Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘slavery

Thanksgiving Links!

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* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday

* I’m giving the last “Tolkien Tuesdays” talk at the Haggerty on next Tuesday, November 28, on Tolkien and pop culture.

* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.

* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.

* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.

* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!

* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.

* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.

* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.

* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.

* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.

* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.

* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.

* The Dirt on Pig-Pen.

* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.

* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…

* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.

* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.

* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.

* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.

* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.

* ‘A World Cup Built on Modern Slavery’: Stadium Workers Blow the Whistle on Qatar’s ‘Coverup’ of Migrant Deaths and Suffering.

* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.

* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.

* Abortion, Every Day.

* New Rules for a New Game.

* Welcome to the Infinite Conversation: an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.

* ‘I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to be there’: Milwaukee student’s poetry takes her to the White House.

* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.

* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.

* what is the crime for which the turkey was sentenced to death & the sentence nullified by the US President? & what guarantee do we have that the turkey won’t be executed anyway, as soon as the cameras are gone.

* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.

* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.

* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

* Yes, but: the comic.

* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.

* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.

* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’

* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.

* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.

* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”

* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 22, 2022 at 11:35 am

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Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!

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Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant?

… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?

Written by gerrycanavan

March 12, 2022 at 6:38 pm

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Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy

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Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...

First, just a few things I’ve been doing:

And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:

Written by gerrycanavan

May 11, 2021 at 1:41 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet

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Tuesday Links!

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* Something I wrote a few years back about Black Panther has finally popped up at Mayday: “Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda.”

* And Grad School Vonnegut #10 is up, on “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and Watchmen with Adam Kotsko. I’m proud of the tweet hyping it.

* SFRA is seeking a web director. The Huntington has a new Octavia E. Butler research fellowship. World Science Fiction Studies is still seeking proposals for the 2021 book prize.

* CFP: Us in Flux: Community, Collaboration, and the Collective Imaginations of SF. Call for Papers: Serious Play. CFP: “Post-Utopia in Speculative Fiction: The End of the Future?”

This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!

* For the second year in a row, George R.R. Martin has managed to make the Hugos all about him.

The Coronavirus Pandemic, Science Fiction, and the Contingent Nature of Roads. Last and First Men review – eerie sounds and unearthly images from a posthuman world. Apocalypse Then, Now—and Future? “Nostalgia for the Future”: Projecting a Post-Disability Image through Retro-Futuristic Aesthetics in Viktoria Modesta’s “Prototype.” The Name of This Feeling Is Revolution: On David Mitchell’s “Utopia Avenue.”

CDC predicts up to 11,000 people will die every week this month from coronavirus. CDC Predicts Grim Future. Young people are infecting older family members with coronavirus in multigenerational homes. Survivors of Covid-19 show increased rate of psychiatric disorders, study finds. One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren’t hospitalized have long-term illness. Lasting heart damage could be COVID-19’s legacy for some non-hospitalized survivors. How the Pandemic Defeated America. Vermont, History, and the Coronavirus. After Plummeting, the Virus Soars Back in the Midwest. We Just Have to Assume the Monster Is Everywhere. Every Decision Is A Risk. Every Risk Is A Decision. We Need to Talk about Ventilation. Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine.

In late July academia changed its mind about the fall term. Covid Tests and Quarantines: Colleges Brace for an Uncertain Fall. The Risk That Students Could Arrive at School With the Coronavirus. ‘The virus beat us’: Colleges are increasingly going online for fall 2020 semester as COVID-19 cases rise. Email From Columbia Admin Requests That Graduate Students And Faculty Reconsider Teaching Solely Online, Gives Three Days To Decide. UO is reopening dorms at full capacity *and* keeping their on-campus housing requirement. North Carolina colleges and universities reported COVID-19 cases on campus. More Than 6,600 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Linked to U.S. Colleges. The largest school district in Georgia reported Sunday that 260 employees have tested positive for the coronavirus or are in quarantine because of possible exposure as they prepare for the new school year. Staff in a district in Arizona is already 11% positive. Officials say the student attended part of the first day of school Thursday. Outbreak at Fraternity Row. UNC Tenured Faculty Tell Students to Stay Home Amid COVID Concerns: ‘It Is Not Safe for You to Come to Campus.’ Colleges Seek Waivers From Risk-Taking Students. “This is the worst, biggest crisis we have ever gone through UWM.” Let’s Look at the Numbers. Teachers Are Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction Too. Will Kids Follow the New Pandemic Rules at School? ‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail.’ 9 ways America is having the wrong conversation about ‘reopening’ schools. How to Stop Magical Thinking in School Reopening Plans. Think school kids won’t be hurt by COVID-19? Experiences from the 1918–19 flu say otherwise. Covid-19 and the market model of higher education: Something has to give, and it won’t be the pandemic.

