Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Rick Perry

Sunday Morning Links!

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* Picard trailer! Disco trailer! Short Trek! It’s truly a Golden Age.

* Some new poems from Jaimee up at her website.

* State DOT orders homeless to leave encampment under I-794 overpass in downtown Milwaukee by Oct. 31. I’m amazed this situation was allowed to go on this long and am worried that it will turn truly ugly now.

* Anyone want to buy a college?

He Was a Consultant for the Search; Now He’s the Chancellor. And the Faculty Is Furious.

* Now let us proclaim the mystery of speech.

College Students Just Want Normal Libraries. Fine, but get back to me when you figure out a way to turn that into graft.

* 22-year adjunct (and union leader) denied medical leave by UC Irvine following brain surgery.

* They were never going to land anywhere but “you’re damn right I ordered the code red.” Every Trump scandal follows a playbook. With Ukraine, the playbook finally might not work. If the rule of law meant anything to the American political class, Trump would have been impeached on the first day of his presidency. 2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings. Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified.’ CIA General Counsel Thought She Made Criminal Referral Based On Whistleblower Info. Bringing back all the classics. Chris Hayes explains it all. Crucial role of right-wing media missing from impeachment coverage. It’s the Republicans, stupid. Even Chris Cillizza gets it.

* I just hope they bring Rick Perry to justice.

* Never Trumpers, man.

* Immigrants will be denied visas if they cannot prove they have health insurance or the ability to pay for medical care, the Trump administration said. The government is simply lawless.

This Supreme Court Term Will Launch a Conservative Revolution.

 Sorry, but It’s Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor.

Pharmaceutical Companies Are Luring Mexicans Across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma.

“It’s Very Unethical”: Audio Shows Hospital Kept Vegetative Patient on Life Support to Boost Survival Rates.

* Inside TheMaven’s Plan To Turn Sports Illustrated Into A Rickety Content Mill.

The Four-Day Work Week—Not Just a Daydream.

* Saving the planet without self-loathing.

* Deep dive into the scandal rocking online poker.

* America.jpg.

21-year-old oversleeps jury duty, goes to jail for 10 days.

* US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded.

* The billionaire class: “I’m a fiscal conservative, but a cultural nihilist.”

* Cops can do anything they want wherever they want whenever they want.

Bootleg film shows Florida prison in all its danger, squalor. An inmate shot it on the sly.

* Mosby lists 25 Baltimore police officers as discredited; prosecutors begin wiping out 790 convictions.

* From the archives: During the season 17 premiere of Sesame Street in 1985, after 14 years, the adults see Mr. Snuffleupagus for the first time.

* And from the other archives: Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.

* Top Joker burn. Joker and white resentment. Brogan breaks it down.

* House of X: still really good! I’m really interested to see where Hickman takes the franchise from here.

* DC continuity: still utterly bonkers!

* Still the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that cuts me the worst.

* And know, even in these dark times, there are still heroes in this world.

Thursday Night Links!

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New Photo Seems To Prove Amelia Earhart Survived Plane Crash, Was Captured By Japanese.

If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45 a.m. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Impossibly Hungry Judges.

* Free download: Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America.

* On My High School Obsession with UFOs.

* It’s in the National Review — and it describes a phenomenon at work in many departments along many political axes — but this piece describes a problem academics should take more seriously than they do. This is probably the most crimethink intellectual position I hold.

* Trump White House openly discusses extorting Time Warner and AOL to manipulate CNN coverage, no one bats an eye.

* Head of Office of Government Ethics resigns, sending President Trump a serious message. The message is “you can do whatever you want and nobody will stop you.”

4 dumb ideas that centrist Democrats simply adore.

Mark Penn has been giving shitty advice for literally forever. But don’t worry, we’ve got this.

Meet the populist Wisconsin Democrat looking to dethrone Paul Ryan.

