A a few years back that has haunted me ever since https://t.co/uGdbY5etlG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 24, 2021
yikes https://t.co/xaGcMuVhaA
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 3, 2022
* We stan.
* We’re preparing for apocalypse wrong — and that could make things even worse. What The Marvel Movies Don’t Say About The End Of The World.
But taken together, at the 100,000-foot level, the fact that each property is basically about someone doing what they were doing anyway, then having to deal with some new iteration of surreal but familiar external forces invading, and never having any time to really think about what it all means because the next thing is already happening, as it turns out — now that we really do live in a notable historical period of continual surreal events that could make you question the foundations of society — everyone has to continue doing what they were doing anyway when the world is ending, and you’ll never have that much time to think about what it all means because the demands of the next thing will be upon you.
What does it feel like when the world ends? It just feels like aliens invading until something else happens.

* The Subversive Playfulness of the ‘The Matrix.’ ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ captures the real crisis of our post-truth era. ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ Is the Anti-sequel Sequel. The Matrix Resurrections is a messy triumph. Too many movies right now are “about trauma.” The Matrix Resurrections actually does the work. Why trans fans connect to ‘The Matrix’. On the Matrix Resurrections. Blank Check. Even Neo Can’t Log Off.
Even putting the oddness with the actor who played Tank aside, you still have the reboot doing multiple very weird, sidelining things with the Morpheus character, arguably the most iconic of the core three and the heart of the first movie, and don't even get me started on Niobe.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 25, 2021
.@GriffLightning and @davidlsims had some reflections on the latest @blankcheckpod on Zoom life as a sort of uncanny and exhausting performance of what used to “come naturally” that I think could be really valuable for teachers wondering why the last two years have felt so bad.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2022
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2022
change my mind pic.twitter.com/pbF8PmJade
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 27, 2021
* Another person discovers the terrible truth about jazz in the Star Wars universe.
* The case against the trauma plot.
* Placement games were 2021’s most calming trend. Black Games Studies.
* LARB’s top-ten most-read of 2021.
* The Radical James Baldwin.
* The End of Neoliberalism in Chile?
* Space Colonists Will Likely Resort to Cannibalism, Scientist Says. Henry Kissinger: AI Will Prompt Consideration of What it Means to Be Human.
* Routine Maintenance: Embracing habit in an automated world.
* Why am I being hurt?
* The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts school, still uses electric shock therapy to punish disabled students. How can an entire field of mental health accept this as fine?
* Death Drive Nation.
* I’m older than Frasier. I’m older than Cliff Claven.
* Behold: Star Trek: Coda.
* What are you doing? Listen to Man Bites Dog.
* And the news just gets worse: Exercise necessary for older people later in life, study says.
IN & OUT FOR 2022
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2022
out: complaining about how individual years are bad, pretending you believe in astrology
in: overthrowing capitalism, pretending you believe birth-order determines destiny
Don’t Look Up (2021) pic.twitter.com/Kz1AuFof4D
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2021
what I think my classes are like / what they’re actually like pic.twitter.com/mc2hvJPSUN
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 24, 2021
— mike🌵 (@kurtruslfanclub) December 31, 2021
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 24, 2021
Written by gerrycanavan
January 3, 2022 at 4:15 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2022, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, Afrofuturism, artificial intelligence, autism, blackness, Blank Check, cannibalism, Cheers, Chile, death drive, disability, Doughboys, exercise, Frasier, games, habit, Henry Kissinger, I grow old, James Baldwin, jazz, Los Angeles Reviews of Books, memes, neoliberalism, NFTs, outer space, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, revolution, science fiction, Star Trek, Star Trek novels, Star Wars, teaching, The Matrix, The Matrix Resurrections, therapy, trauma, Utopia
Wednesday Links!
* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.
* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.
* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.
* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.
* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.
* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.
* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.
* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.
* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in “The Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self.
* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
* El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.
* Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?
* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College football’s leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be ‘highest risk’ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.
* What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?
* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.
* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.
Happy July, everyone! Unfortunately, I'm convinced that this month will be one of the worst months that American higher education has experienced in a long time. Thread alert. (1/)
— Robert Kelchen (@rkelchen) July 1, 2020
At root, the political economy of colleges and universities in the United States has been rebuilt in a matter of several decades around an understanding of higher education as a service sold to student consumers rather than a public good.
— Aaron Jakes (@aaronjakes) July 3, 2020
Three truths about the upcoming semester:
1. Any F2F class is going to be awkward, weird, and uncomfortable. Stop pretending it won't be.
2. We will all be online at some point whether one wants to admit it or not.
3. There will be illnesses and deaths that were preventable.— HyFlex Course in Radical Left Indoctrination (@TheTattooedProf) July 14, 2020
I imagine I’d have mixed feelings if it were my workplace knowing that none of us are getting paid and that if the coronavirus that is being inflicted upon us by our millionaire bosses permanently damages our lungs we lose our scholarships https://t.co/taGTpA4ZMk
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 27, 2020
* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. ‘One Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.’ ‘I Can’t Keep Doing This:’ Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
Liberals were right about George W Bush and they’re right about Donald Trump. The Republican Party is a political party incapable of governing the nation without ushering in death, devastation, and national humiliation. Just the facts.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 11, 2020
This is a poem about America. pic.twitter.com/QsaCb3GwVS
— Amanda Guinzburg (@Guinz) July 8, 2020
I would say that the coronavirus period in the US has been characterized by the pathological refusal to prioritize anything over anything else, in accordance with the larger neoliberal tendency to pretend all social outcomes are exclusively the product of autonomous market action https://t.co/bvmSPlt67S
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 27, 2020
Prince literally said two thousand zero zero party OOP it’s out of time and we didn’t listen
— Wʏɴᴛᴇʀ Mɪᴛᴄʜᴇʟʟ (Rᴏʜʀʙᴀᴜɢʜ) (@wyntermitchell) July 13, 2020
* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.
* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. California’s slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.
* Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?
* Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.
* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.
* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to “Normal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.
* Damn, that is an American airline.
* The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.
* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.
* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.
* Starship Troopers and American decline.
* Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.
* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” and Fighting the Good Fight.
* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.
* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?
* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders… and It’s Not Halloween.
* Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.
* The blog started “innocently enough” and just “got out of hand.”
* Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. ‘The Flag is Coming Down’: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.
* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.
Wisconsin GOP wins power in 2010, gerrymander the legislature such that they can win a supermajority of seats without a majority of votes, pack the state courts, and raise new barriers and obstacles to voting. When Democrats win nonetheless, they strip power from the offices. https://t.co/yaIC43V7zi
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 9, 2020
* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schools’ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.
* How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.
* According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.
I've skimmed the Democrats' brand new climate plan and it stinks! https://t.co/jbVdecOUEO
— Mike Pearl (@MikeLeePearl) June 30, 2020
* How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.
* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.
* This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.
* What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.
* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.
A reminder that after he returned from destroying the ring, Frodo temporarily served as Deputy Mayor of the Shire, and his sole act was to defund the police pic.twitter.com/jmEVWzOvmP
— Samuel Miller McDonald (@sjmmcd) June 27, 2020
* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.
* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.
* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.
* ‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.
* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.
Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.
— Daphne K. Lee (@daphnekylee) June 28, 2020
* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.
* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe.
* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the “zone of avoidance.” My sci-fi novel just got a title…
* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.
* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.
* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.
J.K. Rowling, again, is arguably the most successful person of her generation in her field, revered internationally, and a billionaire, and she has nonetheless made herself a miserable pariah through this pathetic, deluded obsession with other people’s genitals. makes you think https://t.co/5eXlQtbyqU
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2020
1. abolish the suburbs
2. attack and dethrone god
3. taco trucks on every corner
4. hamburgers eat people https://t.co/gRhNWXXFcA— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2020
* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.
* A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.
* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
* A short story about Serena Williams.
if you know where i can buy this nuclear waste warning message live-laugh-love sign, please get at me because i’ve been thinking about it for a month now and will not rest until it is in my home pic.twitter.com/988H0cID64
— jane c. hu (@jane_c_hu) July 1, 2020
* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.
* Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me.
* Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.
* Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?
* The Life-Threatening “Ride” That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.
* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.
* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.
* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.
* Please scream inside your heart.
* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.
if you know where i can buy this nuclear waste warning message live-laugh-love sign, please get at me because i’ve been thinking about it for a month now and will not rest until it is in my home pic.twitter.com/988H0cID64
— jane c. hu (@jane_c_hu) July 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
July 15, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1999, academia, Action Park, adjunctification, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, air travel, America, American Airlines, amusement parks, animal studies, apocalypse, Arizona, astronomers, Beirut, Big Bird, Biosphere 2, Black Panther 2, blackface, cars, Cedric Burrows, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, Clone High, coffee, collapse, college closures, Colson Whitehead, comic boos, community, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dan Hassler-Forest, Dead Astronauts, decline, decolonize everything, denial, deportation, disability, domestic violence, Donald Trump, dystopia, epidemic, equity, expertise, Extrapolation, Far Side, film, folklore, found poetry, fracking, franchise fiction, franchises, fraud, free speech, game studies, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, Ghislaine Maxwell, Golden Compass, Golden Girls, Hamilton, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, Hell, His Dark Materials, hoaxes, How the University Works, ice, illiberalism, immigration, Ishmael Reed, J.K. Rowling, Janelle Monae, Jeff Vandermeer, Jim Henson, kids today, Kung Fu Nuns of Kathmandu, Latin America, liberalism, Locus Award, Marquette, Mars, McDonald's, medical humanities, medicine, millennials, movies, Mt. Rushmore, Muppets, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, nerds, New York, North Carolina, Obama, Octavia Butler, one-party rule, online classes, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, Philip Pullman, podcasts, police, politics, poverty, Prince, quarantine, race, racial slurs, racism, rape, rape culture, Reddit, religion, Republicans, resistance, revenge bedtime procrastination, revolution, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scrabble, Second Great Depression?, Serena Williams, sexual assault, Shakespeare, Silicon Valley, sleep, socialism, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, stimulus package, Storm, suicide, teaching, tech industry, tennis, tenure, the Anthropocene, The Book of Martha, the courts, the deaf, the economy, the humanities, the law, theme parks, Thomas Jefferson, trans* issues, true crime, Twin Peaks, unemployment, unschooling, Utopia, Vonnegut, Washington Racial Slurs, waste, white supremacy, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, zombies
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020
The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.
Crime went down. Way down.
Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS
— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020
“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo
— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020
Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy
— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020
you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg
— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg
— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.
For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”
— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020
Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.
— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020
What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.
— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020
For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR
— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?
— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020
Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm
— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B
— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019
Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
Written by gerrycanavan
June 27, 2020 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 1918, 2020, academia, academic publishing, Afrofuturism, aliens, America, amusement parks, Animal Crossing, anxiety, artificial intelligence, Arundhati Roy, Before the End, Before trilogy, Black Lives Matter, books, Boots Riley, Brooklyn 99, capitalism, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, cards against humanity, CFPs, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, college football, comedy, comics, comics studies, Confederate flag, coronavirus, COVID-19, culture war, Deadpool, decolonize everything, deportation, depression, Diplomacy, disability, Disney, Disney World, domestic violence, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk, emergencies, Facebook, Flannery O'Connor, fMRIs, football, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, George Floyd, Germany, Get Out, Gloomhaven, Gone with the Wind, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Grad School Vonnegut, Harriet Tubman, Harrison Bergeron, Harry Potter, haunted houses, Hemingway, Hitler, Hitler's alligator, Holdo maneuver, How the University Works, IAFA, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, improv, insurrection, J.K. Rowling, Jaws of the Lion, Joe Biden, John Boyega, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, LSU, maps, Marquette, Mars, masculinity, masks, mass movements, MCU, medicine, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mongolia, My Little Pony, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASCAR, Nazism, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, New York, Nintendo, no such thing as good news, Octavia Butler, Ori and the Blind Forest, pandemic, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Trickster, parenting, pedagogy, pedophilia, podcasts, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, porn, protests, QAnon, queer theory, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, remote learning, revolution, Rutgers, schools, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Seattle, Seattle commune, SFRA, six-word stories, Skynet, Snowpiercer, Song of the South, Springsteen, Star Wars, stimulus, Street Fighter, Taco Bell, teaching, Teddy Roosevelt, television, TERFs, the Confederacy, the economy, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi, The Office, The Princess and the Frog, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, This American Life, toxic masculinity, trans* issues, treasure, true crime, Tulsa massacre, UCB, unions, virtual learning, Vonnegut, voting, Warren Ellis, Watchmen, West Virginia, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, Zoomers, Žižek
Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links
* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).
* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”
* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.
* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.
* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.
Look, let's be real. The ultimate reason the economy "must" "reopen" is so that we everyone can once more be individually blamed for their own unemployment, desperation, etc in this coming depression. It is fundamentally dangerous to our system to have masses of people 1/2
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
simultaneously unable to work or make basic ends meet in a way that would suggest blame lies elsewhere than on them (whether in the virus, our leaders' failures, quarantine orders, market chicanery, etc), that is collectively experienced, and that might give them ideas. 2/3
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
this pandemic sharpens a divide that already existed, between those of us whose labor is "inessential" but who have the privilege of, basically, hibernating indefinitely, and those whose labor is "essential," but whose lives are treated as disposable
— Eric Weiskott (@ericweiskott) April 5, 2020
Everything we're doing – IE tokenistic "aid" (which just funnels money back to creditors and landlords) – is just the barest minimum not for survival, but to ensure that we can blame people for their own starvation and misery once things are "normal" again. That's it. 3/3
— inverted vibe curve: futurist edition (@PatBlanchfield) April 14, 2020
The wildcat strikes that are happening across the country now are important not just for their immediate goal of saving lives but in the long term they are the only thing we have to face down the monstrosity of austerity that this pandemic will leave it its wake.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) April 10, 2020
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wild billinair he parbly ben the las wyld billinair on Longisland any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint looking to see none agen. https://t.co/Q2xpiRAM1f
— Gregory Hays (@aristofontes) April 3, 2020
2020 is going really well. My timeline is mostly debating:
1. Would you kill a million Americans to save the economy?
2. Is it possible to save the economy by killing a million Americans?— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) April 16, 2020
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.
* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.
* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.
* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.
Hearing on Facebook that Zizek is uploading new chapters to his COVID book like DLC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.
* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.
* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.
* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.
* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.
* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.
Milwaukee resident Jennifer Taff requested an absentee ballot almost three weeks ago, never got it. She has a father dying from lung disease and then waited hours in line to vote at Washington High School. Photo from Patricia McKnight.
More: https://t.co/i7weo2xdfv pic.twitter.com/ceHb2i8zpC
— JR Radcliffe (@JRRadcliffe) April 7, 2020
The City of Milwaukee is experiencing a surge of cases on the south side, Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik says.
— Mary Spicuzza (@MSpicuzzaMJS) April 17, 2020
* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.
The United States is a failed state: Five theses. pic.twitter.com/VbtrsZajIH
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) April 6, 2020
By including Kentucky, we are telling Iowa and Dakotas things about themselves in a tone that only Upper Midwesterners can hear. https://t.co/aQvfAdWTSZ
— Maggie Koerth (@maggiekb1) April 16, 2020
* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.
* Vegas after the end of the world.
This is going to be one of the iconic images of the pandemic, from photographer @todseelie:
Homeless Americans sleeping in taped squares in a parking lot, while the Las Vegas strip, full of empty hotel rooms, shimmers behind them. https://t.co/Sy2Qq5rcpK pic.twitter.com/QRZHckPZrt
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) April 15, 2020
* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.
* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?