* And on the homefront: Whitefish Bay school board approves plan to start school year with in-person and virtual learning. Marquette Wire: MU must offer remote learning, teaching options for fall semester.

* Against vocational awe.

Essential or Expendable? Working in Higher Education during COVID-19.

* Acquiescent no more.

* ‘We are being gaslit’: College football and Covid-19 are imperiling athletes. On a call with SEC leaders, worried football players pushed back: ‘Not good enough.’ Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX. Colorado universities are increasingly losing money on sports as coaches’ pay, recruitment costs rise.

* Wild @Sciencing_Bi hoax ends in absolutely wild fashion.

U.S. Economy Drops 32.9% In Worst GDP Report Ever. At least someone’s getting rich. NYC small businesses now closing for good. The Virus Turns Midtown Into a Ghost Town, Causing an Economic Crisis. These Businesses Lasted Decades. The Virus Closed Them for Good. Beach towns fear they won’t survive a summer of COVID-19. No football in Green Bay would be economic, emotional blow. America needs a bar and restaurant bailout. Self-employed Wisconsinites wait for word on unemployment payments. ‘Coronavirus has stolen our future’: young people’s despair as jobs evaporate. America.jpg. United States May Lose One-third of All Museums, New Survey Shows. Dunkin’s as Bellweather. Activism against evictions in New Orleans. As Pandemic Rages, the United States Slashes an Economic Lifeline. The incompetent criminals ruling the U.S. are about to push millions of Americans off a terrifying financial cliff. How the eviction crisis across the U.S. will look. The Pandemic Makes the Case for Sweeping Reform.

Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All.

Americans Aren’t Making Babies, and That’s Bad for the Economy. I guess the “baby boom or divorce boom” folks have their answer…

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air.” Kushner’s COVID-19 Team Ended Plan For Nationwide Testing Because They Didn’t Want To Help Blue States.

Study: Men More Likely Than Women to Back COVID Conspiracies.

* Disgusting effort from the Manhattan DA office to drag the Trump name through the mud. Know Your Enemy. Nearly everyone believes that Trump can be reelected in November but almost no one believes he’ll do so with the support of a majority of the voting public. DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents. Census Door Knocking Cut A Month Short Amid Pressure To Finish Count. Destroying the Postal Service for Fun and Profit. As Trump leans into attacks on mail voting, GOP officials confront signs of Republican turnout crisis. Pregaming the Coming November Trainwreck. How Trump Could Steal the Election. Warning Statement on the Potential for Mass Atrocities in the United States.

* Because it never stops being relevant: Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism.

* Harper’s v. Kenosha, WI.

* This TikTok thing is just nuts.

Counterfactual Criticism: Watchmen, Witch Armies, and Asking TV for More.

* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.

* Neo-Nazis Infilitrate the Police in Germany.

* Genocide in China.

* The gender-neutral b’nai mitzvah.

* U.S. Missionary With No Medical Training Settles Suit Over Child Deaths At Her Center.

Pewaukee priest once accused of sexual assault of a minor free to return to church.

* Miracles and wonders: uniQure Begins First-in-Human Gene Therapy Trials for Huntington’s Disease.

Zelda recipe appears in serious novel by serious author after rushed Google search. This really hits home — my dissertation had an entire chapter on Zelda Fitzgerald I had to take out at the very last minute.

* As transgender rights debate spills into sports, one runner finds herself at the center of a pivotal case.

* On the local beat: What happened at Comet Cafe?

What if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s? The World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Is on Fire. It’s at least double.

* What sort of weird late-period William Gibson bullshit is this?

