Posts Tagged ‘sabotage’
Weekend Links!
* Angela Davis at Marquette, March 29.
* CFP: From Sanctuary to Sabotage: Fighting the Fascist Creep at and beyond Universities.
* “Virtually nothing about our standard model of sleep existed as we know it two centuries ago.”
* 20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins.
* 11 things I learned about academia by analysing 14 million RateMyProfessor reviews.
* Remember that Iowa lawmaker who wanted to purge universities of Democrats? Guess what!
* Nice, low-key interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on Flash Forward TV.
* Abigail Nussbaum walks you through her Hugo short fiction nominations.
* Trump and the Myth of Nuclear Flexibility.
* Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War.
* America divided into states with the population of California. Which is to say, if we allow ourselves a crudely democratic understanding of what representative democracy should be, there would only be 16 senators in a Senate that fairly represented people living in California.
* America has locked up so many black people it has warped our sense of reality.
* Exiting the Roach Motel, or, What’s the Matter with the Democratic Party?
The Democratic Party is a roach motel for leftists. We go in full of vision and energy, like the Sanders kids, like the Ellison supporters, and we get crushed and stuck in the slime. Sanders and Ellison had to play by the rules and call for continuing support for the Dems after their losses. Having played the game, they were stuck with the rules in the roach motel. Once you go in, you may never come out.
* Twilight of the meritocrats.
* Palantir and ICE. Freeze on H-1B Visas. Customs Giving Literacy Tests At JFK Is A Thing Now. Deportation fears impacting criminal case. Don’t Get Your Undocumented Friends in Trouble: A How-To. Are you listening, SXSW?
* White House aide Sebastian Gorka said Wednesday that objections to President Donald Trump’s creation of a new office to highlight crimes committed by undocumented immigrants are “un-American.” All right, then, I’ll go to Hell….
* “Accompanied by his wife Jessica, a U.S. citizen who is six months pregnant with their first child.” Trump administration considering separating women, children at U.S.-Mexico border. Detained after a press conference, Daniela Vargas was seven when she came to the U.S. A 13-Year-Old Girl Sobbed While Recording Her Immigrant Father Get Arrested By ICE Agents. ICE Plans To Deport Oregon Immigrant With 5 Children, No Criminal Background. Immigration agents deport Houston father of two who previously held immigration reprieve. After Decades In The U.S., NY Immigrant With Years-Old Pot Misdemeanor Faces Deportation. Does even a single person with a conscience work for this administration?
* Kushner and Flynn. Two other Trump advisers also spoke with Russian envoy during GOP convention. Your cheat sheet to four potential investigations of Russia and President Trump. Mysteries of Jeff Sessions. Recusal is not enough. Isn’t it pretty to think so? The Innocent Explanation. Why Trump Sounding ‘Presidential’ Only Makes Him More Dangerous. Style and Substance. Trumpism and heroism. You Cretins Are Going To Get Thousands Of People Killed. This one broke while I was tagging the post.
Jeff Sessions looks like a child that got turned into an old man for stealing a pie from a witch's window sill. pic.twitter.com/NxNQZURRjk
— Adam Murray (@Atom_Murray) February 9, 2017
y'all, i apologize. i got so excited to do racism that i slipped up and did a dang perjury! pic.twitter.com/sl04VNuTeG
— ceeks (@70Ceeks) March 2, 2017
* Hard to blame them: European Parliament votes to end visa-free travel for Americans.
* Four mosques have burned in seven weeks. Nearly half of the country’s Jewish community centers have received bomb threats in 2017. Today’s arrest (an apparent copycat) covered less than 10% of that.
* Destroying the planet is too important to let a silly little thing like national borders get in the way. The end of the Great Lakes. Gutting the Chesapeake Bay. Massive Permafrost Thaw Documented in Canada, Portends Huge Carbon Release. Antarctica hits record high temperature at balmy 63.5°F.
there’s
no
future
because
granddad
thought
it
would
be
funny
if
Trump
were
president— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 1, 2017
* The rich are different: they control everything.
* Adam Roberts rereads The Time Machine.
* The Feminist Bookstore Movement.
* Fascinated by this: Price of Lab-Grown Burger Falls from $325K to $11.36.
* A rough stat from up the street: Only 1 in 5 black students enrolled at UW-Milwaukee graduates in 6 years.
* Team Plagiarizes Golden State Warriors. Team Is Undefeated.
* Could different borders save Europe?
Could different borders save Europe? Ethnographic maps suggest an alternative to the continent's current configuration of artificial states pic.twitter.com/eAETsKtoVI
— Nicholas Danforth (@NicholasDanfort) March 2, 2017
* A diabetic boy’s parents ‘didn’t believe in doctors.’ Now they’re guilty of his murder.
* Are the Yuuzhan Vong coming back?
* After oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world. Then they began to be murdered off mysteriously. In 1924 the nascent FBI sent a team of undercover agents, including a Native American, to the Osage reservation.
* 69 Cock Lane is yours for £449,950, but is it Britain’s naughtiest address?