* But in truth the Declaration wasn’t quite the singular achievement we remember it to be. As it turns out, nearly 100 other “declarations of independence” had already been issued in the months leading up to July 4th, 1776, by states, towns, counties, and assorted other bodies. The Declaration of Independence endorsed at the Continental Congress that July wasn’t a bolt out of the blue: It was more like a final draft in a loose, many-centered, wide-ranging process, authored not by one man but by a chorus of voices in a fledgling nation whose people had caught independence fever and were suddenly proclaiming it with contagious enthusiasm.

* Hobby Lobby Agrees to Forfeit 5,500 Artifacts Smuggled Out of Iraq.

* No SWAT Zone: Resisting police militarization under Trump.

* Mom Feared Beating by United Employees — So She Gave Up Toddler Son’s $1000 Seat to Standby Passenger. It’s clear the time has come for United to be abolished.

* Rick Perry left his smart-guy glasses at home today. Check out 2nd Term SS 1970.

* Arizona Court Overturns In-State Tuition for Some Immigrants.

Facebook and Google gobble ’99 per cent of new digital ad cash.’ Media buyers warn Facebook viewability ‘diabolical and horrible.’ Taxonomy of Humans According to Twitter.

* Easily the most boundary-pushing, offensive path they should have chosen: South Park to Lay Off Trump Jokes, Focus on Childhood Antics.

* The poverty of expanded universes: Man, Rey and BB-8 Went Through a Lot During Their One Night on Jakku.

This is how climate change will shift the world’s cities.

* It really is their century.

* An editing error, you say.

* When your book only sells sixty copies. Don’t tell me what to do. Or, the utopian impulse. And they hated Jesus because he told them the truth.

Supersized ICFA Weekend Links!

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* Hey, ICFAites! I’m posting this too late to hype yesterday’s talk on Black Panther and Wakanda as Nation, but there’s still time to hype my Rogue One roundtable at 8:30 and the Modern Masters of Science Fiction book signing at 12:30…

* One week from today! Buffy at 20!

* I really appreciated The New Inquiry‘s most recent issue on prison abolition, including this piece on home monitoring, this one on deaf inmates, and this one on bureaucratic malice.

* Awesome IndieGoGo success story: Nimuno LEGO tape.

Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse.

* Teach the controversy: Did the CIA really astrally project to Mars in 1984?

* Neat project I’m coming late to: Young People Read Old SFF.

“Mr. Thursday.” By Emily St. John Mandel.

* Starfleet or bust.

* The Gig Economy and Working Yourself to Death.

What Happens If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan? How to survive a nuclear blast.

Other genres merely represent everyday life. Science fiction hopes to change it.

* Humans, on brand.

New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being.

The Existential Hokiness of Rick & Morty.

Purplish Haze: The Science Fiction Vision of Jimi Hendrix.

“Comrade, Can You Paint My Horse?” Soviet Kids’ Books Today.

* Being Kim Stanley Robinson. After the Great Dithering.

Julia muppet
Credit: Sesame Workshop

* Sesame Street’s newest puppet is a four-year-old with autism.

Disabled Americans: Stop Murdering Us.

* “Let’s talk about the weird psychosexual energy in Beauty and the Beast.”

* “The monsters of Kong: Skull Island are as brilliantly rendered as its politics are muddled and queasy.”

* “Humpback whales are organizing in huge numbers, and no one knows why.”

Animal rights lawyer says zoos are solitary confinement for animals. No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other. The beginning of the end of meat. Scientists are messing around with 3-D printed cheese.

* Great news: Authorities believe they’ve captured the individual responsible for most of the JCC bomb threats. The Slip-Up That Caught the Jewish Center Bomb Caller.

With a 10-day supply of opioids, 1 in 5 become long-term users. Drugs are killing so many people in Ohio that cold-storage trailers are being used as morgues.

With Trump Poised to Change the Legal Landscape, the Clock May Be Ticking on Graduate Unions. The shamelessness with which college administrations have courted this outcome is amazing, even by college administration standards.

How One Family Is Beating the NCAA at Its Own Game.

