Posts Tagged ‘Robert Menendez’
Weekend Links!
* But at least one line in the tax form gives pause: The college lost roughly $4-million in investment income compared with the previous year, for unknown reasons. That year the college posted a deficit of $3-million, compared with a $325,000 deficit the previous year. I certainly hope someone follows up on that little oddity.
* Of course, it’s not entirely insane: How Larry Summers lost Harvard $1.8 billion.
* Academia and the Advance of African Science Fiction.
* SimCity, homelessness, and utopia.
It seems we all now live in a Magnasanti whose governing algorithm is to capture all work and play and turn them not only into commodities but also into data, and to subordinate all praxis to the rule of exchange. Any data that undermines the premise that this can go on and on for 50,000 years, has to be turned into non-data. If there’s work and play to be done, then, it’s inside the gamespace that is now the world. Is there a way that this gamespace could be the material with which to build another one?
* Parenting and the Profession: Don’t Expect Much When You’re Expecting.
* Higher Education and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory.
While the post-9/11 attacks have taken an even more dangerous turn, higher education is still a site of intense struggle, but it is fair to say the right wing is winning. The success of the financial elite in waging this war can be measured not only by the rise in the stranglehold of neoliberal policies over higher education, the increasing corporatization of the university, the evisceration of full-time, tenured jobs for faculty, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the view of students as customers, and the growing influence of the military-industrial-academic complex in the service of the financial elite, but also in the erasing of public memory. Memory is no longer insurgent; that is, it has been erased as a critical educational and political optic for moral witnessing, testimony and civic courage. On the contrary, it is either being cleansed or erased by the new apologists for the status quo who urge people to love the United States, which means giving up any sense of counter memory, interrogation of dominant narratives or retrieval of lost histories of struggle.
* 158 Private Colleges Fail Government’s Financial-Responsibility Test.
* The gangsters of Ferguson. But even this is still not “proof!”
* The Ferguson PD is NOT medieval. It’s modern white supremacy.
* Judge who invented Ferguson’s debtor’s prisons owes $170K in tax.
* It’s Not Just the Drug War: Progressive narratives about what’s driving mass incarceration don’t quite add up.
* Sotomayor May Have Saved Obamacare.
* Designing The Grand Budapest Hotel with Marquette alum Adam Stockhausen.
* Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People?
* “Rahm Emanuel pays the price for not pandering.” Why should the poor man be voted out of office just because his policies are horror-shows that no one likes?
* A corrupt politician from New Jersey? What will they think of next?
* Wow: Ringling Bros. Circus Will Stop Using Elephants By 2018.
* Cities Are Quietly Reviving A Jim Crow-Era Trick To Suppress Latino Votes.
* Hartford, CT says friends can’t room together unless some of them are servants.
* This Is What It’s Like To Go To Prison For Trolling.
* Brianna Wu vs. the Troll Army.
* Short film of the weekend: “Chronemics.”
* Gasp! Science proves men tend to be more narcissistic than women.
* The Time That Charles Babbage Tried To Summon The Devil.
* Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast.
* Wellesley Will Admit Transgender Applicants. Planet Fitness Under Fire For Supporting Trans Woman, Kicking Out Transphobic Member. Students seeking to redesignate restrooms as “all gender” face harassment and police detention at UC Berkeley. US Army eases ban on transgender soldiers.
* The headline reads, “Decades of human waste have made Mount Everest a ‘fecal time bomb.’”
* Colonization: Venus better than Mars?
* On Iain M. Banks and the Video Game that Inspired Excession: Civilization.
* Get it together, Millennials! “Millennials like to spank their kids just as much as their parents did.”
* The Catholic Church Opposes the Death Penalty. Why Don’t White Catholics?
* What’s Next After “Right to Work”?
* David Graeber talks about his latest book, The Utopia of Rules.
* The Pigeon King and the Ponzi Scheme That Shook Canada.
* Conservative columnist can’t mourn Nimoy’s death because Spock reminds him of Obama. Is there nothing Obama can’t destroy?
* 9 Social Panics That Gripped America.
* How Unsafe Was Hillary Clinton’s Secret Staff Email System?