* This is the future liberals want. Though of course the meme is good too.
this is the future that liberals want pic.twitter.com/Ha8vbroPoU
— o_O (@franglophonic) March 2, 2017
This is the future liberals want. pic.twitter.com/9iH1ddpgqV
— Dan Hassler-Forest (@DanHF) March 2, 2017
This is the future that liberals want. pic.twitter.com/68FVp6pv5v
— Freddie Campion (@FreddieCampion) March 2, 2017
This is the future that liberals want. pic.twitter.com/YfA08Konou
— Maris Kreizman (@mariskreizman) March 2, 2017
Too good to remain hidden behind an anon account: This is the future liberals want. pic.twitter.com/vpWKBFzWkx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 2, 2017
* But not this one: “basically a Fitbit for your man bits that tracks thrust speed and velocity.”
* Disney is super proud of itself for this incredibly progressive leap forward. Next: Scar, Ursula, and Captain Hook were all gay, too!
* There’s nothing sweet in life: Protesting Dr. Seuss Week.
* Nobody hates college more than the people who run colleges.
* A transgender boy just won the Texas girls’ state wrestling championship.
* No More Saturday Marches. While the Iron Is Hot: The Case for the Women’s Strike.
* The line must be drawn — here!
* A People’s History of Daria.
* These colleges are better than Harvard at making poor kids rich.
* George W. Bush, with the soul of an artist.
die in jail serving consecutive life sentences or live long enough to become a beloved grandfatherly elder statesman https://t.co/DDorNHjHOb
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 2, 2017
* Massive Open Online Rubber Arrow through the Head.
* Statement of teaching philosophy.
* This week’s I Was There Too interviews someone I’ve always wondered about, the actor who replaced Crispin Glover in Back to the Future Part Two. The Biff episode was good too though if you follow Back to the Future arcana you’ve probably heard a lot of it before.
I’ll be nominating it for a Hugo next year. @BenRobertson @marc_laidlaw
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 4, 2017
* Trump’s worst crime is forcing me to agree with David Frum.
* Neoliberalism in everything: “Ark Encounter doesn’t live up to economic promise.”
* NASA’s about to learn a valuable lesson about the Internet.
* And the positive reviews have done it: I’m going to ruin my career and buy a Nintendo Switch so I can play the new Zelda.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 4, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 69 Cock Lane, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Roberts, America, Angela Davis, Antarctica, anti-Semitism, art, Attorney General, authoritarianism, autocracy, Back to the Future, Back to the Future II, banality of evil, Barack Obama, Breath of the Wind, Bush, California, cancer, CFPs, Chesapeake Bay, CIA, class struggle, climate change, college, college basketball, comedy, corruption, Daria, David Frum, democracy, Democrats, Department of Justice, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, Dr. Seuss, Duke, ecology, England, EPA, equality, espionage, Europe, Expanded Universe, fascism, FBI, feminist bookstores, Foucault, futurity, games, gay rights, general election 2020, general strike, Golden State Warriors, Great Lakes, H. G. Wells, Harvard, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Hugo awards, I Was There Too, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, income equality, Iowa, Islamophobia, Jared Kushner, JCCs, Jeff Sessions, job creation, journamalism, Kellyanne Conway, Keystone XL, Kim Stanley Robinson, lab-grown meat, liberals, Lord of the Rings, love, maps, Marquette, mass incarceration, memes, meritocracy, Mexico, Michael Flynn, Milwaukee, MOOCs, moral panics, mosques, murder, NASA, NBA, neoliberalism, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Noah's Ark, nuclear war, nuclearity, oil, Oprah, oral histories, Osage Nation, Palantir, parenting, Patrick Stewart, permafrost, Peter Thiel, podcasts, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, Putin, race, racism, radiation, Rate My Professor, resistance, roach motels, Robert Heinlein, Russia, sabotage, sanctuary campuses, science fiction, sea level rise, sex, Sizzler, slavery, sleep, smart condoms, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, State of the Union, Steve Martin, strikes, SXSW, terrorism, The Hobbit, the news, the rich are different, the Senate, The Time Machine, theory, this is the future liberals want, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, totalitarianism, transgender issues, Trappist-1, true crime, undercommons, UWM, visas, voice, wiretapping, Wisconsin, women's strike, Yuuzhan Vong, Zelda
Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Links
* Some of my own stuff from the weekend: Making America Great Again with Octavia Butler and the formal, official, can’t-take-it-back-now release of Octavia E. Butler in Kindle, hardback, and paperback. CFP: Buffy at 20. Jaimee’s election poem at the New Verse News: “Donald Trump, Kate McKinnon, Leonard Cohen.”
* CFP: Capital at 150. CFP: Marxist Reading Group: Genre and the Crisis of Narrative.
* Jerome Winter on the new space opera.
* Other books I’d rather be reading: In a Galaxy 90 Miles Away: The View from Cuban Science Fiction. No Mind To Lose: On Brainwashing.
* How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It). A Ted Chiang profile in The Guardian.