Here’s the Important Stuff That Happens in Iron Fist So You Don’t Have to Watch It. Netflix and Marvel’s Iron Fist is an ill-conceived, poorly written disaster. The Iron Fist TV Series Is Marvel and Netflix’s First Big Failure. Five Comments on Iron Fist.

* Paranoia in the Trump White House. Trumpism and academia. Trump’s Cuts. A day in the life of a poor American under Trump’s proposed budget. North Korea. The Incredible Cruelty of Trumpcare. Trumpcare goes down. Democrats Will Filibuster Neil Grouch’s Nomination. What to ask about Russian hacking. New York Attorney General Steps Up Scrutiny of White House. Why they voted Trump. r/Donald. It’s a better time to be doing any kind of leftist politics than it was a decade ago. Well, we’ll see…

* It’s hard in all this mess to pay attention to the little things, but man.

* My fascism will be big, beautiful, and sustainable, or it will be bullshit.

Overall, Obama’s performance in office looks like most American presidencies since Reagan, not altering all that much at home while pressing ahead with imperial tasks abroad—in effect, a largely conventional stewardship of neo-liberal capitalism and military-diplomatic expansionism. No new direction for either society or empire emerged under him. Obama’s rule was in this sense essentially stand-pat: business as usual. On another plane, however, his tenure was innovative. For he is the first celebrity President—that is, a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that. Catapulted into the White House on colour charisma and economic crisis, and commanding the first congressional supermajority since Carter, Obama in office continued to be an accomplished vote-winner and champion money-raiser. But celebrity is not leadership, and is not transferrable. The personality it projects allows no diffusion. Of its nature, it requires a certain isolation. Obama, relishing his aura and aware of the risks of diluting it, made little attempt to mobilize the populace who cast their ballots for him, and reserved the largesse showered on him by big money for further acclamation at the polls. What mattered was his personal popularity. His party hardly counted, and his policies had little political carry-through.

What If Students Only Went to School Four Days a Week?

Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.

* Body cameras and the nightmare state.

* When corporations colonize academia.

White, Irish, and undocumented in America.

Children as young as 3 detained 500 days — and counting — in disgraceful immigrant prisons. Rape Victims Aren’t Seeking Help For Fear Of Deportation, Police Say. Banking on Deportation. There was an Africa trade meeting with no Africans because all their visas got denied.

Sheriff David Clarke’s jail forced a woman to give birth while in shackles. The newborn died.

* The long now: A Computer-Generated Coliseum that Will Disintegrate for 1,000 Years.

Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research.

* A special issue of Orbit devoted to David Foster Wallace.

* Functional illiteracy in Detroit.

* Why Does Mt. Rushmore Exist?

Everybody in the NBA is obsessed with PB&J sandwiches.

* Missing Richard Simmons turned out super gross. Don’t listen.

Congress Moves to Strike Internet Privacy Rules From Obama Era.

* I’ve been really interested in this: A major study finding that voter ID laws hurt minorities isn’t standing up well under scrutiny. A follow-up study suggests voter ID laws may not have a big effect on elections.

* Are we raising racists? Pay attention to what your kids watch on their screens.

* Tomb of Santa uncovered in Siberia.

* Educational attainment in America.

The Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson Marriage Will Never Ever Return “Up To Infinity” Says Dan Slott.

* Or a tweet. Probably a tweet.

A Tale Which Must Never Be Told: A New Biography of George Herriman.

Trans, Disabled, And Tired Of Fighting To Get Into Bathrooms.

* Appliances used to last decades.

A year in Eden: Remaining cast of TV show finally leave their remote Highland home.

Now the remaining cast of a TV show have finally left their remote home – to virtual anonymity.

Instead of being crowned reality TV celebrities and fought over by agents, the 10 who made it through the 12 months have learned that only four episodes have been shown – the last seven months ago.

* Mr. Rogers vs. the Ku Klux Klan.

* Andy Daly reviews Review.

* CFP: Chuck Berry in the Anthropocene.

* The Rise of Bowie Studies.

* SNL quick change, Jeff Sessions to mermaid.