Is This the End of Writing in Cafés?

* Did a Goblin King write this?

* Remember when Google was useful?

* Former Deadspin staffers launch Defector, a new worker-owned media company.

* SWAT Mafia.

The DA’s Office Is Reviewing Hundreds of Cases Linked to (Just) 3 LAPD Officers.

* Michigan Today profiles Saladin Ahmed and his Dearborn-based superhero Starling.

* The headline reads, “Human sperm roll like ‘playful otters’ as they swim, study finds, contradicting centuries-old beliefs.”

* This is Katie Ledecky swimming the length of a pool without spilling a single drop of the chocolate milk balanced on her head.

* The X2 Cast Allegedly Almost Quit the Marvel Film Over Bryan Singer.

The ‘Star Trek’ Saga: How the Starship Enterprise Almost Landed in Las Vegas.

When Black People Appear on Seinfeld.

And Forrest MacNeil reviews living through a pandemic.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 4, 2020 at 10:31 am

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Saturday Night Links!

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* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”

I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.

A Million People on Mars May Not Be Wishful Thinking. But colonists would have to change their diets, and learn to eat crickets.

* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.

Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.

* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.

* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.

Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”

Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.

Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!

Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)

* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.

* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.

* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.

The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.

* 36 Hours in Milwaukee.

PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.

* The university and nuclear weapons research.

* Headlines for the contemporary university.

* NYC Psychology Professor Secretly Moonlights As White Nationalist Co-Host Of Richard Spencer’s Podcast.

* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.

* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”

* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.

The Philosopher of #MeToo.

* What can you do with an English major?

Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.

Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!

* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.

* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.

* Rudy! Go Team Crime!

* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!

* Wild what we just accept as normal now.

* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.

The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.

 

* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.

Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.

Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.

* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.

If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.

* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.

* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.

* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.

* Netflixlodeon.

* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.

* Sonic is cool now.

* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.

* The streaming interregnum.

* The pink.

* Even nobodies have fans now.

* NASA bud if you hate stuff that has historical connections to the Third Reich I have some bad news for you about you

* Disbar this prosecutor.

* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.

* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.

* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 16, 2019 at 5:25 pm

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Thursday Night Links!

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* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.

Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.

* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?

What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.

* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.

California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.

* Here come the esports majors.

* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.

Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.

* My university is dying.

Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.

* The inaugural issue of our journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic is finally live.

* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.

Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.

First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!

What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?

* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.

* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.

* The toll of #MeToo.

* This time they can’t use procedural tricks to stymie the march of progress! *five seconds later* Ah, well, nevertheless.

The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.

 

* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.

How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.

* Snowden in the Labyrinth.

* John Kelly, man of honor.

“shoddy system backed by extremely shoddy research and jackboot instincts should be applied globally”

* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.

The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”

* The Boeing whistleblower.

* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.

* How they teach slavery, then and now.

* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.

The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.

* I suppose this is canon (again).

* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.

Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.

* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.

Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?

Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?

* Is it weird that no one can sustain a media operation of any size no matter what the topic or longevity?

More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.

* Absolutely psychotic nation.

* Great country. Truly great.

* Only in America!

* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.

* Superheroes are real.

* get you a man who can do all three

* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.

* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.

* Don’t vape!

Stop Getting Married On Plantations!

* america.jpg

* This one is a real america.jpg too.

* america.jpgs all over.

* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.

He Spent Years Infiltrating White Supremacist Groups. Here’s What He Has to Say About What’s Going on Now.

* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.

* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.


Written by gerrycanavan

October 3, 2019 at 5:02 pm

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Wednesday Links!

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* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.

* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.

* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.

* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.

* Student debt is transforming the American family.

No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.

* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?

* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.

* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?

How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?

* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.

* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.

* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.

* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.

* Never a single misstep.

The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.

* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.

South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.

Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.

* The voting machines don’t help, either.

* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.

* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”

Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.

* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!

Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.

She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.

In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.

Facing a labor shortage, restaurants are turning to on-demand services for line cooks, dishwashers and other trained workers.

* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.

* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”

* Grenada’s Revolution at 40.

* Never say die!

* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.