* A history of Chinese science fiction. An Islam and Sci-Fi Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
The margin was so small that everybody’s ego-preserving rationalization can look like the determinative factor. Hard outcome to learn from.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 12, 2016
* Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten. The Trump Meltdown Begins. There is no way to predict where this is heading. (Okay, maybe we can predict a little bit.) How Trump Won. The counties that flipped parties to swing the 2016 election. It probably wasn’t voter suppression (except maybe in Wisconsin). We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions. Yeah, good luck. It Can’t Happen Here in 2016. The Plot Against America in 2016. Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America. Preparing for the Worst: How Conservatives Will Govern in 2017. Trump takes to Twitter to blast ‘hater, loser’ children; vows retribution. Where the Democrats Go From Here. How to Build an Exit Ramp for Trump Supporters. Amazing what a week can do. Blue Feed, Red Feed. Abolish the Electoral College. Post-Election College Grading Rubric. Google Emoluments Truth. The nine liberals you meet in hell.
* He might as well try: Obama Can and Should Put Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.
* Hillary Clinton’s Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters. The Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem. Clinton Aides Blame Loss on Everything but Themselves. Comey! The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say. Epic. This didn’t have to happen. They Always Wanted Trump: Inside Team Clinton’s year-long struggle to find a strategy against the opponent they were most eager to face. Twilight of the Messageless Candidate. Blame the Clintons. Obama after Obama. Whatever happened: The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble. 2009: The Year the Democratic Party Died. The decimation of the Democratic Party, visualized. Does the Democratic Party Have a Future? Well, have you met the Democrats? The Worst Possible Leader at the Worst Possible Time. These are the key governors’ races the Democrats will blow in 2018. Blueprint for a New Party.
Harder even than disentangling from election season cult of personality will be re-processing Obama era as failure rather than triumph. https://t.co/eZBYqYIRs3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 15, 2016
*RECORD SCRATCH*
*FREEZE FRAME*
"Yup. That's me. I bet you're wondering how I ended up in this situation." pic.twitter.com/lrjaR82U2B
— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) November 10, 2016
But my core principle here is that any conclusion Dems draw that isn’t about their own bad choices is destructive.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 13, 2016
* From the archives: Umberto Eco on Ur-Fascism.
* Historians under Hitler. When Hitler Pivoted. Autocracy: Rules for Survival. What Is The “Alt-Right”? A Guide To The White Nationalist Movement Now Leading Conservative Media. Prepare For Regime Change, Not Policy Change.
Obama walking through the ruins of democracy feels a bit on-the-nose at the moment. pic.twitter.com/x7DiL5sFCy
— Brendan Sasso (@BrendanSasso) November 17, 2016
* Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else. More from Nate’s Twitter. And from another angle entirely: Things look an awful lot like they would if we decided elections by coin flip.
* So many more examples could be given, but it’s getting late, and one general takeaway from the 2016 Election seems clear: our popular media, from those producing it to those sorting it with editors and algorithms, are not up to the task of informing us and describing reality. This won’t happen, but those people who got Trump sooo consistently wrong from the primaries to Election Day should not have the job of informing us anymore. And if you were surprised last night, you might want to reconsider how you get information.
* The New Inquiry has been all over the Trump Resistance. Waking up in Trump’s America. Lose Your Kin. Against Extinction. Fuck. The Gamble. And the struggle goes on: “Thanksgiving is the festival of white reconciliation.”
Sabotage worked, and case for Trump illegitimacy is far stronger than against Obama. Build left-liberal consensus for maximum refusal now. https://t.co/N70tM7i8a3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 13, 2016
* No President. What a proper response to Trump’s fascism demands: a true ideological left.
* Do any laws bind electors to vote along with their state? Not really. But this cuts both ways, and basically ruins any sort of “hack the Electoral College scheme” from the jump too. Meanwhile, let’s hack the Electoral College, because what could possibly go wrong.
* Truly, only the superrich can save us now.
* Beginning to look a lot like Christmasttime: UPS strike. O’Hare strike.
* Rise of the Sanctuary Campus.
* And yet, to my knowledge, no one has explained clearly enough that globalization is over, and that we urgently need to reestablish ourselves on an Earth that has nothing to do with the protective borders of nation-states any more than the infinite horizon of globalization.
* Being Productive in Scholarly Publishing: Advice from Jason Brennan. No one said you’d like it.
* A GoFundMe for SEK’s medical bills. I only wish the prognosis were better.
* The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?
* Title IX is effectively finished, at least in its current form. More here. “College” as a concept may not be all that far behind.
* On toxifying, rather than repealing, the ACA.
* Trump Will Have Access To Personal Info Of “Dreamers” For Deportation Efforts. This precise possibility, of course, was raised as an objection to Obama’s action at the time.
* Democrats, 2016, preserving the state, and the man of lawlessness.
please calm down. we are a nation of laws and like it or not the sentinel program is law now. pic.twitter.com/WY7b3122J1
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) November 14, 2016
* After a tweet blaming this all on Bill Clinton, Steve Shaviro provided a time-travel novel to soothe my pain: The X-President.
* The coming Democratic defeat on infrastructure.
* What Women Used Before They Could Use the Law.
* I want things to be different.
* This world is so messed up. Let’s go do something good.
* How to Reverse Engineer Smells.
* The Official November 2016 Guide for Making People Feel Old.
* The 100-Year-Old Man Who Lives in the Future.