* I still believe in a place called Duckburg.

* No.

* Respectfully disagree.

* Action Lad and the Living Sword!

* And the arc of history is long, but there’s an Attack from Mars pinball machine remake coming later this year.

Written by gerrycanavan

March 25, 2017 at 9:00 am

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Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!

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(here’s part one)

* The story behind the Christmas Truce of 1914, simultaneously the most and least utopian thing that’s ever happened.

* Now that’s running it like a sandwich: College Can’t Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.

* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.

* Addressing the myths of academic job market.

* Arrival and the end of the academy.

* This was not called execution. It was called retirement.

* Colleges should invest in career services.

The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.

* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.

* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.

* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.

* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.

* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.

* High praise: The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.

* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.

* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump’s Ring of Power. This is fine.

* tfw your research collapses and it’s too late to rewrite the book

Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.

* Their fake news, and ours.

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.

* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.

A sense of ennui and overdetermination binds the audience of NPR podcasts together in a bloc of obnoxious explainerism.

* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase’s Four Futures.

* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.

* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?

* The Business of Institutionalization.

* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.

* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.

* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for “Permanent Flooding.”

* Google and the death of knowledge.

* There’s no safe space for kids anywhere: 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.

* Hey, let’s all fight about Shakespeare again.

Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.

* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.

We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.

* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.

* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.

* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds: Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.

* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.

* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.

The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division’s 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.

Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.

My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.

* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.

* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.

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Written by gerrycanavan

December 20, 2016 at 3:03 pm

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Friday Links!

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* ‘We Come from the Future’: a short piece on African SF.

* Zadie Smith says her next novel is SF.

As for her own next move, she says it will be a total departure: a science-fiction romp. She has been reading a lot of Ursula K Le Guin. ‘It’s a concept novel. It’s the only novel I’ve ever written that has a plot, which is thrilling. I don’t know if I can do it. Those books are incredibly hard to write.’

* Giant, oil-belching sinkhole dooms more than 100 homes in Louisiana.

* Valences of the IRS scandal.

* I believe this is explicitly against the law governing the CIA: Four Central Intelligence Agency officers were embedded with the New York Police Department in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, including one official who helped conduct surveillance operations in the United States, according to a newly disclosed C.I.A. inspector general’s report.

* A nation of temps: 15% of job growth since 2009, 40% or more in many urban areas.

Temp jobs accounted for whopping 116 percent of job growth in Memphis (that means that one sector added more jobs than all other industries together), 66 percent in Birmingham, 65 percent in Cincinnati, 58 percent in Hartford, 51 percent in Milwaukee, 46 percent in Kansas City, and 40 percent or more in Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

* The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed.

* ‘Black Babies Cost Less’: The Racial Realities of Adoption in America. Can’t help trying to pair this with the Baby Veronica nightmare still making its way back and forth through the courts.

* More nightmares: Worker Sues Employer For The Death Of Her Baby.

* End of an era at the Met.

* Obama at the door of no return.

* Cleveland State figures out inventive way to punish students it’s already failing.

Cleveland State University undergraduates will see a 2-percent tuition increase this fall but can get it back as a credit on the next year’s tuition through an innovative program approved Wednesday by university trustees.

Beginning in the fall, students who complete 30 course credits in an academic year in good standing can earn the rebate for the following year. Students also will receive $100 per semester in book credits.

Meritocracy! Catch the fever.

* The high cost of autism.

* Land of the God-Men: Inside the Wild Movement to Turn Us All into Immortal Cyborgs. I’m listening…

* “The Lottery” letters.

* And Rick Perry, wow. I mean wow.

During his remarks, the Texas governor also described Davis’ filibuster as “hijacking of the Democratic process” and said of the pro-choice movement, “the louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done.”

MOOC as Right-Wing Plot?

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Salon goes there.