EXACTLY https://t.co/tC1Djqb5FV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020
* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.
* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.
* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.
* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.
* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.
* In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.
* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.
Opening up the economy prematurely will kill off every small and marginal business in the country even if you don’t immediately have to go into shutdown again three weeks later (which you would). People are too freaked and won’t spend at their own levels, esp. in wide gatherings.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020
oh so no more restaurants then https://t.co/DOJTeDaway
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2020
Money is a social fiction, which you see in the way they can simply summon more out of the aether when they need it. But the amount of debt spending we’re all about to do is going to be hard to honor afterwards when we know perfectly well we could just say it all never happened.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 9, 2020
* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.
* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?
* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.
since the world is filled with rhinos and you can’t catch them all, you need social forms that are generous, resilient, and devoted to harm reduction, elimination, and amelioration, rather than the incredibly brittle and cruel modes of social organization we use now
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
the coronavirus memes are extremely good pic.twitter.com/3dkZMAeFIk
— love one another (@girlziplocked) April 13, 2020
* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.
* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.
* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.
Another rare but instantly iconic shot of the Muppets being puppeteered. Apparently Sesame Street is filming at their homes. pic.twitter.com/Fj8to2P1Wu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2020
* The case for teaching depressing books.
* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.
* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.
* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.
* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.
* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?
* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.
* why would her name be doogie too
* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.
* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?
I thought I’d predicted a PICARD-style deconstruction of the original jouissance of SAVED BY THE BELL, revealing the characters destroyed by time, but perhaps that one was just for me https://t.co/9a2vSCn7ZT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 16, 2020
* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.
* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.
* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.
* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.
One way of thinking the Anthropocene is that it is when geological time starts to move more quickly than historical time.
— chica marx (@mckenziewark) April 17, 2020
* At least this Hamilton video was fun.
* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.
* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 17, 2020 at 4:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, admissions, Adrian Tchaikovsky, AI, air pollution, alienation, aliens, Amazon, America, America in ruins, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, backwards universes, baseball, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, black swans, books, Boomers, call for papers, Cape Cod Statement, cats, Charles Yu, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, class struggle, climate change, COBOL, collapse, college, comics, Corey Robin, coronavirus, cost of thriving, COVID-19, cruises, cyberpunk, Deep Space 9, democracy, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, devolution, Donald Trump, Doogie Howser, elections, epidemic, extrasolar planets, failed states, Fox News, Fraggle Rock, futurity, general election 2020, grading, gray rhinos, guns, Hamilton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hugos, Joe Biden, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Las Vegas, lawsuits, LEGO, Los Angeles, medicine, megadrought, memes, Miami, middle class, Mike Pence, Milwaukee, money, movie theaters, Muppets, Navajo Nation, outer space, pandemic, podcasts, politics, Port Huron Statement, professional wrestling, protest, race, racism, Reddit, release the butthole cut, remdesivir, Republicans, resistance, restaurants, revolution, Saved by the Bell, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, stimulus, Stonehenge, strikes, Students for a Democratic Society, Tawain, teaching, the Anthropocene, The Apprentice, the economy, the humanities, the Midwest, The Ministry for the Future, the Moon, the sublime, the university in ruins, travel, UBI, unemployment, Utopia, vaccines, veepstakes, Vegas, voting, Weird Al, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, WWE, Žižek
Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links
* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…
* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery. It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.
Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020
* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?
* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.
* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.
* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.
* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.
* The One with the Coronavirus.
* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.
* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.
* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.
* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.
there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse
— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020
* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.
* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.
* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.
* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.
* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.
* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.
* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.
* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.
It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020
* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.
* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.
* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.
* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.
* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.
* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.
* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.
City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.
That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020
* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!
* Policing and the English language.
* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”
* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.
* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’
* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.
* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.
* The return of Rick and Morty.
* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 2, 2020 at 6:33 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, America, apocalypse, art, Big Oil, Big Soda, Britney Spears, Chicago, children's books, China Miéville, class struggle, college, college sports, condoms, coronovirus, crisis, cruise ships, Dan Albergotti, democracy, Democrats, depression, divorce, DNC, domestic violence, Donald Trump, eating meat, ecology, Elon Musk, Extrapolation, federalism, Felix Guattari, film, financial exigency, Frosthaven, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, hippos, homelessness, How the University Works, Joe Biden, journalism, kids today, language, Last Supper, loneliness, mad science, magnets, maps, Mario, medicine, Milwaukee, my scholarly empire, NCAA, New York, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, originalism, Pablo Escobar, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, Picard, plastic, poetry, police, politics, postdocs, prison-industrial complex, recession, remote learning, Republicans, revolution, Rick and Morty, Samuel R. Delany, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Second Great Depression?, social distancing, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, strikes, teaching, Ted Chiang, television, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The World's End, TNG, toilet paper, unemployment, Utopia, voting, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, xkcd, YA literature, Zoom
Feeling a Little Coronavirusty — Links
* This Twitter thread on the Imperial College modeling calling for 18 months or more of suppressive action was some of the most bracing reading on coronavirus I’ve seen yet. (This Buzzfeed article has a summary if that’s more your speed.) We are living through a nightmare. We’re not going back to normal. (UDPATE: Here’s a critique of the Imperial College study that got a lot of people spooked, including me, arguing that a few weeks of lockdown plus contact tracing and monitoring *can* prevent reemergence of the outbreak.)
* How long will social distancing for coronavirus have to last? Deciphering the pandemic: a guide to understanding the coronavirus numbers. How the US stacks up to other countries in confirmed coronavirus cases. The Single Most Important Lesson From the 1918 Influenza.
* 18% have lost jobs or hours in the last month. You Should Be Absolutely Terrified About the Economy. A Frantic Few Days for Restaurants Is Only the Beginning. Baseball Shutdown Sends Minor Leaguers Into Uncertain Future. The World of Books Braces for a Newly Ominous Future. Amazon’s Supply Chain Is Breaking and Small Businesses Are Screwed. There’s no one to pick the fruit. As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens Its Spread. It Has All Gone to Hell. Coronavirus is an indictment of our way of life. America is a sham. Big Pharma is ready.
Unemployment claims filed in Ohio:
Last Sunday: 536
This Sunday: 11,995
Monday: 36,645For tens of thousands of Ohioans the economic crisis is already here. We should have already voted on the House-passed bill.https://t.co/xCAUPzhgGW
— Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) March 18, 2020
* To stop a coronavirus quarantine recession, economists say send everyone cash—now. Romney! Dem Senators! Bernie Sanders Proposal for $2 Trillion Coronavirus Emergency Plan Includes $2,000 Direct Monthly Payments to Every American. He’ll just have to beat the Democrats to do it.
I was trying to figure out why this point wasn’t absolutely obvious to people but finally realized the point of the utterance is “blah blah blah blah I don’t need a check” https://t.co/K6gk4kg7Wq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 17, 2020
Haunted by family legends of great-grandparents who lost the stock to save the house, which they then lost anyway, or maybe it was the other way around, the point is they lost everything
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 16, 2020
We can only exist where capitalism is not. And this crisis is opening up such spaces. The question is whether it becomes a way to get back to "normal," or whether it wakes us up that "normal" wants us dead.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 16, 2020
banal point but it’s moments like this you realize our entire society is based on one premise: spend or die
— Quinn Slobodian (@zeithistoriker) March 16, 2020
* First confirmed patient in R.I. talks about surviving coronavirus. A Frontline Physician Speaks Out on the Coronavirus.
* Evers orders bars, restaurants closed; schools closed indefinitely. Vegas shuts down. Then: Spring breakers pack Florida beach despite coronavirus pandemic. Now: $6 flights to Fort Lauderdale.
* New York Is Now the Epicenter of the Coronavirus Crisis in the U.S. New York Will Be The Next Italy, But Doesn’t Have to Be.