* Fact-checking doesn’t ‘backfire,’ new study suggests. Calling people racist might, though.
* Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* What if X-Men were a Gothic novel?
* Calexit.
* The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price.
* Huge, if true: Report finds many graduate students are stressed about finances.
* An Oral History of My So-Called Life.
* The Fate of Reading in a Multimedia Age.
* I think I did this one a few months ago, but at least somebody has a plan: Optimal search path for finding Waldo.
* We asked eighty-six burglars how they broke into homes.
* New research suggests the Earth’s climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than thought, raising the spectre of an ‘apocalyptic side of bad’ temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime. With Trump’s election I think any hope of solving this without geoengineering is over, and perhaps all hope period.
* The North Pole is a mere 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends. Give it a chance!
* Stephen Hawking says we’ve got about 1,000 years to find a new place to live. So you’re saying we have 999 years before we even need to think about this.
* But it’s not all bad news! Blood from human teens rejuvenates body and brains of old mice.
* And the thrilling conclusion to the thisisfine.jpg trilogy, truly the epic of our times.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 18, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2017, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abortion, academia, academic writing, actually existing media bias, airports, alt history, alt right, America, apocalypse, Arrival, authoritarianism, autocracy, backlash, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, blood, books, brainwashing, burglars, Calexit, California, callouts, capital, Carl Schmitt, Chicago, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, collapse, corpocracy, Cuba, decadence, democracy, Democrats, disability, Don't mention the war, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, drones, ecology, economists, Electoral College, empathy, empire, extrasolar planets, Facebook, factchecks, failure, fascism, FBI, FiveThirtyEight, futurity, general election 2016, genre, get out the vote, give it a chance, globalization, Gothic novels, grading, Greece, Hamilton, Harry Potter, health, health care, health insurance, Hell, Hillary Clinton, historians, Hitler, hope, I grow old, I want things to be different, ice sheet collapse, ideology, immigration, immortality, incompetence, infrastructure, It Can't Happen Here, Jaimee, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, Jerome Winter, journamalism, kakistocracy, Kate McKinnon, kids, kids today, kindness, kleptocracy, Lena Dunham, Leonard Cohen, liberals, maps, Marx, Marxism, mergers, Merrick Garland, my scholarly empire, My So-Called Life, narrative, Nate Silver, Netflix, obstruction, Octavia Butler, only the super-rich can save us now, parenting, podcasts, politics, polls, prediction, public intellectuals, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reading, real estate, recess, regime change, Richard Rorty, Rome, Ronald Reagan, Rust Belt, sabotage, sanctuary campus, science fiction, Scott Selisker, SEK, Sentinels, smells, space opera, Stephen Hawking, Story of Your Life, Stranger Things, strikes, Supreme Court, Ted Chiang, Thanksgiving, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, The Culture, the laws, the man of lawlessness, The New Inquiry, The Plot Against America, The X-President, this is fine, Title IX, totalitarianism, trans* issues, true crime, turnout, Umbero Eco, UPS, vampires, voter suppression, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Welcome to Night Vale, white nationalism, white supremacy, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing, X-Men, xkcd
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU
— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.
— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL
— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM
— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 11, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, Adam Kotsko, adjectives, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Alan Moore, alcohol, algorithms, Alice in Wonderland, America, animal personhood, animal research, animals, Apple, art, Art Spiegelman, austerity, Avatar, Balance of Terror, Barack Obama, basket of deplorables, Benjamin Robertson, Bill Clinton, Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter, Booster Gold, breastfeeding, Brexit, Britain, Bro Adams, Bugs Bunny, Camus, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, charity, China, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Newfield, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Civil War, class struggle, Clemson University, climate change, college majors, comics, communism, concussions, conspiracies, container ships, corporal punishment, credit scores, cryptozoology, cultural preservation, Dakota Access Pipeline, Dan Hassler-Forest, Darwing Duck, David Foster Wallace, DC Cinematic Universe, death, debt, deep time, Disney, Disney afternoon, Donald Trump, Donna Haraway, Douglas Adams, drama, Drug Enforcement Agency, drugs, DuckTales, Duke, Earth First, ecology, education, English, English departments, eschatology, eviction, Ewoks, faking your own death, fan culture, fantasy, fashion, first contact, FiveThirtyEight, flame trombones, Flat Earth, floods, FOIA, football, for-profit schools, Fordism, Fox News, Fred Moten, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Jameson, free speech, freedom of speech, games, gay issues, Gene L. Coon, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2016, genius, giraffes, graduate student life, graduate students, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda Jane, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, HBO, Hellboy, Henry Jenkins, heroin, Hillary Clinton, hippos, history, homelessness, hydrofracking, illegal immigration, India, Infinite Jest, iPhones, Israel, ITT Tech, J.K. Rowling, Jack Daniels, James Tiptree Jr., Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, John Brunner, John C. Calhoun, John Carpenter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindergarten, King Lear, Klu Klux Klan, Kratom, labor, language, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Lewis Carroll, liberals, libraries, literature, lockouts, loneliness, Long Island