* To whatever extent Doctor Who series 8 was a bit rocky, it seems like it’s Jenna Coleman’s fault.
* Making teaching a miserable profession has had a completely unexpected effect.
* Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? What could explain it?
* Is Yik Yak The New Weapon Against Campus Rape Culture?
* Tilt-shift effect applied to Van Gogh paintings.
* They say we as a society are no longer capable of great things.
TuesNi
* A slim majority of Americans now agree that homosexuality is not immoral. Break out the champagne!
* ABC wants you to know that the characters on Lost were not dead the whole time. Please be advised.
* Related: n+1 argues Lost is the last great scripted drama.
* Tonight’s BP links: It turns out BP screwed up the Exxon Valdez disaster too. They had no plan. No one has much of a plan now. What BP does not want you to see: oil and chemical dispersants swirling together into a toxic soup, forming large plumes under the surface of the water as deep as twenty-five feet, perhaps deeper. Chris Hayes v. “accidents happen.” And New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez has put forward legislation that would lift BP’s liability cap; I predict this eventually passes.
* And you had me at invisible sharks.
3/16.2
* Update from yesterday: running marathons will also kill you. Don’t do that either!
* Update from two weeks ago: a New Jersey appeals court has ruled Tea Party supporters in New Jersey can try to recall Robert Menendez despite the fact that no recall procedure exists for federal legislators under the Constitution.
* NBC polls puts health care support at 46-45. Some day, I suspect, this bill may actually pass.
* Related: By this time next week we’ll have seen huge headlines about health care. These headlines will either read “Democrats do it!”, followed by various Republicans and their apologists complaining that what the Dems did wasn’t nice, or “Democrats — losers again”, followed by Republicans going bwahahaha.
And it’s up to a handful of Democrats to decide which headlines we get. They’re out of their minds if they don’t choose door #1. (via)
* Also related, some breaking news: Major legislative breakthroughs are always controversial!
* If you ever watched the This American Life TV show, you might remember Mark Hogancamp, who built a replica World-War-II-era village in his backyard as a means of dealing with being brutally assaulted outside a bar. His story is now a feature-length documentary. (via)
* Wow: Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity. So this is why we can’t have nice things. (via)
* More actually existing media bias: CNN hires goat f**king child molester.
* FantasySCOTUS: Who will replace Judge Stevens if he retires?
* And Greensboro in the news! An “equipment failure” caused preview clips for adult programming to appear on two channels dedicated for kids in North Carolina, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable Inc. said today.
Tea Partiers, Jersey, Cheney, Scalia, Guns, 2010, RNC
* Tea Party supporters in New Jersey try to recall Robert Menendez despite the fact that no recall procedure exists for federal legislators under the Constitution. New Jersey Democratic Chairman John Wisniewski is angry about it:
“The attempt to recall Senator Menendez is an affront to the voters of New Jersey and has no standing in law. One day these folks are trying to disprove human evolution, the next day they are challenging the constitutionality of the Constitution. These are radical people who chose Menendez off of a list of Democrats because of the sound of his last name.”
Via Daily Kos.
* Inside the RNC’s secret fundraising strategy memo.
The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”
Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.” Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”
And yet it’s the Left that’s supposed to be condescending and arrogant. Conor Friedersdorf is pretty unhappy about all this.
* Former DNC Chair Howard Dean says the pundits are misreading 2010: the mood is anti-incumbent, not anti-Democrat.
* Firedoglake gets nostalgic for the Cheney doctrine, which says we should invade other countries at the slightest probability of danger but apparently doesn’t apply to protecting the only planet we will ever have.
* And The Wall Street Journal, of all places: So Where’s Your Originalism Now, Justice Scalia?
Justice Scalia insisted that the right to keep and bear arms is right there in the text, which of course is true. But so too is the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which, unlike the Court’s due process jurisprudence, has a historical meaning that helps define and limit the rights it was meant to protect.
At the McDonald argument, it seemed obvious that five or more justices will vote to apply the Second Amendment to the states. . . . But it was also obvious that most were deeply afraid of following a text whose original meaning might lead them where they do not want to go.
Via MyDD. More on the Chicago gun case at SCOTUSblog.
Gerry Canavan 