Posts Tagged ‘Robocop’
I Guess That’s Why They Call It Jet Lag Links
* “Fantastic Breasts and Where To Find Them.” NSFW, and probably deserves a trigger warning for imagery of sexual violence too.
* Academics, Public Work, And Labor.
* Kids Returned To Honduras, Killed.
* California drought: 17 communities could run out of water within 60 to 120 days, state says. More at MetaFilter.
* Recent Glacial Melt Mostly Caused By Man-Made Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Study Finds.
* Mr. Holder and top Justice Department officials were weighing whether to open a broader civil rights investigation to look at Ferguson’s police practices at large, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The issue came up after news reports revealed a 2009 case in which a man said that four police officers beat him, then charged him with damaging government property — by getting blood on their uniforms.
* Half of black men in the US have been arrested by age 23.
* Who is an “Outside Agitator”? Unethical journalism can make Ferguson more dangerous. Police in Ferguson Are Firing Tear Gas Canisters Manufactured During the Cold War Era. Tear Gas Is an Abortifacient. Why Won’t the Anti-Abortion Movement Oppose It? Why hasn’t Darren Wilson been arrested yet? Police are operating with total impunity in Ferguson. A local public defender on the deeply dysfunctional Ferguson court system.
* Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year.
* Saying the quiet part loud: Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.
* Another edition of Aaron Bady Movie Corner.
* I thought this @nerdist interview with Matthew Weiner was great.
* Trustees agree! Trustees need more power.
* Islamic militants execute journalist, MU grad James Foley. His letter to the alumni magazine from 2011.
* The Pressure to Breast-Feed Is Hurting New Moms With Postpartum Depression.
* It’s not all bad news: This Oxford professor thinks artificial intelligence will destroy us all.
* And the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin says we should prioritize road work based on what would create the most jobs. My gosh. It’s like an Adam Kotsko rant come to life.
Happy Birthday Connor Links!
My son is being born today, so the posting will probably be sporadic even by summer standards. Sorry! And hooray!
* FindingEstella from @amplify285 is an awesome Octavia Butler Archives Tumblr.
* NASA: ‘Our plan is to colonize Mars.’ Well, then, let’s go!
* Breaking: The Constitution is a shell game.
* Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas.
* This fantasy has survived the 1980s, of course, even as the action genre that spawned RoboCop has faded. Meanwhile, the market fundamentalism and “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that the film makes fun of, still relatively novel in 1987, have today become normalized. The idea of redemptive violence—mass incarceration, a heavily armed police force—is now so deeply embedded in our political culture that we may no longer be able to see it well enough to mock it. RoboCop is thus both more dated and more current than ever. Its critical edge comes from a pessimistic vision of the future that is getting closer all the time.
* If social and labor movements are to break out of this cycle, it will have to mean an actual break to the left of the Democratic Party. Or not?
* Politics in Times of Anxiety.
* Is soccer finally becoming a mainstream TV sport in America? These charts say yes.
* Bazillionaires! They’re just like us!
* Sherlock Holmes is officially out of copyright. Start your slashes!
* Podcast of the week: Rachel and Miles x-Plain the X-Men.
* Danger Close: The Iraq War in American Fiction. Almost certainly a factor in the prevalence of Iraq War stories being (1) science fictional (2) set in narrative situations that recast us as the victims of our own invasion.
* US v. Portugal: It was the worst. See you Thursday.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has your improved Turing Test.
Wednesday Links!
* What we’re talking about in my cultural preservation class today: Jyotsna Kapur’s “Capital limits on creativity: neoliberalism and its uses of art.” I’d actually suggest the adjunct herself functions as “the model worker of the new economy” alongside the freelancer.
The results of the Creative Culture Industry policy have already started to come in. Kate Oakley, among others, has shown that in the case of Britain these policies have exacerbated rather than eliminated inequality. They have led to gentrification and pockets of wealth in the midst of disintegrating social infrastructure. At the same time, work in the creative industries has become increasingly precarious — that is, temporary, project-based, and competitive, putting artists and media people in a constant in search of work (2006). As Richard Shearmur has indicated, calling upon local governments to modify their policies, planning, and budgets in order to respond to the preferences of the creative class boils down to reinforcing and subsidizing elites to a kind of ‘talent welfare’ that is reminiscent of ‘corporate welfare’ (2006-7, 37). In the process, art’s entire social role is undergoing a profound transformation. From being considered an imaginative and critical outsider or a participant in social transformation, the artist is now presented as the model worker of the new economy.
* New, privatized African city heralds climate apartheid.
* The bad conscience of empire: Historic papers about the slave trade are among the enormous cache of public documents that the Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded in a secret archive, the Guardian has learned.
* Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.
* Pollution from Chinese factories is harming air quality on U.S. West Coast!
* The chemical spill that contaminated water for hundreds of thousands in West Virginia was only the latest and most high-profile case of coal sullying the nation’s waters.
* Only You Can Discover Oil Pipeline Spills, Since 80 Percent Of The Time The Companies Miss Them.
* Train Derailment In Philadelphia Leaves Crude Oil Car Dangling Over Schuylkill River.
* UWM sued over dissolution of student government.
* New York’s Mayor Is Snow Plowing the City Along Class Lines Again.
* Campus shootings have become so common they barely make the news anymore.
* Good Guy with a Gun shoots self with gun, for second time.
Connersville, Indiana police chief David Counceller’s most recent self-inflicted wound occurred when his sweatshirt jammed against his 40-caliber Glock’s trigger as he attempted to holster the weapon. He was examining a new Glock at a gun shop at the time.
* ‘Pregnant Sims Can No Longer Brawl’ And Other Amazing Sims Patch Notes.