University, magic, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, Making a Murderer, maladministration, mannequins, maps, Margaret Atwood, Maus, medical humanities, Mel Gibson, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, monsters, Montana, monuments, moral panic, Mother Theresa, musicals, my media empire, Nadja Spiegelman, names, narcissism, Nate Silver, Native Americans, NEH, neoliberalism, New York, NFL, nonprofit-industrial complex, nonprofits, nostalgia, novels, obituary, oil spills, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, pennies, philanthropy, philosophy, Poe's Law, poetry, Pokémon Go, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, polls, Polygraph, pre-K, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, public universities, Quebec, queer readings writing themselves, race, racism, rape culture, Raymond Chandler, reaction, reactionaries, reading, religion, retirement plans, Richmond, rising sea levels, Roger Ailes, Romulans, sabotage, saints, Salvador Dali, Samsung, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scabs, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Shakespeare, slave trade, slavery, socialism, sound, Soviet Union, speculation, speculative fiction, speculative finance, sports, Stand on Zanzibar, Standing Rock, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, stillbirth, Stranger Things, strikes, student debt, student loans, student movements, surrealism, taste, teaching, tech trash, tenure, text adventures, textual histories, the Anthropcene, the avant-garde, the Capitalocene, the Chthulhucene, The City on the Edge of Forever, the courts, the Flood, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the humanities, the law, The Night Of, the oceans, The Passion of the Christ, the revolution, The Space Merchants, The Stranger, The Thing, the university in ruins, theater, theory, Thirteenth Amendment, TIAA-CREF, TNG, Tolkien, totality, trans* issues, transmedia, trees, trigger warnings, true crime, Trump TV, UIUC, Underground Railroad, unions, University of Chicago, Utopia, Virginia, Vonnegut, Vox, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Westeros, white people, wilderness, Wisconsin, words, WPA, writing, Zack Snyder
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
Overnight totals:
4 injured officers
17 arrests
7 squads damaged, 2 totaled
48 ShotSpotter activations
6 businesses set on fire— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 14, 2016
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
This is fine. pic.twitter.com/uJawEv7mo7
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) August 11, 2016
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then they google to make sure it’s actually THAT pirate party
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 13, 2016
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
English has a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" https://t.co/6Inp9xNJ4n
— AllThingsLinguistic (@AllThingsLing) August 14, 2016
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
CONSPIRACY THEORY:
AUSTRALIA IS SCOOBY DOO pic.twitter.com/BJvqgK8USd— anna (@ttylgay) August 10, 2016
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
I saw this yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since pic.twitter.com/S2RVoBswyJ
— sam (@SamSt3bbins) May 16, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, abolish the Senate, abuse, academia, addiction, alcoholism, aliens, American exceptionalism, anagrams, animals, anime, architecture, austerity, Australia, Barack Obama, Bigfoot, body cameras, books, bronze medals, Bryan Fuller, Case Western, CFPs, cheating, Chernobyl, childbirth, chimera, China, China Miéville, Chris Ware, CIA, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, Cloud Atlas, cockroaches, comics, CWRU, David Mitchell, DC Comics, deafness, decency, democracy, disease, Disney, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, doping, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Electoral College, English majors, epistemic closure, ethics, faculty meetings, family leave, fantasy, feminism, film, Flint, flooding, FMLA, game theory, games, Gawker, general election 2016, girlhood, God, group writing assignments, groupwork, guns, Harry Potter, Hawaii, Hawaii Sign Language, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, human-animal hybrids, ice, Iceland, immortality, institutes, James Tiptree Jr., Jessica Jones, karate, Kenny Baker, language, lawns, lead, lead poisoning, license plates, linguistics, literature, Lois Lane, long jump, Louisiana, mad science, Making a Murderer, maps, Marquette, Mars, mass extinction, Mayor McCheese, McDonald's, McSweeney's, Mebane, medieval studies, mental health, mental illness, Merrick Garland, MetaFilter, Michigan, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, Moirai, money, monstrosity, movies, Mr. Burns, muons, music, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, neoliberalism, New York City, Niku, No Man's Sky, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, NYC, Ocean's Eight, Octavia Butler, Olympics, online harassment, Orion, outer space, Paul McCartney, pedagogy, personality, Peter Thiel, physics, Pirate Party, podcasts, poetry, police, police violence, politeness, politics, polls, pregnancy, prisoner's dilemma, protons, Proxima Centauri, PT Cruisers, public universities, Puerto Rico, pulse drive, R2-D2, race, race-walking, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, Ray Kurzweil, reading, real estate, refrigeration, religion, Republican National Convention, Republicans, revenge, rickrolling, riots, sabotage, science fiction, Scooby Doo, segregation, self-driving cards, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, shipwrecks, silver medals, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, street signs, suicide, Suicide Squad, superheroes, Supreme Court, surrealism, surveillance society, syllabus, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Beatles, The Last Days of New Paris, The Last Saturday, The Little Mermaid, the Moon, The Night Of, the Senate, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the Universe, Third Amendment, this is fine, ties, totality, traffic stops, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unions, violence, voting, water, wealth, weather, white privilege, whiteness, wilderness, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, writing
Spring Break Forever Links
* Hey look! LARoB reviewed Green Planets.