* There is something inherently entertaining about the self-proclaimed defender of uncomfortable speech on college campuses coming unglued when he found a sentence on the Internet that he didn’t like.

* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.

* The Book of Prince.

This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.

* And there’s no idea so bad you can’t make it worse.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 4, 2019 at 8:34 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!

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* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!

* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.

Faith in science fiction and fantasy.

64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.

In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.

How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?

Marquette University

This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.

This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.

How does this school stack up?

The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.

Inside the African essay factories that churn out university coursework for 115,000 cheating British students every year.

Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.

Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.

* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.

* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.

Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.

* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.

* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.

* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”

Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.

Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.

It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.

* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.

Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.

How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.

Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.

7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.

Liberalism in Theory and Practice.

* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.

* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.

North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.

* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.

* The Climate Trail.

How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.

* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.

* Meanwhile, a Maryland teen has been labeled a child pornographer for sharing a video of her own sex act.

* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.

* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).

* In the age of the psychonauts.

* “It’s time to talk about James Mattis’s involvement with the Theranos scandal. He’s selling a book, not saving the country from Trump.”

* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”

* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.

The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.

* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.

* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!

* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.

* Dicey Dungeons rules.

* The Slinky was invented by accident.

* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.

Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.

* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.

* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…

* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.

* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.

* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 1, 2019 at 9:17 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Friday Links!

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‘I Don’t Think We Should Be Afraid of Protests’: Marquette Faculty Members Speak Out Against Policy Requiring Approval for Demonstrations.

* Conservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used the same language to defend slavery.

The ‘1619 Project’ Isn’t Anti-American — It’s Anti-White Identity Politics.

If Erickson and Co. would simply choose to identify as Americans – instead of as white Americans – then they’d free themselves from the compulsion to defend Thomas Jefferson’s sainthood, and belittle Sally Hemings’s suffering. If they would only seek meaning and belonging through identification with every American whose deeds affirmed our republic’s highest ideals – instead of with those whose pigmentation affirmed their racial pride – they could feel themselves ennobled by MLK’s heroism, and unthreatened by a frank accounting of the Founding Fathers’ crimes.

Most Canadians Are Now Better Off Than Most Americans.

* How Paying for College Is Changing Middle-Class Life.

* Against happiness.

* Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media.

Welcome to the US, Greta. With your help we can save the planet and ourselves.

* But what if there was a way to pull back the curtain — to gain another perspective on the high-definition simulation we call reality, and to unravel the physical mysteries of our world? A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts.

* ‘Nobody cared’: A woman gave birth alone in a jail cell after her cries for help were ignored, lawsuit says. Trump administration leaves menstruating migrant girls ‘bleeding through’ underwear at detention centres, lawsuit claims. The Trump Administration Wants To Start DNA Testing Undocumented Immigrants In Government Custody. When Solitary Confinement Is A Death Sentence. CDC reports 900 mumps cases in migrant detention facilities over past year.

* Every day with this guy. It’s a truly astounding record of achievement.

How Democrats Can Win Back Rural Wisconsin.

The DNC Doesn’t Want a Climate Debate for a Reason.

The DNC has shown what it represents: plutocratic interests and their deep commitment to human extinction. Even a lightweight Ivy League skateposer like Beto has a better sense of where the political culture is headed than the DNC does. Greta Thunberg arrived yesterday in New York City after crossing the Atlantic in a small, janky-looking zero-carbon boat from Europe. She and the many other people around the world fighting capitalism and the fossil fuel industry are our best hope — not only for the future, but for the present.

* just manipulating markets lol

* YouTube is a very bad company.

* Big Pharma Is Starting to Pay for the Opioid Crisis. Make Those Payments Count.

* The twenty-year musical.

* Solved that little problem.

* Same joke but about PornHub planting trees to fight climate change.

* How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein.

* By and large, arbitration just shouldn’t exist.

* The largest study of same-sex sexual behavior finds there is no gay gene.

Mark Twain wrote his own sad projections about Huck in 1891, when he planned a sequel: “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom and Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from . . . wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful, is under the mold. They die together.” 

Garak and Bashir: The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relationship That Should’ve Been.

* What is it with the kids today and Friends?

* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. Wild to see how some of these communities have limped on or evolved into cults since becoming irrelevant.