* Good Jersey / Bad Jersey: New Jersey Will Protect Pregnant Workers From Discrimination And Unsafe Conditions. Christie declines to sign bill requiring public notice of raw sewage overflows.
* Former Virginia Governor Indicted on Corruption Charges.
* The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard.
* “To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence,” he wrote to Ó Méalóid. “It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”
* Once we had the Sideways House, now we have the Upside-Down House.
* Legalizing murder still working out great.
* What Grantland Got Wrong. When mainstream media is the lunatic fringe.
* How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor.
* The headline reads, “Pubic Hair Grooming Injuries Have Quintupled.”
* If A then B: How the World Discovered Logic. The golden age of female philosophy.
* Back to the Future fan wants to make sequel accurate by releasing tons of Jaws movies.
* Don’t ever spoil Homeland for Jennifer Lawrence.
* If you eat the yellow pill, you will know all things. If you eat the green pill, you will know nothing but happiness.
* How to win a Best Actress Oscar.
* And never let them say our civilization never accomplished anything.
If There Is Hope It Lies in the Robocop Fans
In the face of rejection from corrupt* mayor Dave Bing, the fight to build a statue of Robocop in Detroit has gone viral.
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* If he’s not corrupt why does he hate Robocop so much?
Monday Night!
* The latest Detroit atrocity: Detroit mayor shoots down idea for Robocop statue. When will that poor city finally get a leader with some vision?
* How “The Fridge” lost his way: Elegy for William “The Refrigerator” Perry.
* Football vs. labor: Will the NFL play next year?
* Dystopia watch: Disney Now Marketing To Newborns In The Delivery Room.
* David Cole plays “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?”—almost by name!—in the New York Review of Books.
As Judge Hudson sees it, the health care reform law poses an unprecedented question: Can Congress, under its power to regulate “commerce among the states,” regulate “inactivity” by compelling citizens who are not engaged in commerce to purchase insurance? If it is indeed a novel question, there may be plenty of room for political preconceptions to color legal analysis. And given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, that worries the law’s supporters.
But the concerns are overstated. In fact, defenders of the law have both the better argument and the force of history on their side. Judge Hudson’s decision reads as if it were written at the beginning of the twentieth rather than the twenty-first century. It rests on formalistic distinctions—between “activity” and “inactivity,” and between “taxing” and “regulating”—that recall jurisprudence the Supreme Court has long since abandoned, and abandoned for good reason. To uphold Judge Hudson’s decision would require the rewriting of several major and well-established tenets of constitutional law. Even this Supreme Court, as conservative a court as we have had in living memory, is unlikely to do that.
The objections to health care reform are ultimately founded not on a genuine concern about preserving state prerogative, but on a libertarian opposition to compelling individuals to act for the collective good, no matter who imposes the obligation. The Constitution recognizes no such right, however, so the opponents have opportunistically invoked “states’ rights.” But their arguments fail under either heading. With the help of the filibuster, the opponents of health care reform came close to defeating it politically. The legal case should not be a close call.
* Did Bush cancel a trip to Switzerland out of fear of criminal prosecution? Probably not—but isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party finds another RINO: godfather of neoconservatism Bill Kristol.
* The end of the DLC. My inclination is to say “make sure you bury it at a crossroads so it can’t come back,” but of course Ezra’s more or less right: the DLC can safely disband because it won.
* The city-states of America, “those states where the majority of their populations lie within a single metropolitan area.” Via Yglesias, which has some light speculation on the politics of all this.
* On the Soviet Union’s rather poor plan to reach the Moon.
* Star Wars, with all those pointless words and images taken out. Note: falsely implies Chewbacca received a medal at the end of the film.
* Charles Simic: Where is Poetry Going?
“Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,” William Hazlitt wrote. One hopes that a poem will eventually arise out of all that hemming and hawing, then go out into the world and convince a complete stranger that what it describes truly happened. If one is fortunate, it may even get into bed with them or be taken on a vacation to a tropical island. A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge.
* An evening with J.D. Salinger. It ends pretty much exactly as you’d expect:
The three of us got into the cab. Joe gave the driver my address and when the cab began to move Salinger began walking, then running, alongside, still asking us to change our minds. He hit the cab—with his fist, I supposed—and the driver braked.
Joe said, “Drive on!” Salinger was looking in through the window beside me. “Stop. Please come back!” He was shouting now in the quiet street.
The cab moved and got through the intersection. Joe said angrily, “He’s absolutely crazy.”
* And the headline reads: Global food crisis driven by extreme weather fueled by climate change. Enjoy the century.
Busy Week Ahead
Busy week ahead, so posting will be comparatively light except insofar as I allow the Internets to distract me from my work. We’ll see how I do.
A few links:
* The U.S. has apparently launched not-at-all-October-Surprise forays into Syria and Pakistan.
* Barack draws a record 100,000+ crowd in Denver. (See photo.)
* NBC numbers man Chuck Todd is having an increasingly difficult time keeping “objectivity” in the face of Obama’s overwhelming advantages; here he is on Meet the Press talking about the early voting explosion and the possibility of African-American voter participation in the neighborhood of 95-100%.
* More early voting buzz: the latest official numbers show Democrats taking a lead over Republicans in the votes already cast, 871,251 to 818,799. As early voting tends to favor Republicans due to the disproportionate absentee balloting of military voters and the elderly, this is good news.
* Jewish voters in Pennsylvania have been warned by the state GOP not to make the same mistake their German ancestors did in the 1930s and ’40s. There is so much wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin.
* Who will replace Obama as the senator from Illinois? Jesse Jackson, Jr., wants the job, despite fears that he may be unelectable statewide.
* The Ann Arbor News endorses *nobody* for president. Well done, sirs.
* And the Internet has created its most bizarrely Dada meme yet: Robocop on a Unicorn.
Gerry Canavan 