* Another science fiction studies research opportunity: The 2016-2017 Le Guin Fellowship.
* Notes from ICFA roundtable on The Force Awakens, on cast, nostalgia, and franchise. This was a great panel; I’m so glad we did it.
* Will we ever learn George Lucas’s original Plan for Star Wars Episode 7?
* What a Funding Fracas Could Mean for the Future of CUNY.
* They’ve finally diagnosed my unusual condition.
* Snubbed again! Here Are 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman. Meanwhile:
But the movie itself is terrible, poorly made, dumb, and shockingly dull. Doomsday is trash. Lex stinks. The worst modern comic book film.
— Adonai (@devincf) March 22, 2016
* In other words, bad food becomes linked to good memories, and to our sense of who we are and where we come from. To give up that food would be to give up not only a piece of our childhood, but of ourselves. “When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favorite brand of ice cream or potato chips or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility,” Wilson writes. “It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss.”
* In this formula, the president implies that with hard work everyone can get a good job. This is the premise for a lot of public education rhetoric, and it is 100 percent false. It may be technically true that in the American system anyone can get a good job, but that doesn’t mean most people aren’t out of luck. Anyone can win the lottery, but everyone certainly can’t. America is still a class system, and by design, most people—no matter the average level of education or job skill—will have to sell their labor to property owners in order to feed and house themselves. Those property owners are the same people that have spent the past hundred years shaping the education system and scientifically reducing labor costs.
* What a weird coincidence, ten straight record warm months in a row.
* Appalachia in the Anthropocene: When mining a century’s worth of energy means ruining a landscape for millions of years. Ice in the Anthropocene. Oil in the Anthropocene. Boulder-Hurling Megawaves in the Anthropocene. Cli-Fi in the Anthropocene.
* “There are no plausible scenarios in which climate stabilization is compatible with a pace of capital accumulation required for economic and political stability under a capitalist system.” Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World.
* How are the political effects of “terrorism” produced?
* #altac
* A Video Game About Changing What Happens In Shakespeare’s Hamlet Using Time Travel. Sold!
* Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* The Christians, the Soviets, and the Bible.
* It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
* Game theory and the GOP nomination. Can’t #StopTrump? Third parties: a beginner’s guide. Of course, there’s always Plan B. Or Plan C.
* I, Cthulhu, endorse Donald Trump.
* BART Social Media Intern ’16.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
* A Brief History of Sabotage.
* Twilight of Gawker: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit.
* Sea World Promises to Acquire No New Orcas. Why SeaWorld is ending its killer whale program, in one brutal chart.
New SeaWorld Show Just Elephant Drowning In Large Tank Of Water With No Explanation https://t.co/JfgnMqF5L4 pic.twitter.com/uFtvm3K65l
— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 18, 2016
* Why We’re Opting Out of Testing.
* Junot Díaz on time travel and colonialism.
* A book length history of abolition.
* More from the death of psychology.
* Well, he tried: the Obama legacy.
* The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana.
* The stock market is a sucker’s bet.
* What we talk about when we talk about jobs.
* These measures seem harsh, but if Trump really is a sui generis evil, then unprecedented and difficult measures are called for. If we’re not willing to make and carry through with such threats, does that mean that we don’t really view him as a sui generis evil? That this is just the latest thing we’re willing to humor for the sake of family peace and avoiding social awkwardness?
* Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings. I’m currently in the process of filing a request with the chalk administration office so I can respond to this with the detail and attention it deserves.
* What if physical activity doesn’t help people lose weight?
* Duke’s non-tenure-track faculty have unionized.
* They found Himmler’s occult book stash.
* “Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms.”
* Inside the Crazy Back-Channel Negotiations That Revolutionized Our Relationship With Cuba.
* Hackers ‘could take over your dildo and make it go berserk’, expert warns.
* Reading Calvin and Hobbes in Korea.
* I’ll be 100% honest, you had me at hello.
* And the best fantasy series you’ve never heard of is getting a second chance at a film franchise. This time it will work for sure!
Written by gerrycanavan
March 23, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NeverTrump, #StopTrump, 1969, abolition, academia, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncts, altac, Andrew Cuomo, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Appalachia, austerity, Barack Obama, BART, Batman, Batman v. Superman, Ben Robertson, Bernie Sanders, books, Calvin and Hobbes, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, chalk, charter schools, Christianity, Chronicles of Pyrdain, class struggle, cli-fi, climate change, coal, colonialism, comics, conferences, Cthulhu, Cuba, CUNY, Daredevil, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, diabetes, dildoes, Disney, Donald Trump, Duke, ecology, education, Emory, empire, endorsements, Episode 7, espionage, evil, exercise, fantasy, fascism, Federal Reserve, fellowships, feminism, film, food, free speech, game theory, games, Gandalf, Gawker, George Lucas, Green Planets, grief, hackers, Hamlet, Hillary Clinton, Himmler, history, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, humor, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, ideology, jobs, joke addiction, jokes, Junot Díaz, Kansas, kids today, Korea, legalize drugs, Lloyd Alexander, Lord of the Rings, Louisiana, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nixon, occultism, oil, orcas, Paradox, Playboy, politics, psychology, race, religion, Republican primary 2016, sabotage, San Francisco, Saruman, scams, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sea World, Shakespeare, slavery, snubs and flubs, Soviet Union, standardized testing, Star Wars, stock market, student movements, superheroes, Superman, Telltale Games, The Americans, the Anthropocene, The Force Awakens, the occult, The Walking Dead, third parties, time travel, Tolkien, transgender issues, Twitter, unions, war on drugs, West Virginia, zombies, Zootopia
Wednesday Links!