After some reflection, it’s become clear to me that there is a crucial difference in how the Internet’s remaking of higher education is qualitatively different than what we’ve seen with recorded music and newspapers. There’s a political context to the transformation. Higher education is in crisis because costs are rising at the same time that public funding support is falling. That decline in public support is no accident. Conservatives don’t like big government and they don’t like taxes, and increasingly, they don’t even like the entire way that the humanities are taught in the United States.

It’s absolutely no accident that in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, three of the most conservative governors in the country are leading the push to incorporate MOOCs in university curricula. And it seems well worth asking whether the apostles of disruption who have been warning academics that everything is about to change have paid enough attention to how the intersection of politics and MOOCs is affecting the speed and intensity of that change. Imagine if Napster had had the backing of the Heritage Foundation and House Republicans? It’s hard enough to survive chaotic disruption when it is a pure consequence of technological change. But when technological change suits the purposes of enemies looking to put a knife in your back, it’s almost impossible.

Thursday Morning Links

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Sneaking in a linkdump before the conference begins…

* We will never forget the day Wikipedia went dark. More here and here.

* Mediocre new Springsteen track released! Really, this one’s just not great.

* Letters to Children from Cultural Icons on the Love of Libraries.

* Stunning pictures from the Costa Concordia disaster. And here’s some stunning audio.

A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled “Some Projections on West Georgia College’s Next Thirty Years.” Gingrich’s College Records Show a Professor Hatching Big Plans. I know it’s all Romney! Romney! Romney! these days, but Rick Perry and I still believe in Gingritchmentum.

* You’ve probably already seen it, but Wisconsin Democrats have collected a million signatures to recall Scott Walker. Given that’s 50% of the votes cast in the last election and 20% of the total number of the people in the state, they could make some history here.

* Obama officially rejects Keystone XL, for now at least.

* Another TPM piece on “the new swing states.”

* In traveling around I wasn’t able to post on the latest James O’Keefe follies. Well done sir. I wonder if this violates his probation from the last time he pulled a pointless, self-refuting stunt.

* And today’s speculative physics: What if every electron in the universe was all the same exact particle, dreaming it was a butterfly, dreaming it was a man?

Quick Hits

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* “Proposed new calendar would make time rational.”

According to Richard Conn Henry’s calendar, eight months would each have 30 days. Every third month would have 31 days. Every so often, to account for the leftover time, a whole extra week would be added.

The upshot: Years would proceed with clockwork regularity, with no annual re-jiggering of schedules required. Each day would occupy the same position as it had the previous year and would in the next. Were this 364-day calendar, known officially as the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, adopted on the first day of 2012, both Christmas and New Year’s Day would forever fall on Sunday.

If the bonus week can be a work-free jubilee, I’m in.

* And then climate change ate all our peanuts.

* And then Rick Perry annexed Canada.

* The SSA said 50 percent of workers made less than $26,364 last year — and most Americans have fewer job opportunities available to them. But the wealthiest Americans are relatively unscathed, with those earning $1 million or more jumping 18 percent from 2009. More here.

* Charles Taylor asks, “Is there any other living novelist who calls for a perpetual re-evaluation as much as Stephen King?” I’m not exactly a fan (though there’s quite a bit I like), but he’s definitely someone I’d like to teach a class on at some point.

* Death of cinema watch: Bridesmaids is the only top fifteen film this year that is neither a sequel, a reboot, or an adaptation.

* Bad news everyone: Clean paper towels are filthy. Your only hope now is to finally build that cleanroom.

* Why you’re fat and will always be fat. Via MeFi.

* Robert Reich predicts Obama-Clinton 2012. The Clinton-Biden switch has seemed like the only possible option for ’12 since at least 2008; it’s a huge unforced error if they don’t.

* And TEDxBrussels predicts 2061. No word on if there will still be peanuts.

Sunday Night Links

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* Officers in pepper spray incident placed on (paid) leave.

* Greenwald on UC Davis: It’s easy to be outraged by this incident as though it’s some sort of shocking aberration, but that is exactly what it is not.

* How pepper spray works.