* I nearly cried reading this.

* Alright alright alright.

* And if you want a vision of the future.

Thursday Links!

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* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.

* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.

* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal. “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist.” Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.

* Indentured.

* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.

The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.

* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.

Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.

* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.

Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.

It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”

Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT

Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.

The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.

* Gamergate in the classroom.

Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.

* The most succinct articulation of the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism I’ve ever seen.

Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.

“Every debate has some people who fight on the losing side to the very end. And, eventually, they don’t become convinced. They just disappear.”

* Huge, if true: Golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism.

Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction.

* On Representations of Disability: A Reading List.

These Nigerian teenagers are producing short sci-fi movies using a smart phone and other everyday items.

* India’s military blockade of Kashmir is breathtaking in its brutality and violence. We can’t let them silence Kashmir’s dreams for freedom and justice.

* The cruelty is the point.

* Militant Neo-Nazi Group Actively Recruiting Ahead of Alleged Training Camp. Militant Neo-Nazi now the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Militant Neo-Nazis run the New York Times.

How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico. After ICE. An undocumented Chinese restaurant worker has been fighting for backpay to the tune of $200K. Then ICE arrested him while giving a deposition in a lawsuit. The Trump Administration Wants To Hold Undocumented Children In Detention Indefinitely. Trump admin weighs letting states, cities deny entry to refugees approved for resettlement in U.S. The US won’t provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps. How the US Exported Its Border Around the World.

Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times. Donald Trump Is Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy. Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump. The President Is on Some Real Shit Right Now, Honestly. Trump draws another primary challenger. Meanwhile, I’ve laid my marker down.

Buying Greenland isn’t a good idea — it’s a great idea.

* The more I look at it, the more this photograph is punctum, punctum, punctum. It barely holds together. It is all disturbance, all accident. Even the wallpaper starts to tremble: Who at the University of El Paso Medical Center violated the Hippocratic Oath by approving this particular photo-op?

* Not exactly a democracy, now, is it.

* The boomers going bust: why elderly bankruptcy is rising in America.

* Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.

In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.

NYPD fires officer who put Eric Garner in chokehold. I lost my job for keeping Charlottesville police accountable. I’d do it again. Fearing for his life, Cleveland cop…

* School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say.

* “We’ve wasted all their fucking resources to make this rally,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said in video captured during the latest extremist rally held Saturday in Portland. “We want them to waste $2 million and we’ll do it again in two months.”

I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one.

Amazon’s Ring wants police to keep these surveillance details from you.

* Pressured To Spy On NYC Mosques For Two Years, An Immigrant FBI Informant Seeks A Way Out.

* To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands. Abolish the Priesthood.

A first grader who found his grandmother’s loaded gun at school this spring pointed it at another student, according to an email released Monday by Highland Local Schools in Morrow County.

* $48M Michigan high school has places to hide in case of mass shooting.

* What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?

* Designer babies are on the way. We’re not ready.

* Abdul-Jabbar v. Tarantino.

In this way, the violent, cathartic fantasies of Tarantino’s recent historical-ish trilogy allegorize the very function of fiction itself. They intervene in matters of fact not to rewrite the record, but to remind us that stories are the spaces where we consider alternatives, rework our real-world mythologies, rethink history, and expand upon ideas.

California’s Forgotten Confederate History. A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.

* Who’s to Blame When Algorithms Discriminate? No one, silly, that’s the whole point!

* DoorDash is still pocketing workers’ tips, almost a month after it promised to stop.

* Dungeons and Dragons Rules for Progressives.

* Dr. Evil wants to refresh his moonbase.

One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien.

* The poetry of Brexit.

* There is no Africa in African studies.

* The dialectic of enlightenment.

* My life as a background Slytherin. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?

* Our favorite candid photographs of wild animals—taken via camera trap.

I bought a copy of Hasbro’s mean-spirited and woefully ill-informed “MONOPOLY: SOCIALISM” board game so you don’t have to – a thread.

* Another good thread: What’s the fantasy or SF book that’s not some big famous award winning thing that you think I should read?

* The language of Mario Maker.

* Twilight of the MCU. Here comes Matrix 4, at least.