* Marquette English’s course offerings for summer and fall 2015, including my courses on Science Fiction as Genre, J.R.R. Tolkien, and American Literature after the American Century.
* Speaking of my courses, this is such an incredible answer to the last few weeks of my cultural preservation course I almost feel as though I somehow made it up.
* An amazing late comment on my Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis post, including some great commentary on the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
* My review isn’t coming for a few months, but I really loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. I can’t wait to talk to people about it. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now.
* If you want a vision of the future: Sweet Briar College, Citing ‘Financial Challenges,’ Will Close Its Doors in August. (More, more.) Clarkson U., Union Graduate College Explore Merger. It’s Final: UNC Board of Governors Votes To Close Academic Centers. Jindal cuts higher ed by 78%.
* It’s always “the end of college.”
* “De-tenure.” Don’t worry, it’s just another regrettable drafting error!
* Why we occupy: Dutch universities at the crossroads.
* The academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has focused largely on how fake undergraduate classes helped athletes maintain their eligibility to compete. In an article in The News & Observer over the weekend, a former UNC official says athletics officials also sometimes asked the university’s graduate school to bend the rules to admit athletes in order to extend their eligibility.
* This is the best Dean of Eureka Moments post yet. Maybe literally the best possible.
associate vice provost of failure successes
— Dean O. Eureka (@deaneureka) February 28, 2015
* College admissions and former inmates.
* Nine out of ten startups fail, which is why every institution in society should be converted to the startup model immediately.
* The Search for a Useable Past: An Interview with Paul Buhle on Radical America.
* The politicization of even the idea of knowledge.
* Michigan Frat’s 48-Hour Rager Wrecks Resort, Causes $430,000 in Damages.
* Le Guin vs. Ishiguo: “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
* The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s.
* US sea level north of New York City ‘jumped by 128mm.’
* A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years.
* Vox considers the end of American democracy: 1, 2.
* Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules. Hillary Clinton’s personal email account looks bad now. But it was even worse at the time.
* Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.
* When A Newspaper Gave Blade Runner‘s Replicant Test To Mayor Candidates.
* “An ode to Juiceboxxx, a 27-year-old rapper from Milwaukee no one’s ever heard of.”
* “When Your Father Is the BTK Serial Killer, Forgiveness Is Not Tidy.”
* Scott Walker Wants To Stop Funding Renewable Energy Research Center. Of course he does.
* Defense Bill Passes, Giving Sacred Native American Sites To Mining Company.
* The forgotten masterpieces of African modernism.
* Man gets life in prison for selling $20 worth of weed to undercover cop.
* Justice department determines Ferguson is a terrible place.
* The Americans and austerity.
* Two ways of looking at income inequality.
* How a French insurer wrote the worst contract in the world and sold it to thousands of clients.
* Teach students about consent in high school.
* Vermont Town May Allow 16- And 17-Year-Olds To Vote In Local Elections.
* Crunching the numbers: How Long Can A Spinoff Like ‘Better Call Saul’ Last?
* What Marvel Characters End Up Being Called In Other Languages.
* Careers of the future: professional dumpster diver.
* It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son. After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.
* Mars One colonists better off eating frozen pizza than local veggies.
* Local Lab In Berkeley Accidentally Discovers Solution To Fix Color Blindness.
* Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.
* How the MFA Glut Is a Disservice to Students, Teachers, and Writers.
But there’s another breed of MFA program out there, proliferating constantly. These programs have nearly 100% admittance rates, fund zero percent of their students, collect outrageously high tuition, and often pay their instructors very little. And because there are so many people (rightly or wrongly) clamoring for MFAs, they have no incentive for standards, either—no incentive to reject any person, no matter how badly they write. One person’s money is as green as the next, after all. If you’ve received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you’re in.
* 10-Year-Old Math Genius Studying for University Degree.
* The Last Man on Earth really shouldn’t work. And yet…
* Officials at Arizona State University probably weren’t expecting the full Stormfront treatment when its English department advertised a spring semester class exploring the “problem of whiteness.”
* No shades of grey in teaching relationships.
* Pendulum keeps swinging: Now Americans Should Drink Much More Coffee.
* It’s been so long so I posted one of these I haven’t even linked to anything about the dress yet.
* In 1971, William Powell published The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide to making bombs and drugs at home. He spent the next four decades fighting to take it out of print.
* Why Americans Don’t Care About Prison Rape.
* Robear: the bear-shaped nursing robot who’ll look after you when you get old. What could possibly go wrong?
* In the 1800s, Courts Tried to Enforce Partnerships With Dolphins.