Pepper spray use has been suspected of contributing to a number of deaths that occurred in police custody. In mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice cited nearly 70 fatalities linked to pepper-spray use, following on a 1995 report compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union of California. The ACLU report cited 26 suspicious deaths; it’s important to note that most involved pre-existing conditions such as asthma. But it’s also important to note a troubling pattern.

In fact, in 1999, the ACLU asked the California appeals court to declare the use of pepper spray to be dangerous and cruel. That request followed an action by northern California police officers against environmental protestors – the police were accused of dipping Q-tips into OC spray and applying them directly to the eyes of men and women engaged in an anti-logging protest.

“The ACLU believes that the use of pepper spray as a kind of chemical cattle prod on nonviolent demonstrators resisting arrest constitutes excessive force and violates the Constitution,” wrote association attorneys some 13 years ago.

* Five Theses on Privatization and the UC Struggle.

1. Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
2. Police brutality is an administrative tool to enforce tuition increases.
3. What we are struggling against is not the California legislature, but the upper administration of the UC system.
4. The university is the real world.
5. We are winning.

* Another UC Davis Manifesto: No Cops, No Bosses.

Open Letter to Chancellors and Presidents of American Universities and Colleges.

* The 1% and ecology: “Pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the corporate boardroom.”

* Freezing Free Speech: Winter Tents Are ‘Contraband’ For Occupy Boston.

In the last few days, Boston police have blocked the occupiers from bringing in a winterized tent intended as a safe space for women, and have searched a truck for “contraband” tents and insulation materials. In an exchange that resembles a vaudeville comedy routine, a Boston police officer explains to activist Clark Stoekley why he searched the truck for “items we don’t want in the camp”:

I came to the truck because uh, we were afraid you had contraband that we don’t want in the camp . . . items we don’t want in the camp . . . Winter tents and, um, any type of insulation materials for tents that are already presently there.

* “The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.” Another take on how to fix law schools from Slate. Via Pandagon and LGM.

* Pleasure in sex ed was a major topic last November at one of the largest sex-education conferences in the country, sponsored by the education arm of Planned Parenthood of Greater Northern New Jersey. “Porn is the model for today’s middle-school and high-school students,” Paul Joannides said in the keynote speech. “And none of us is offering an alternative that’s even remotely appealing.”

* And when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it you call it what it is: Perry Promises To End Civilian-Controlled Military.

Wednesday Night!

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* So many amazing things happened today, from the simultaneous implosion of both the Perry and Cain campaigns to Occupy Cal and Occupy Harvard to riots at Penn State in support of Joe Paterno (of all people). And I can’t give proper attention to any of these amazing things because I spent 6 hours hanging out with John Hodgman on behalf of the Regulator Bookshop. Here’s a nice interview with the man himself from Independent Weekly‘s Zack Smith.

* Not to pile on poor Rick Perry, but abolishing the Department of Energy doesn’t make sense even on his own terms.

* Needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows: Young adults agree that college is becoming increasingly unaffordable in today’s economy even as it is becoming more important, according to a recent poll released on Wednesday by Demos and Young Invincibles, two research and advocacy groups.

* For people looking to transition #Occupy back into traditional electoral politics—and for people who want to make sure that doesn’t happen—Occupy Des Moines is going to be pretty important.

* LGM celebrates Wake County’s repudiation of de-integration.

* Some podcasts from the ASA, including my advisor Priscilla Wald’s presidential address on Henrietta Lacks.

* Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp page.

A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage.

* Howard is one of the chief architects of the “Cleveland Model” — an effort to create good jobs in depressed urban neighborhoods by fostering for-profit cooperatives founded on a principle of environmental sustainability. The neighborhoods targeted by Howard’s Evergreen Cooperative Initiative suffer from 40 percent unemployment, but he suggests tossing out any preconceptions one might have about whether or not desperately poor people care about the environment. Howard recounts one cooperative worker telling him, “I thought I’d have to move to Portland to become part of the green revolution, and now I can say that we lead the way in Cleveland.”

* The bastards have stolen your honey.