Jerry's girlfriend demands to know if they're at "quarantine level"; George and Elaine pretend to date to get around the Uber pool ban; Kramer pretends to be an epidemiologist on twitter and gets retweeted by the President etc etc https://t.co/ZyHk2W1lWI
— Eric Lach (@ericlach) March 17, 2020
* They Went Off the Grid. They Came Back to the Coronavirus.
* COVID-19 and Collective Childcare.
* Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918.’ How Trump snapped out of coronavirus delusion mode. The Mar-a-Lago hot zone. Priorities. With masks at the ready, ICE agents make arrests on first day of California coronavirus lockdown.
* Some good news: Ventilator Maker: We Can Ramp Up Production Five-Fold. Coronavirus vaccine test opens with 1st doses. New cases and deaths in Italy may have reached their plateau.
* Isis issues coronavirus travel advice: terrorists should avoid Europe.
* Student advocates say coronavirus-related directives to move off campus threaten to reinforce existing inequalities and put disproportionate burdens on low-income and international students, among others. Why not simply make your online courses as human as possible? Coronavirus and the ruptured narrative of campus life.
* Social media giants warn of AI moderation errors as coronavirus empties offices. Coronavirus Is Changing Podcasting, Fast.
* Now is the time to overreact.
* …a properly dialectical critique does not criticise the reality of capitalism for failing to live up to its ideals; it criticises the ideals of capitalism for their, more or less hidden, reflection of that reality. What a dialectical critique shows is that better things aren’t possible, if we index possibilities to what appears possible according to the world as it is. But what it also shows is that better things are not only necessary, but real: a better world does not exist in the thwarted ideals of the present, but in the real processes that might abolish that present.
* Planet Plastic: How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. The Mad Men of Climate Denial. Coronavirus Lockdown May Save More Lives By Preventing Pollution Than By Preventing Infection. Welcome to the LEGOpocene.
* Chindogu are inventions that defy concise explanation. They aren’t useful. But they aren’t completely useless either. Their creator, Kenji Kawakami, describes them as “un-useless.” The Ten Tenets of Chindogu.
* The Rise of Impossibly Cute and Wholesome Games.
* Joe Biden has now essentially won the Democratic nomination. Ugh.
* Wrestlemania in a time of coronavirus.
* And Friday can’t get here fast enough. Save us, Nintendo!
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2020 at 8:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1918, academia, America, Animal Crossing, capitalism, childcare, chindogu, class struggle, climate change, college, coronavirus, Democratic primary 2020, Donald Trump, ecology, epidemic, Facebook, games, Grand Canyon, How the University Works, inventions, ISIS, Italy, Joe Biden, kids today, Mar-a-Lago, moderation, New York, Nintendo, off the grid, pandemic, parenting, Pee Wee Herman, podcasts, politics, professional wrestling, quarantine, revolution, Second Great Depression?, Seinfeld, social distancing, social media, Spanish flu, terrorism, the economy, UBI, unemployment, vaccines, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, Wrestlemania
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
“deenergization” https://t.co/bynSavKFBx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019
they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot, and passed a paradise preservation act for the remaining unpaved areas of paradise, then legalized heavy logging and oil exploration in paradise
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019
There's a point in every serious conversation about California's wildfire problem where you have to entertain the thought that literally every major policy decision of the twentieth century related to any aspect of the problem was wrong
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 27, 2019
The story of fire in California is:
10,000 years of native people using low-grade fire to manage forests
100 years of settlers repressing ALL fire as much as possible, causing forests to go haywire
50 years of wild, overbuilding settlement, climate change, and PG&E falling apart— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 28, 2019
“We’re not so different, you and I” https://t.co/iNqtZGzUkE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019
"we've got it stopped…"
the final words of the 1958 cult classic THE BLOB, meant to be matter of fact, read rather ominous fifty years later
"yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold"
— kai a. bosworth (@kaibosworth) October 27, 2019
"Science-fiction is the dying breath of old ways of living."
— Nick Axel (@alucidwake) October 27, 2019
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
Yeah that’s kind of the point https://t.co/Dl2ZAFyPDe
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 29, 2019
Oh you love the 90s huh. Name every short-sighted decision elites made that we are only now beginning to pay for.
— Ed Booooo-mila (@gin_and_tacos) October 26, 2019
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
I taught a class on cultural criticism in the digital age last year, & it was stunning the number of essays I assigned from shuttered sites or written by fired writers. I pitched it as a class abt contemporary discourse but slowly realized it was a class abt an historical period.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019
I imagined that class five years ago imagining it'd be a class about life and energy but had to eventually teach it as a class about loss and decline. That all these disavowed words are so fucking funny and smart and humane makes it all that much worse.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
OK, I think I figured it out: pic.twitter.com/GtpEpjH54T
— eve peyser (@evepeyser) October 22, 2019
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
You beat Trump by getting people who don’t normally vote to vote, not by beating your head against the wall trying to convince rich white men to change their minds about hurting people
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 18, 2019
True of basically everywhere in the US honestly. https://t.co/3AHHChEcFS
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019
I forget who said it, but respecting the powerful is called "civility" and should be held sacred, while respecting the powerless is called "political correctness" and should be the object of ridiculehttps://t.co/HmG4EYYUw7
— Seva (@SevaUT) October 25, 2019
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
OMG. This. pic.twitter.com/lPpud7dtSE
— Lou Anders needs to pick a book and stick with it (@LouAnders) October 20, 2019
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
Media and Social Class: A Guide https://t.co/eTztXfj1qB This is at least two years of grad school in literature for free. pic.twitter.com/j56AnoCJ0x
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2019
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
advance directive, colorize
backslash, commoditize
compact disc
fragile x
Lyme disease
de-stress
adjustable rate, identity
canola oil, therapy
neocon, pepper spray
WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY https://t.co/Pg1ADY7cpU— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2019
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 29, 2019 at 4:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11' 8", academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, alt-right, America, apocalypse, assassination, autism, Baby Boomers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Black Panther, blackouts, Booker Prize, Brexit, California, CBP, CFPs, Chile, China, Chuck E. Cheese, civility, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, coal, Coca-Cola, college sports, color, comics, culture, CUNY, cussing, data breaches, debt, deenergization, deportation, digital culture, disability, Disney, Do you hear the people sing?, Donald Trump, dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, Durham, eco-horror, ecology, Edward Snowden, Elizabeth Warren, Emmett Till, empire, English majors, Evil Dead, Exxon, fantasy, fifty-state strategy, film, Florida, Fox, Foxconn, fraternities, Fredric Jameson, Game of Thrones, games, general strike, Generation X, Generation Z, genocide, genre, Greta Thunberg, Handmaid's Tale, His Dark Materials, hitmen, Homestuck, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Iceland, immigration, impeachment, India, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John Roberts, Kashmir, Kentucky, kids today, Kirby, lead paint, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, lunch debt, maps, Margaret Atwood, Massachusetts, memorials, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, MOOCs, Mordor, my media empire, NCAA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Newsweek, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, oil, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, orcs, Pakistan, Pantone, parenting, Philip Pullman, politics, pollution, poverty, President Supervillain, prestige TV, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, radicalization, recession, remember the 90s?, resistance, revolution, San Francisco, Santa Ana, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science fiction, scooters, screen time, sea level rise, Silicon Valley, small liberal arts colleges, socialism, Star Wars, student debt, Supernova Era, surveillance, Swarthmore, Tarantino, television, tenure, the 2010s, the Amazon, the Arctic, the Blob, the Internet, The Testaments, The Wandering Earth, they paved paradise, Three-Body Problem, time travel, Tolkien, transgender issues, typing, United Kingdom, University of Maryland, Untitled Goose Game, UWM, villains, voting, Wakanda, war on education, water, we're not so different, WeWork, wildfire, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, xkcd, YouTube
Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!
* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.
* Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.
* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.
* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.