* The 16 Strangest Dragons In Dungeons & Dragons.
* Mark your everythings: Community comes back March 17.
* First the gorilla who punched the photographer, now this.
* And the arc of history is long, but: North Carolina Legalizes Call Girls For Politicians.
Meanwhile, in heaven … #LeonardNimoy #LLAP pic.twitter.com/kn1a6RiDuA
— Kirsten Heffron (@KirstenHeffron) February 27, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
March 4, 2015 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academic fraud, administrative blight, Africa, America, American century, American literature, Anarchist's Cookbook, anarchists, animals, apocalypse, Arizona State University, Aurora, austerity, Barack Obama, Better Call Saul, Bill Clinton, Blade Runner, blue, Bobby Jindal, books, Breaking Bad, California, Clarkson University, class struggle, climate change, coffee, collapse, college admissions, college sports, color, color blindness, comedy, comics, community, consent, contracts, cultural preservation, Dan Harmon, deflation, defund everything, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, Department of Justice, dictatorship, dolphins, don't date your students, don't sleep with your students, dumpster divers, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, eldercare, emails, epistemic closure, eureka moments, fantasy, fascism, Ferguson, fraternities, frozen pizza, genius, genre, health, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, income inequality, insurance, Juiceboxxx, Kazuo Ishiguro, Keurig, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge, learning styles, lies and lying liars, live long and prosper, Louisiana, magic, Marquette, Mars, Mars One, Marvel, megadrought, MFAs, Michael Brown, Milwaukee, mining, mismanagement, modernism, Monica Lewinsky, MOOCs, moral panics, museums, Native American issues, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netherlands, New York City, North Carolina, nursing, obituary, octopuses, our brains work in interesting ways, Ozymandias, panpsychism, Parkinson's, Paul Buhle, pedagogy, permanent crisis, permanent cuts, photography, plantations, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, prostitution, race, racism, Radical America, rap, rape, rape culture, renewable energy, RIP, rising sea levels, Robear, robots, sabotage, sadness, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, serial killers, sex, shock doctrine, slavery, speculative realism, Spock, St. Louis, Star Trek, State department, Steve Shaviro, Students for a Democratic Society, subjectivity, Sweet Briar University, teaching, television, tenure, the 60s, The Americans, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, The Buried Giant, the courts, the dress, the kids are all right, The Last Man on Earth, the law, the rich are different, Tolkien, Twitterbots, UNC, Union Graduate College, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Voight-Kampff Test, voting, war on drugs, water, Wes Anderson, West Wing, what it is I think I'm doing, whiteness, Wisconsin, words, writing, X-Men
Thursday Evening
* Aaron Bady has an interesting, informative, and important post on his experiences at the Occupy Oakland general strike yesterday.
* Seven weeks of Occupy, at In Focus.
* Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.
It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes. Students drink too much alcohol, smoke too much marijuana, play too many computer games, wreck cars, become pregnant, get overwhelmed trying to help anorexic roommates, and too often lose the modest but vital support previously provided by a parent who has been laid off. Older students—and these days most are older than traditional university age—often have to work full-time and care for children or parents, or both. Those likeliest to encounter these problems are also the ones who haven’t been schooled since birth to find the thread that can lead them through the labyrinths of the bureaucracy. They aren’t confident that they will see an invitingly open door, where a friendly adviser or professor is eager to help them, and they don’t have parents hovering, eager to find that helper for them.
* How could a late entrant still shake up the Republican field? Nate Silver reports. You already know my thoughts on this.
* One-half of Floridians believe the GOP is intentionally sabotaging the economy. Gee, you think? On the one hand, I’m surprised the number is so high; on the other, I’m amazed there’s anyone who can’t see this…
* Mars 500 wraps up this week. io9 says it doesn’t prove anything.
* A Utah man who claimed to be an illegal immigrant from Mexico to avoid going to prison is now wanted by police after he returned to the United States and acknowledged his true identity to a judge.
* If episodes of fission at Fukushima were confirmed, Mr. Koide said, “our entire understanding of nuclear safety would be turned on its head.”
* This week we celebrate 100 years of dropping bombs on people from planes.
* Two great tastes (okay, one): The Muppets on WWE Raw.
* And the headline reads, “Cash-strapped Chicago mulls easing marijuana law.” Do the right thing for the wrong reasons if you have to, just do it…
Written by gerrycanavan
November 3, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, air war, big pictures, bombs, Chicago, class struggle, college, corporations, crime, Defense of Marriage Act, Fukushima, general strike, How the University Works, immigration, Japan, Jeb Bush, John Edwards, Libya, marijuana, Mars, Muppets, NASA, North Carolina, nuclear energy, nuclearity, Oakland, Occupy Everywhere, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Wall Street, only the super-rich can save us now, outer space, politics, professional wrestling, protest, Republican primary 2012, Republicans, resistance, sabotage, the economy, the university in ruins, unemployment, Utah, war on drugs
What’s Wrong with the Post Office?
But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.
At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”
As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today:
By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion). This $19.5 billion deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 29, 2011 at 11:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11-dimensional chess, politics, Republicans, sabotage, they're always one step ahead, ugh, unions, USPS