* The arc of history is long, but Marquette has prohibited motorized scooter use on campus property.

* From the archives: 50 years later, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash remains mysterious.

* And this is some extremely relatable content.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 22, 2019 at 2:10 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Thursday Night Links!

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* Rest in peace, Toni Morrison. A New Yorker flashback. The obligatory MetaFilter thread.

* Just in time for my fall class: [r/FanTheories] Hagrid is a Death Eater.

Toward a Theory of the New Weird.

* In Praise of Samuel R. Delany. Samuel Delany on capitalism, racism, and science fiction.

* Don’t teach this way! Ever!

Another professor is under fire for using the slur in class while discussing a work by James Baldwin. Should universities pursue cases against instructors who use the word in a teaching context, not as a weapon?

* An elite D.C. girls’ school thought its founding nuns taught slaves to read. Instead, they sold them off for as much as they could.

More Than 100 Immigrants Were Pepper-Sprayed At An ICE Facility. ICE Raids Miss. Plant After $3.75 Million Sexual Harassment Settlement. Families “Are Scared To Death” After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People. Children of undocumented immigrants arrested in Mississippi rely on strangers for food and shelter. America’s “Poster Child” Syndrome. ICE agents try to raid Brooklyn homeless shelter without warrants, sources say. Death by deportation.

Police Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder. Boston Police crush wheelchairs belonging to homeless folks. After HuffPost Investigation, 4 White Nationalists Out Of U.S. Military — But Others Allowed To Remain. Chelsea Manning Can Remain in Jail for Another Year, Judge Rules.

* Trump administration authorizes ‘cyanide bombs’ to kill wild animals.

Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America’s police. Surviving Amazon.

* Tired: Trade war. Wired: Real war.

* Nightmare in Kashmir.

Police “neutralized” the Dayton shooter in 30 seconds. He still shot 14 people. White House rebuffed attempts by DHS to make combating domestic terrorism a higher priority. Mass Shootings, Militarism and Policing Are Chapters in the Same Manifesto. Understanding The Statements Of Mass Shooters. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto contains a dangerous message about climate change. How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism. A future that currently doesn’t exist. America decided the death of children was bearable before America became America.

* Joke’s on you, libs! McDonald’s new paper straws aren’t recyclable — but its axed plastic ones were.

* How Gender Stereotypes Affect Pro-Environment Behavior. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper changes the game.

* How Peanuts Created a Space for Thinking.

* What is the secret to living to be well over 100 years old?

* now we are crossing all plantation tours off our list

* A thread involving me where the other people are saying more interesting things: The NYT published a review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s “cosmic justice” that basically convinced me the film *is* fascist.

* How often do women talk in Quentin Tarantino films? Updated now for Death Proof, if you saw it earlier.

* Where are they now? Manson family edition.

Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding. In the richest country in human history.

* The Highway Was Supposed to Save This City. Can Tearing It Down Fix the Sins of the Past?

There’s a ‘Toxic Fallout’ From the Notre-Dame Disaster: Lead Contamination.

Greta Thunberg Joined A Walkout At The First Major Summit Of The Movement She Inspired.

Jeffrey Epstein Is the Face of the Billionaire Class.

* Dreams are lost memories: a fatalism vs stoicism film roundup.

The legacy of colonialism on public lands created the Mauna Kea conflict.

* Robin Vos is a truly odious person.

* Seems fine: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials.

* Twilight of Pacific Standard.

* The man just upped my rent last night / and tardigrades on the moon

The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On.

* And copyrightopia is already here, it just doesn’t apply to anything you’d actually want to read: Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain.

Monday Morning Links!

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* Now this I’d watch.

* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.

* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.

* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.

Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!

Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.

* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.

Demand for disability accommodations for schoolwork and testing has swelled. But access to them is unequal and the process is vulnerable to abuse.

How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.

Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.

The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.

* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.

On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”

Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.

About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”

* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?

* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”

* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?

* The Wisconsin veto has always been a deranged executive power, but it too only becomes a problem when a Democrat is governor.

* The weird contracts of the Fast and Furious franchise, which legislate who is allowed to ever lose a fight.

* Phone farms and late capitalism.

* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.

* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.

* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.

* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.

* Biden, Inc.

* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.

* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.

* The story of Native American dispossession is too easily swept aside, but new visualisations should make it unforgettable.

* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.

* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?

* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report

* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.

* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.

* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.

Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.

* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.

* Charles Manson was a Republican.

* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.

* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?

Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.

8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.

Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”

* Rituals of Childhood.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?

OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?

* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.

* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.

* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.

* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.

The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.

* Did someone say my name?

* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?

* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.

* Quantum computing.

* Self-help.

* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.

Written by gerrycanavan

August 5, 2019 at 2:10 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Saturday Morning Links!

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* Sci-Fi Author Ted Chiang on Our Relationship to Technology, Capitalism, and the Threat of Extinction.

So intelligent species burn out too quickly to make intergalactic headway—I have to ask, do you think that’s what will happen to us?

I don’t know. We used to think that the biggest threat we faced as a species was nuclear war. Now it looks like it’s global warming. If we survive that, it’d be tempting to think that it’ll smooth sailing afterwards, but any consideration of this question is primarily a reminder of how much we don’t know.

A math equation that predicts the end of humanity.

* America is crumbling.

The struggling US media industry is facing its worst year for job layoffs in a decade as news organizations continue to cut staff and close shop, according to a new survey. And this is before the coming recession hits.

* University Of Alaska Readies For Budget Slash: ‘We May Likely Never Recover.’ Alaska Isn’t a Bellwether. It’s a Swan Song.

Two professors at Miami University are suddenly at risk of losing their jobs over a plant that has been in their collection for over a decade.

* Remembering the strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead.

* A brief history of busing.

* Defeated in the courts, Trump may issue an executive order to try to rig the Census. There are no laws in America, only power.

The anger and hate that spews from 8chan is not a conscious extension of the anger and hate of its creator – though he had plenty – but an inevitable byproduct of the dark structure he built. The story of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness. 8chan is a monster, but its creator had no idea what it would become. He was just a kid.

These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 Border Security Expo—essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.”

* Former ICE Chief Counsel Gets 4 Years In Prison For Stealing Immigrants’ Identities.

* Border officials had known about the secret Facebook group for up to three years, according to a Homeland Security official.

* Meet the people fighting for health care access for disabled kids detained at the border.

DHS watchdog details dangerous conditions for migrants at border centers. What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse. The Treatment of Migrants Likely ‘Meets the Definition of a Mass Atrocity.’ “The Whole Facility’s Culture Is Rotted From the Core”: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Saw Inside the El Paso Camps. The department is seeking 20-year leases for most of the sites, signaling they don’t expect challenges to fade.

Trump administration ending in-person interpreters at immigrants’ first hearings.

The Exceptional Cruelty of a No-Hugging Policy.

Drawings by migrant children in detention show them in cages.

* ICE Threatens Immigrant in Sanctuary in Chapel Hill With $314,000 Fine.

At a crowded Mexican shelter, migrants wait months to claim asylum. Some opt to cross the river instead.

* “Seth Donnelly was one of the many inmates Texas prison officials use as prey for dog hunts. He died from heatstroke after collapsing on the job in Abilene.” I’m gonna need you to start from the top.

Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museum’s Rejection of Historical Analogy.

* Happy 4th! Here are some readings on concentration camps.

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

Europe’s Bold Plan for a Moon Base Is Coming Together. How will we deal with squatters on the Moon?

* World’s most full of shit people nearly terminally full of shit.

* Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.

* If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.

* “Plan to ban seagulls from the sea suspended.”

* Deep-sea mining to turn oceans into ‘new industrial frontier’.

* Heatstroke warnings in Anchorage.

* Your map to Twitter.

 

How Washington’s Elite Learned to Love Policy Wonks.

* When your email spies on you.

* The arc of history is long, but.

This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.

Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.

Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option.

* Netflix vs. storytelling.

* Here, the truth is made plain: the childlike nature of corporate branding isn’t a random trend, but part of the mindset that consumers ought to be treated like children. Details are the sinister machinations of faceless authority figures; friendly colors and geometric letters like those on a toddler’s building blocks are comforting by contrast. That each brand looks more or less like the next is only for the better: the world is a little smaller that way, less likely to confuse or frighten. As Jesse Barron wrote for Real Life magazine in 2016, “We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness.” Cuteness, employed as these companies do, talks down to you without words.