Call for papers: @UCRiverside Symposium on speculative futures and education: pic.twitter.com/4NSN0WqSnu
— Nalo Hopkinson (@Nalo_Hopkinson) October 3, 2019
* Get ready for the next recession.
* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.
The looting of higher ed https://t.co/crh0sNJpTx
— Kevin Modestino (@kevin_modestino) October 8, 2019
* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.
* Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.
* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.
* You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.
* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.
One year ago, Greta Thunberg began a one-person school strike.
This week, she will likely win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Her message to world leaders is really a message to all of us: "Change is coming whether you like it or not." https://t.co/UaP72pdIwE
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 7, 2019
* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.
it's clarifying to watch liberals who have spent three years bemoaning the ruin of US society yet again show that what they really mean by "norms" is the ability of celebrities to have telegenic feel-good moments of Being Normal with ghouls who have killed millions of people
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 8, 2019
* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.
* The Concern Troll in Everyone.
I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.
* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.
* Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.
* “every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”
every time i think about this poem i need to lie down pic.twitter.com/mQBBqqbNGY
— ava wolf (@wownicebuttdude) October 7, 2019
* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.
* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.
* Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.
* What can’t we remember our earliest years?
* And this gender reveal party has so much to teach us.
Every “gender reveal” is a fail https://t.co/5aL66brUok
— rhea butcher (@RheaButcher) October 7, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
October 8, 2019 at 4:35 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Ad Astra, administrative blight, Alan Moore, America, apocalypse, authoritarianism, automation, Barack Obama, billionaires, Bush, call for papers, capitalism, CFPs, change, China, class struggle, climate change, comics, corruption, Democratic primary 2020, disability, Donald Trump, Drexel University, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Ellen DeGeneres, Facebook, gender, Greta Thunberg, guns, Hong Kong, How the University Works, human resources, ice, impeachment, indigenous issues, Interstellar, John Roberts, Joker, kids today, liberalism, Lyft, Marquette, mass shootings, memory, Mitt Romney, Nalo Hopkinson, NBA, neoliberalism, Nobel Prize, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, poetry, politics, protest, recession, resistance, revolution, robots, Romney eats shit, sad dads, science fiction, social media, South Park, Supreme Court, the courts, the economy, the law, the Odyssey, the subway, the university in ruins, trolls, Uber, UC Riverside, Utopia
Monday Night Links!
* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.
These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019
* We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering.
* I study collapsed civilizations. Here’s my advice for a climate change apocalypse.
* I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.
* Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?
* US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria. Top Military Officers Unload on Trump. Sounds like my man is on the brink of self-impeaching. Trump at serious risk of losing the mandate of heaven. Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman: Trump wrong to seek help from Ukraine, China. ‘Out on a limb’: Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump’s possible impeachment. Trump allies sought Ukraine gas deal. Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson. Nine scenarios.
The belief that there will be some miraculous awakening by the 40 or so % (including elected GOP officials) who support Trump and they will suddenly or eventually realize his crimes are worthy of impeachment is similar in its total disconnect from reality to climate denial
— karl taro greenfeld (@karltaro) October 6, 2019
* Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.
* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.
* Slain witness Joshua Brown was expected to testify in lawsuit against Dallas police.
* How the Prison Economy Works.
* Journalist says a CBP officer withheld his passport until he agreed he writes ‘propaganda.’
* Robots to Cut 200,000 U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says.
i'm becoming of the opinion that late capitalism's insistence on skeletal staffing has made it more fragile and vulnerable to a general strike
— L'Shanah Dovahkiin (@CelticAnarchy) October 7, 2019
"I think all interesting movies are puzzles or dreams." – @david_rees, breaking our brains pic.twitter.com/fMcnv5mqO3
— Blank Check Podcast (@blankcheckpod) October 1, 2019
* 24 Reasons “Angel” Was Perfect, and one pretty big reason why it wasn’t.
* Joker and the vacuity of influence. Joker and white male resentment. (I liked what Noah Berlatsky had to say on this subject, too; I thought a lot about it while I was watching.) Joker Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. ‘The Greater Danger to Society May Be If You Don’t See This Movie.’ My own meager contribution to The Discourse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
* I think I linked this once before, but I saw it on Twitter and wanted to link again: Ida Yoshinaga’s Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films.
* This tweet got inside my fucking head.
thinking about how recent games in which "small mario" appears (eg, 3D World) imply this is some sort of fallen or injured condition with post-mushroom "super mario" being the norm, contrasted to the original 2D games' presentation of small mario as his natural state. disturbing.
— michael lutz from the amityville horror (@WarrenIsDead) October 7, 2019
* In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.
* They say America’s best days are behind it, but Someone Beat Minecraft Without Mining Any Blocks.
* Of course you had me at hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map.
* But at least Rick and Morty‘s coming back. Everything’s coming up Canavan!
Written by gerrycanavan
October 7, 2019 at 2:29 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Amazon, Amber Guyger, America, Andrew Johnson, Angel, animals, apocalypse, automation, Baby Boomers, Big Tech, Black Check, Buffy, Bush, CBP, class struggle, collapse, college football, college sports, Dallas, David Rees, Democratic primary 2020, denialism, Disney, Disneyland, Donald Trump, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Ellen DeGeneres, environmentalism, extinction, Facebook, fascism, film, futurity, games, geoengineering, Grinnell, guns, Hayao Miyazaki, impeachment, intergenerational struggle, Joker, Joshua Brown, Joss Whedon, labor, McDonald's, Mexico, millennials, Minecraft, Moana, Nintendo, police, police corruption, police state, politics, prison, recycling, revolution, Richard Nixon, Rick and Morty, Rob Portman, robots, Scorsese, sports, Super Mario, Syria, the economy, the Kurds, tigers, Turkey, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, work
Monday Night Links!
* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.
* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.
* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.
* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.
Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV
— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019
* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.
* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.
* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.
* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?
* The university in ruins in Buffalo.
* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.
Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019
* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.
* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.
* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.
* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.
* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.
* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.
* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.
* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.
* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.
* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.
* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.
* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.
* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.
* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.
* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.
* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.
2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ
— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019
Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019
* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.
* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.
* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.
* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?
* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.
* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.
* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.
* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?
* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.
sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019
Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019
What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019
* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.
"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019
* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.
* The Case Against the Popular Vote.
* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.
* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.
found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7
— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019
* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.
* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.
* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.
* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.
* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.
* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.
* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.
* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.
* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.
* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.
* This game should be illegal.
* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.
* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.
* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.
* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.
* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.
* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.
* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.
Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019
* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.
In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.
* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.
* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.
* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.
* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.
* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.
* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.
* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.
* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.
* How we invest in our cities is broken.
* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.
* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.
* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.
* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.
* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.
* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.
* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.
* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.
* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.
* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.
* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.
* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.
* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.
Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019
* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.
* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?
* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 23, 2019 at 3:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 737 Max, academic freedom, Achille Mbembe, Africa, air travel, aliens, Alzheimer's disease, America, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, Area 51, artificial intelligence, asteroids, autism, Boeing, Buffalo, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, charter schools, China, class struggle, climate change, climate grief, climate strike, clowns, college footballs, college sports, comics, communism, consciousness, conspiracy theories, copyright, Cory Doctorow, cultural preservation, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, drugs, Duke, ecology, Electoral College, electric cars, Elizabeth Warren, English departments, essays, evolutionary psychology, fast food, film, first contact, flat Earthers, Florida, Florida Keys, Foxconn, free college, free speech, Frozen II, games, games studies, gender, Generation Z, genius, gig economy, graffiti, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, Groundhog Day, guns, Harvard, High Line, How the University Works, Hunter Biden, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Impossible Burger, indigenous futurism, industrial agriculture, Islamophobia, Israel, James Tiptree Jr., Jeffrey Epstein, Joanna Russ, Joe Biden, John Milton, Johns Hopkins, kids today, King of Kong, Koch brothers, language, legacy admissions, logos, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michael Vick, military-industrial complex, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT Media Lab, modern art, MOOCs, Muppets, names, necropolitics, neoliberalism, New Mexico, New York, NLRB, nuclear power, opioids, organ theft, Orwell, over-educated literary theory PhDs, OxyContin, Palestine, pencils, Peter Pan, physics, plagiarism, plantations, podcasts, politics, popular vote, Posadism, Princess Bride, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, recycling, reproducibility crisis, Republicans, resistance, retirement, revolution, San Francisco, Sandy Hook, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saved by the Bell, scams, school-to-prison pipeline, science, science fiction, Scrabble, sea level rise, Sesame Street, Shakespeare, Shampoodler, since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun, socialism, space elevator, standardized testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, strikes, student debt, student movements, Superfund sites, the afterlife, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Bahamas, the Capitalocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the kids are all right, The Little Mermaid, The Lost Girls, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, TikTok, Tiptree award, Tolkien, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, trees, TurnItIn, Two Americas, UFOs, Ukraine, UNC, unions, University of Buffalo, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, vaccines, war on education, wellness, Wes Anderson, WeWork, white people, Wisconsin, X-Men
We Broke the World
The only hope for human civilization lies in a radical, abrupt, and probably violent transformation of that very civilization. Failing this, we all face—all humanity—within our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children—a catastrophic collapse of the biosphere upon which human life depends. This collapse is deeply entangled with but not the same as the ongoing transformation in the global climate system. Climate change is third on the IPBES’s list of the five major direct drivers of biodiversity collapse, having less impact than both changes in land and sea use and the direct exploitation of organisms. And this climate transformation is going to further exacerbate ecological collapse while also bringing to bear immense and widespread pressure on worldwide agriculture and infrastructure.
Yet our bias toward presence and the present makes all of this alarming talk, however emotionally provocative, seem nonetheless always a touch fantastic. Like the academics of the IPBES, most of us are going to go on about our business within the structural and conceptual constraints of the societies in which we live, even as those societies are threatened with existential collapse, even if we happen to know it. The leap to radical resistance or radical disengagement is too great for most of us to make.
We live uneasily the only way we know how, ever more anxious that the earth under our feet is turning to quicksand, while a fierce wind howls at the horizon. Hauling oneself out of one’s elemental presence-ism and presentism is nearly impossible: all the institutions, structures, and systems we live within are predicated on the indefinite persistence of the present. These are the structures and systems and institutions that give our choices meaning, connect us with each other, allow us to see our lives not as transient, atomistic accidents but as coherent, organic parts of a greater whole. Yet as the world changes around us, we are increasingly aware that something is wrong: the future isn’t what it used to be, and the temporal stability we depend on to give our present reality the illusion of persistence seems less and less reliable. We begin to wonder whether thinking fifty, thirty, twenty, or even five years into the future makes any sense, since the global transformation that seems to be steadily approaching—whether for good or for ill, through revolution or through collapse—will overturn everything we hold dear. We find ourselves existentially threatened by ecological collapse and climate change not only in the material sense that it will lead to vast human suffering and billions of deaths but also in a philosophical or psychological sense, in that the promise of imminent catastrophe—or revolution—threatens to make our present day-to-day life meaningless.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 4, 2019 at 9:05 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with apocalypse, climate change, death, futurity, politics, revolution, Roy Scranton, the Anthropocene
Friday Train Ride Links!
* I accidentally said something that went viral and now Twitter is absolutely useless to me.
* Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies of dehydration after being arrested by US Border Patrol. ICE Arrests 170 Immigrants Trying To Save Babies From Baby Jails. Trump is pushing Vietnam to accept deportees who have lived in the US for over 20 years.
* The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women.
* Is a Green New Deal Possible Without a Revolution?
According to the @climateactiontr, current climate policies have the world headed toward roughly 3.3°C of warming. Not a single major developed country has policies in line with 2°. https://t.co/lMbSnRMYar pic.twitter.com/UuhU4Iok68
— David Roberts (@drvox) December 13, 2018
As I keep saying, you're a climate change denier if you think it's going to happen in 50 years and isn't going to affect you or your children in a profound, civilization-ending way, without action. Fiction writers who write shit like that…same thing. https://t.co/Q4j53qNyw8
— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) December 14, 2018
* ‘Carbon removal is now a thing’: Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks. Earth on course to match climate from 3 million years ago by 2030, UW study says. You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change. 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up. Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Urban Flooding Is Worryingly Widespread in the U.S., But Under-Studied. Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps. ”You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.”
* Can the liberal arts survive neoliberalism? Serving at Cross’s Purposes.
* We can’t pull down statues of slaveowners, while out there they’re pulling down statues of Gandhi.
* Got to have some mixed feelings.
* Nice work if you can get it: insider trading is legal when you’re in Congress.
i’m a socialist, although in america this mostly just means “i think it’s bad that you die broke when you have cancer” and “poor people should eat” and “it’s bad that corporations literally write laws”
— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) December 12, 2018
* Elsewhere in hyperexploitation: Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (one-year term).
* How The US Left Failed Brasil. You’re not going to pin this on me!
* Teach the controversy: It’s ridiculous that it’s unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.
* Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist.
* There’s some wild shit going on in the far corners of the Game Of Thrones map.
* Fossils of the 21st century.
* Union solutions / management solutions.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 14, 2018 at 9:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic publishing, administrative blight, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, America, anthropology, apocalypse, at-will employent, authoritarianism, Bethlehem, border patrol, Brazil, California, carbon sequestration, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, Confederate monuments, Congress, corruption we can believe in, denialism, deportation, Donald Trump, ecology, fantasy, fascism, film, forensics, fossils, futurity, Game of Thrones, Gandhi, geoengineering, gig economy, Green New Deal, Guatemala, Harvard, How the University Works, hyperexploitation, ice, immigration, infrastructure, insider trading, It's a Wonderful Life, Jeff Vandermeer, kids today, landmines, liberal arts, management, maps, Mexico, misogyny, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, Netflix, parenting, police, police corruption, politics, Ray Cross, revolution, Rushmore, sex, social media, socialism, statues, streaming, the Anthropcene, the Anthropocene, the Left, the presidency, the university in ruins, the wall, the Wisconsin Idea, totalitarianism, toxic masculinity, true crime, true crme, Twitter, unions, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Vietnam, vitality, Werner Herzog, Wes Anderson, Westeros, women, work
Thursday Morning Links!
There is not a single part of me that doubts that ALF could be a viable contender in the next Presidential election. I’m not saying he’d win…but I do think it’d be close.
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) August 1, 2018
* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Pedagogy, and Social Change. CFP: Teaching 9/11 and Its Aftermaths. CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow: New Conversations & Productive Catalysts Across Science and Humanities Boundaries as the Global Emergency Worsens. CFP: Episodes VII, VIII, IX.
* The ‘feel-good’ horror of late-stage capitalism.
What if the problem isn't stimulants but the mandate for productivity
What if the problem isn't benzos but the mandate to stay calm in actual chaos
What if the problem isn't opioids but the mandate to work like a machine that can't suffer to keep you and your loved ones alive— Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) August 1, 2018
* Unreal.
* Twilight of the omniversity.
* All about QAnon, if you’re just catching up to the latest nonsense.
If you call Qanon people crazy it just hardens their stance. Let's open our intellectual debate to the iconoclasts who believe Democrats, Tom Hanks, and US intel agencies are engaged in a worldwide pedophilic conspiracy to take down Trump. (cc: op-ed page editors.)
— George Zornick (@gzornick) August 1, 2018
* Alex Jones, Pursued Over Infowars Falsehoods, Faces a Legal Crossroads. Man, I hope he loses everything.
* Plymouth State University said Wednesday that a retired professor who defended a convicted child rapist in a letter to the court will not be rehired as an adjunct instructor or “in any other capacity.” Two other faculty members who defended the Plymouth State graduate and high school guidance counselor convicted of sexually assaulting a student will complete sexual harassment training prior to their return to campus and will work closely with other professors upon their return, the university also said.