* And some breaking news via Bitter Laughter: The odds that you’d exist at all are practically zero. So enjoy it! A wise man once said, it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.

Kolkata, Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou, and Ho Chi Minh City

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Brad Plumer links to an OECD report detailing climate change risk to major cities.

Of course the solution to all this is very simple: just brazenly lie about the problem.

Via Kevin Drum, who writes:

Climate change is the public policy problem from hell. If you were inventing a problem that would be virtually impossible to solve, you’d give it all the characteristics of climate change: it’s largely invisibile, it’s slow moving, it’s expensive to fix, it requires global coordination, and its effects will be disproportionately borne by poor countries that nobody cares about.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 13, 2011 at 12:21 pm

Saturday Night Police Blotter & Arrest Report

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*  In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested about 400 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon. The reporting on this is pretty astounding; apparently NYPD actually tricked protestors into leaving the designated route, and then arrested them for it.

* Hmm.

* Some more New York Times reporting about life on occupied Wall Street.

* Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right.

* Rick Perry says it’s time to invade Mexico. I’ve thought for a while this would happen in the next presidential term no matter who is elected, for precisely the reason Steven Taylor says it’s a terrible idea:

Not only that, the suggestion suggests a naive belief that all that is needed to fix the drug problem is finding the right level of force.

There is no major candidate from either party who doesn’t think that is needed to fix the drug problem is finding the right level of force.

* And the gang that can’t shoot straight suddenly found its mojo when it came time to bash Ron Suskind’s book. It’s almost as if they believe Republicans are still potential allies, but left and liberal critics are enemies…

Friday Night Links

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* The absolute craziest thing I’ve ever seen: Berkeley Researchers Turn Brain Waves Into YouTube Videos.

* Even news that the laws of physics have been overturned pales in comparison. I know, I know: Bad Astronomer, xkcd.

* Louis talks to the A.V. Club about Louie: 1, 2, 3, 4.

* Paul Campos: “The law’s absurd formalism was part of its strength as ideology.” Precisely. This insight applies to many more aspects of the legal system than the revolting spectacle of our contemporary system of capital punishment, which in a case such as Davis’s — which is not in this respect was not unusual — psychologically tortures the defendant, the defendant’s family, the victim’s family, and others connected to the case for literally decades before producing what the system then has the temerity to call “justice.” (The climax of this spectacle last night involved Davis being strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm for nearly four hours, waiting for various legal personages to respond to the question of whether, all things considered, it was finally time to stop his heart with state-administered poison).

That we tolerate this kind of thing so readily helps explain, in its own way, why it sometimes seems impossible to do much of anything about the absurdities and dysfunctions of the system of legal education that legitimates it in the first instance. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: perhaps we tolerate the absurdity of something like the 22-year “process” that resulted in the horror of Davis’s final hours because we ‘re socialized from the beginning of our careers in this system to accept all kinds of absurdity and injustice as natural, inevitable, and therefore legitimate.

Reading this I was reminded of Duncan Kennedy’s excellent article “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy,” which Corinne linked the other day on Twitter.

* Ground Zero Mosque opens without controversy. It’s almost as if the objections to this were complete bullshit.

* I’m steadfastly not paying attention to the GOP primary, but this is pretty astounding, even by Republican standards.

* DOJ: Rick Perry’s Texas Redistricting Plan Purposefully Discriminated Against Minorities.

* Why Is TV Suddenly Overstuffed With Buxom Bunnies, Sexy Stewardesses, and Charlie’s Angels?

* How long—how long must we sing this song? Forty years, give or take.

* Genetic sequencing indicates Australian Aborigines may have been the world’s first explorers, leaving Africa more than 60,000 years ago.

* Taxpayers in the San Francisco area spend $2,762,295 each year in junk food subsidies, but only $41,950 each year on apple subsidies.

* Speaking at a Climate Week NYC event hosted by the Maldives, the TckTckTck campaign, and the U.N., Greenpeace International President Kumi Naidoo argued that the path to a sustainable future will involve peaceful, popular civil disobedience. “The struggle for climate justice is not a popularity contest,” he argued. He said the lesson of the Arab Spring, and the history of struggles from suffrage to civil rights to the end of apartheid, is that change only comes when decent men and women are willing to risk their lives and go to jail in peaceful protest.

The world’s rudest hand gestures.

Great Lost Pop Culture Treasures.

And Chris Ware on your iPad. Have a good weekend.

Thursday Night Links

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* We’ve been having some fun on Twitter mocking this overwrought defense of Columbia’s obscenely overpriced MFA program. (Key quote: “It’s for people whose genitals still work, dammit.”) HTMLGiant, via @zunguzungu, has perhaps the definitive takedown.

* Speaking of definitive takedowns, Alex Reid has the last word on digital learning badges.

SCOTUS has issued a temporary stay in the execution of Duane Buck, pending certiorari.

* The Obama disaster has officially reached the “pointing fingers” stage.

“The Citbank incident, and others like it, reflected a more pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young president’s authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers,” Suskind writes.

Yeah, that must be what happened.

* Dateline 1937: Science proves blondes can’t drive.

* And, just for fun, one of the weirder stories I’ve read today.

…thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb.

One suspects they’d have rather gotten a new squash court.

Saturday Links

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* Chris Newfield on the university in crisis.

The first is that this model has been shifting public university revenues to a specific kind of private source, for three decades. Voters are often told that the shift means that wealthy donors and research sponsors have picked up a big part of the educational bill, but this is simply not true. The AFM means shifting educational costs from the overall population to students and their families. The model also shifts costs from old to young, and in California from a 70 per cent white voting public to a 70 per cent student-of-colour secondary-school population. It destroys the mutualization principle of social development.

The second effect of the American funding model is that it has damaged American educational attainment. The USA has had a comparative educational advantage over the rest of the wealthy world for about 150 years – first at the high-school level and then in college degrees. Now, for the first time in US history, younger people are less educated than their baby-boomer parents. If you are wondering whether privatization caused this destruction, the answer is yes it did. The private investment process gives the least money to the colleges with the lowest graduation rates, which receive a disproportionately high percentage of low-income and first-generation students. The decades-old failure of the bottom three-quarters of the country’s students (measured by socio-economic status) to improve their educational outcomes has undermined overall advances in attainment. In about twenty years, the funding model has destroyed the USA’s educational advantage (it is now twelfth in BA attainment rates and falling).

The third effect of privatization is that it is wrecking the financial solvency of high-quality public universities. The funding model doesn’t produce stability because the net private revenues never make up for cuts to the public funding lost to cuts. This structural shortfall will result from the British government’s replacement of most of the teaching grant with a scheme of high fees and loans. It has been happening for a long time in California, and based on that state’s experience even a tripling of fees won’t make up for the teaching grant.

* Michael Tomasky crunches the numbers to prove bipartisanship truly is bunk.

* Meanwhile, it’s extremely unclear why Obama thinks his job is to do things “the people in his party won’t like”. Leave Medicare alone.

* Exxon Makes Billion-Dollar Bet Climate Change is Real, Here Now and Going to Get Worse But Keeps Funding Deniers. Bring on the carbon trials.

* For my Texas readers: please be advised that statistically, you have a better chance of being executed by Rick Perry than dying in an airplane crash. Of course, if Perry gets elected president he’ll do his deregulating best to even those odds.

* Muslim American terrorist plots have killed since 9/11 — since the 3,000 killed on 9/11 — have killed 33 individuals in the United States since that time. Over that same period of time, there have been more than 150,000 murders in the United States, or 14 or 15,000 murders every year. Muslim American terrorism, then, has been a very small, very low percentage of the overall violence in the United States.

* And I’ve seen more than a couple links to this diary on the legacy of Martin Luther King on Daily Kos this weekend.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing “The Help,” may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of “assault,” which could be anything from rape to not taking off one’s hat, to “reckless eyeballing”…