* “The UNC Board of Governors respects each of the varying opinions within the university community concerning this matter. However, after consulting with legal counsel, neither UNC Chapel Hill nor the UNC System have the legal authority to unilaterally relocate the Silent Sam statue,” the board wrote in a statement. “Thus, the board has no plans to take any action regarding the monument at this time, and we will await any guidance that the North Carolina Historical Commission may offer.”
* But in order to turn a story about the U.S. politics of climate change into a story about the entirety of the human species, Rich has to make a strange argument. He has to dispatch with the two most powerful and prominent enemies of a climate policy in the United States: the fossil-fuel industry and the Republican Party.
* A reminder: Just 90 companies are accountable for more than 60 percent of greenhouse gases.
The idea that ‘people,’ as in the entire human species, are failing to act on climate change is based on the assumption that decisions affecting it are democratically made, which is verifiably false.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 1, 2018
It’s not so much the heat or humidity as it is the existential dread that comes from realizing that catastrophic climate change will lead to the collapse of human civilization.
— Doug Gordon (@BrooklynSpoke) August 1, 2018
* How the Carr Fire became one of the most destructive fires in California history.
* Europe facing its hottest day ever.
* Here’s a different question one could ask: Could it be that reporters like Chait, who are obsessed with finding the next Watergate and tend to err on the side of military intervention, aren’t exercising enough skepticism?
* Months later I not only considered my own future, but the far-reaching political implications of these cases: Why did the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia find it appropriate to hang virtual life sentences over the heads of 214 people after an indiscriminate mass arrest? How could they have so shamelessly gleaned evidence from far-right groups like Project Veritas, a discredited organization known for making deceptive gotcha videos, as well as the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, and still felt they had a legitimate case? Where was the motivation—the conspiracy—to pursue these cases coming from?
* Immigration crackdown: U.S. soldier honored for service could be heading for ICE custody.
* ‘Like a kidnapping’: ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video.
* Another migrant child molested at a DHS facility. And a WaPo story about the migrant child who died shortly after their release from an unsafe, unhygienic detention center.
* Source close to Ivanka Trump confirms no one so beautiful could be evil.
A “Purge”-like holiday where one day a year American women are allowed to break their NDAs without getting sued.
— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) August 1, 2018
* From the archives: What Is Socialist Feminism?
* Can’t anyone in Congress have a normal hobby?
* Inside the first database that tracks America’s criminal cops.
* Breaking: leftist politics are very popular. Still / again / always.
* The art of the murder mystery.
* Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine.
* Maybe it’s possible to have too much money.
* Nobody powerful ever makes a mistake, MCU edition.
Worth considering: basically nobody responsible for the financial crisis, Iraq War or 9/11 intel/security failures was held accountable or faced serious career consequences. In fact, many of them got richer, became more powerful & accrued more social status. This seems important.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 2, 2018
* Something is happening in America.
Yowza. https://t.co/XRBunwsQZ7 pic.twitter.com/6EiiZkqbqa
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) August 1, 2018
* At some point in the process, all four of these nominees—Haynsworth, Carswell, Bork, and Ginsburg—seemed like shoo-ins for confirmation, much as Kavanaugh does today. And yet they were all defeated. And the Justices who took their places were closer to the judicial and political mainstream.
* Parents Are Paying Fortnite Coaches So Their Gamer Kids Can Level Up.
* Pope declares death penalty inadmissible, changing Church’s stance.
* …in the U.S., water park rides are not tightly regulated. Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.
* Can Mars even be terraformed?
* Yikes.
* The Songs We Banned From Our Weddings. The answer to a wedding soundtrack is always just all Motown, I think.
* Film Crit Hulk considers Nanette.
* Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia. No detailwas spared, from a food dish for their cat, Snowball II, to Duff beer cans in the fridge.
But controversy soon erupted in this faux-Springfield mock-up. The homeowner’s association wasn’t keen on having a cartoon house that broke conformity requirements by being painted solar yellow. The sweepstakes winner rejected it outright. And the current owner had to learn to live with the property being a source of perpetual curiosity for fans of the show who brazenly turn her doorknobs and peer through her windows at all hours of the day and night. As it turns out, the reality of living in a fantasy can get a little complicated.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 2, 2018 at 9:40 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #J20, 9/11, academia, Al Franken, Alex Jones, ALF, America, anarchism, apocalypse, Barbara Ehrenreich, Boots Riley, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, catfishing, Catholicism, CBP, censorship, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, communism, Congress, conspiracy theories, coups, death penalty, democracy, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, Europe, evil, feminism, Fortnite, fossil fuels, free speech, games, general election 2020, Guardians of the Galaxy, homeland security, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Infowars, Ivanka Trump, Japan, kids today, leftism, lies and lying liars, Mars, MCU, medicine, mental health, misogyny, monuments, Motown, murder, music, mysteries, Nanette, NDAs, neoliberalism, Pizzagate, Plymouth State, police, police corruption, politics, polls, QAnon, rape, rape culture, Republicans, revolution, rich people, Russia, science fiction, sexism, sharks, socialist feminism, Sorry to Bother You, South Korea, Supreme Court, terraforming, the Confederacy, the Pope, the Purge, The Simpsons, true crime, UNC, water parks, weddings, wildfires, women
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
In the process of his SF reading @pefrase throws off the deep key to all post-70s cop shows: “All Cops Are Bastards, Except Us.” That is: they must concede obvious corruption of the system, but posit a fantasy space of exception, of nobility and decency, inside it. #SFRA18
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2018
Echoing Mark Bould’s own Pilgrim speech from two years ago, Freedman notes the irony of science fiction studies becoming “respectable” at the moment the humanities and the academy writ large find themselves under cataclysmic, existential attack. #SFRA18
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 4, 2018
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
#RevisedCourseEvaluationQuestions
Your professor appeared to conceive of the seminar as
1) a psychoanalytic session
2) a Reddit thread
3) an opportunity to talk about themselves
4) a lawsuit waiting to happen— Jan Mieszkowski (@janmpdx) June 25, 2018
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:
– waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
– promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
— Anton Troynikov (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
– living five adults to a two room apartment
– being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you
— Anton Troynikov (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
I can’t tweet everything I know. Some of it is off-the-record. Some of it is uncorroborated. Some of it is embargoed until we publish.
But I can tweet this: this thing where the government took children from their parents atthe border? It’s more horrific than we have imagined.
— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) July 6, 2018
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
In that spirit, an out-of-the-box solution for desperate times: Trump should name Knicks owner James Dolan to replace Anthony Kennedy as a justice on the Supreme Court, forcing him to sell his ownership of the Knicks. Outlandish? Perhaps. But worse than what we have now? 4/17
— danielbenaim (@danielbenaim) July 5, 2018
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It’s still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know. pic.twitter.com/NvVnImoJ7N
— Ahmed BEst (@ahmedbest) July 3, 2018
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
Yesterday was Africa’s hottest reliably measured temperature in recorded history: 124.3°F (51.3°C) in Algeria
Africa has 16% of the world's population—and produces just 3.8% of all greenhouse gases.
Climate change is fundamentally a story of injustice.https://t.co/UuNTd0aDGt
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 6, 2018
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it's appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie. @uwmaaup stands with @BrigField, @clfs_uw, and @Ebonyteach! pic.twitter.com/g8T9fm1V3R
— UWM AAUP (@uwmaaup) July 4, 2018
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
optimism watch: I think things are going to get so terrible in the next few years, and so quickly, that we will have full blown socialism in the US by the time my kids are grown. We just have to survive and destroy Trumpism.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2018
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
.@Google killed its Reader in 2013 because RSS as a format gives readers agency, doesn't track browsing to sell ads, and lets the user chose what they want to read. As opposed to algorithmic personalisation which siloes us into increasingly homogenous demographics for advertisers https://t.co/YAThAP6bdO
— Luc Lewitanski (@LucLewitanski) July 2, 2018
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 7, 2018 at 11:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #J20, #MeToo, 1968, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adoption, advertising, Ahmed Best, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic trading, America, anatomy, animals, Anthony Kennedy, art, asylum, attention economy, Back to the Future, basketball, Batman, Ben Robertson, blackmail, border patrol, Brexit, Brooklyn 99, Bruce Springsteen, California, Carl Freedman, cartooning, Central America, CEOs, CFPs, Chicago, childhood, CIA, civil rights movement, civility, class struggle, climate change, collaborators, comedy, comics, concerts, conference, conferences, copyright, corporate real estate, corruption, country clubs, course evaluations, debt, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Detroit, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Duchamp, Dunbar number, Dungeons and Dragons, economics, Elon Musk, email, embezzlement, EPA, ethnic cleansing, European Union, exotic animals, Facebook, facial recognition, fandom, farmers, fatphobia, felony murder, films, Flint, flood insurance, flooding, franchise fiction, futurity, G. Willow Wilson, gambling, gangs, gay history, general election 2020, geoengineering, Gmail, Google, Google Reader, grading, GRE, happiness, Harlan Ellison, Hawaii, health care, hermits, history, Hitler, HIV/AIDS, Howard Stern, ice, ICFA, immigration, improv, inaugurations, Infinity War, Japan, Jar Jar Binks, John McAdams, Juggalos, kids today, Korea, literacy, loans, Luke Skywalker, Mark Bould, Marquette, Marvel, MCU, medieval studies, medievalism, mere genre, Merrick Garland, Mike Bloomberg, millennials, mobs, monkeys, MS-13, Ms. Marvel, murder, my scholarly empire, NASA, nature, Nazis, NBA, neoliberalism, norms, NSA, obituary, Octavia E. Butler, online harassment, our brains don't work, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, peace, pedagogy, pessimism, Peter Frase, photography, Pixar, places, places to invade next, police, political cartoons, politics, prank calls, protest, Putin, race, racism, rape culture, Rate My Professor, reactionaries, reading, readymades, Reality Winner, refugees, resistance, revolution, rich people, robots, Roe v. Wade, Rosa Parks, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, San Francisco, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, Scott Pruitt, sexual harassment, SFRA, SFRA18, SFRA19, Silicon Valley, soccer, socialism, solar system, Soviet Union, space junk, Spider-Man, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steve Ditko, stock market, Stone Age, stoppage time, student debt, student movements, Stuttering John, suicide, superheroes, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Thailand, Thanos, the 1970s, the courts, the humanities, The Incredibles, The Incredibles 3, the Knicks, the law, the Left, the past, the Wisconsin Idea, the wisdom of markets, they say time is the fire in which we burn, tigers, Tim Geithner, true crime, Trumpism, truth and reconciliation commissions, Twitter, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USSR, Venezuela, video games, vision, water, wealth, whales, white nationalism, white supremacy, William Shatner, William T. Vollman, Wisconsin, World Cup, writing
Sunday Morning Links!
* Somehow this one dropped out of the link post yesterday, but you know it hits all my buttons: Senate Parliamentarian Challenges Key Provisions of Health Bill.
* itshappening.gif. Democrats should be prepared to litigate pardons on every level, in advance. This is good too: Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes. We’re on the Brink of an Authoritarian Crisis. The Crisis Is Upon Us.
I think Democrats should definitely assert a standard that you can’t pardon either yourself or people who commit a crime on your behalf. https://t.co/jy1dIFcomV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 23, 2017
One of the great framers declined in the end to sign the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights — and also because of this: pic.twitter.com/aWdbzjIvUy
— Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) July 22, 2017
a Republic, if you can keep it from the Republicans
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 23, 2017
* Five poll numbers that should make Democrats uneasy. The fire next time. Signs of sanity from Chuck Schumer of all people, who’s been saying such things lately. 6 Months in, Is Trump’s America Living Up to Liberals’ Worst Fears? If Clinton Had Won.
* Connecticut mother facing deportation seeks sanctuary in local church.
* My Daughter Was Murdered in a Mass Shooting. Then I Was Ordered to Pay Her Killer’s Gun Dealer.
* The Millennials Are the American Earthquake.
* The year is 2525. All life on Earth is extinct. Jared Kushner has just submitted a final corrected SF-86.
* Presenting Anthony Scaramucci’s deleted tweets. Inside Hunt & Fish, where beauties trawl for sugar daddies. One last time. And of course.
I didn’t know the abstract concept of embezzlement could take human form. pic.twitter.com/YSiFFZMwkR
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2017
* Why does DC Comics hate Superman? It’s bizarre.
* Game of Thrones’s Medieval Crap.
* Rhapsody for the Anthropocene.
* The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel. Against Academic Conferences. I’m a long-married introvert who doesn’t drink, so if they outlawed conferences I’d probably come out pretty far ahead of the game — but I will say that #notallconferences are like what Matthew describes here: when I give a talk at the specialist conferences I usually go to there’s usually at least 20-30 people in the audience at each panel. (Maybe not at the early morning slot, but…) If panels are being that poorly attended as a rule, it’s likely a problem with the organization of the conference itself. I know my career has benefited a lot from finding out early which conferences were the right ones for me to be attending, and all of the opportunities that have made my career what it is came out of them. So it’s tough for me to say they’re not worth doing.
* I Studied the Humanities, and Now…
* Is the person naming these colors of yarn okay?
Is the person naming these colors of yarn okay? pic.twitter.com/OYkdfa2MwO
— History Lovers Club (@historylvrsclub) July 21, 2017
* Mapped: the United States and Canada at the same latitudes as Europe.
* Cool world history visualization project at chronas.org.
* Adam Roberts previews what everyone says is the best European SF no one in America has ever heard of, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
* Die old and leave an incredible story.
Olive Yang, who died last week at 90, rejected royal birthright to become a cross-dressing opium warlord https://t.co/wOLekzMn3d
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 22, 2017
* From this point of view Strange is perhaps the first postcolonial superhero, the first who taught the youth to ‘provincialise the West’, to paraphrase Dipresh Chakrabarty’s slogan.
* 29 minutes from New York to DC is a thing that is never going to happen.
* Chipotle Suffers Another Setback As Rats Fall From Restaurant Ceiling. Still, when you’re in the mood, Chipotle can really hit the spot.
* 7 Black Alt-History Projects That Would Be Better Than Confederate.
* 21 Today: The Rise of Speculative Fiction in Africa, year by year.
* Comic-Con seemed fun this year: Star Trek! Westworld! Stranger Things! Thor! Infinity War! Ready Player One! Ted Chiang! Flashpoint? Even Justice League looks reasonably competent. This seems… important for the sequel? And the dream of the 90s is alive in Captain Marvel.
* Lean in.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 23, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Adam Roberts, Africa, Afrofuturism, AHCA, alternate history, America, Anthony Scaramucci, authoritarianism, Avengers, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Bohemian Rhapsody, Captain Marvel, child protection services, Chipotle, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, comics superheroes, Confederate, conferences, cross-dressing opium warlords, DC Comics, Democrats, deportation, depression, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Elon Musk, embezzlement, Europe, fast food, food, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, general election 2020, guns, health care, Hillary Clinton, history, Hyperloop, immigration, Infinity War, Jared Kushner, Justice League, Lean In, Liking What You See: A Documentary, maps, Marvel, mass shootings, millennials, obituary, pardons, parenting, parliamentary procedure, politics, polls, postcoloniality, Putin, Queen, race, racism, rats, Ready Player One, restaurants, revolution, Rosie the Riveter, Russia, sanctuary, science fiction, Sean Spicer, self-pardons, shit, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stranger Things, Stranger Things 2, Superman, Ted Chiang, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the courts, the Flash, the humanities, the law, the Senate, Thor, Thor: Ragnarok, timelines, Twitter, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, yarn