The Impact of a World Without The Walking Dead.

* The Harry Potter franchise is going to take another crack at a prequel.

* What’s missing in Spider-Man: Far from Home.

* Another take: Far from Home as metafiction.

* And nothing gold can stay: The end of MAD.

July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!

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* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!

* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.

* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.

* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.

When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.

* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.

* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.

In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.

The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.

* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.

* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.

* The Medea Hypothesis.

* Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.

* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.

* How to Chair an Academic Committee.

* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.

Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’

* Why can’t everyone get As?

* Another free speech mystery.

* Wild decision at Oberlin.

* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.

* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.

* The Closure.

The Surreal End of an American College.

‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.

* Outcomes-based graduate school.

* Nice work if you can get it!

CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.

* When you really mess up the lit review.

* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.

Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.

There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.


There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?

One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.

* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.

The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.

The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.

Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.

* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.

The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.

 

* Redlining in Milwaukee.

The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.

AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.

* Who Owns Tomorrow?

* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.

* Where does money come from?

* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.

Better Schools Won’t Fix America.

It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.

 

Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.

* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.

Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.

* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.

Canada’s Parliament has passed legislation banning whales, dolphins and porpoises from being bred or held in captivity — a move that was hailed by animal rights activists.

* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.

* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.

* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.

* Ravelry bans Trump support.

* Writing Iceman at Marvel.

* Alanis at 45.

* “I babysit for the one percent.”

* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.

Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.

* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.

* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?

* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.

* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.

How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* How to Speak Silicon Valley.

* The day the music burned.

* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.

* Sunoco in Philly.

* We either buy insulin or we die.

According to the UN the chance of a 15-year-old boy dying by the age of 50 is now higher in America than in Bangladesh.

* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.

* The FoxConn scam, one year later.

* Would you like to know more?

Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.

* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.

* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.

Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.

Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.

Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.

* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.

Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.

* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.

* Ghost networks of psychiatrists make money for insurance companies but hinder patients’ access to care.

* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.

Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.

* The war to free science.

* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!

The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.

* The latest MH370 deep dive.

America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.

What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.

Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.

The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.

Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?

* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.

* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY

America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.

* Whoa.

* 63 Up.

* No frills.

* Today in dystopia.

* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.

* They finally found the monolith.

* sold

* my brain hurts a lot

* got another capitalism greatest hit. i will give you one hundred thousand dollars if you can guess the brand by the end

* just another classic canavan viral tweet

* Smash that bridge king.

* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.

* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.

* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing

* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.

Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?

* Tetris forever.

* Mario Royale.

* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’

* On Jameson and genre.

* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.

* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?

A team of researchers found a way to make money legally from online bookies. But then their troubles began.

* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.

Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.

* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.

A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.

* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.

* Worlds without Men.

* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.

* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.

* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!

The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?

* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.

* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.

Written by gerrycanavan

July 2, 2019 at 4:30 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Surprise! Links

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* Shakespeare in the state park: Why a group of Marquette students created an empowering outlet for creativity that provides students with summer jobs.

* Bring this to Wisconsin!

* CFP: Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures.

* A historian of concentration camps explains that this will only get worse.

* Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters. Botched family reunifications left migrant children waiting in vans overnight.

It’s not just at Guantánamo. In a supermax facility on US soil, inmates are force fed — and barred from sharing their stories. An inmate breaks his silence for the first time.

Earth’s carbon dioxide has jumped to the highest level in human history. Can the Paris Climate Goals Save Lives? Yes, a Lot of Them, Researchers Say. Climate change is will cause our third world war. Extreme weather has made half of America look like Tornado Alley. India roasts under heat wave with temperatures above 120 degrees. If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.

* Meanwhile, the DNC has bravely decided to… forbid candidates from participating in any climate debate.

* Biden, man. Biden.

* The only way 2020 can end.

* Is Chernobyl historically accurate about the things that matter? HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Doesn’t Understand History.

Learning The Shape Of Dungeons & Dragons in 2019.

* Understand the destruction of the UC system the reclaimUC way.

* Free speech on campus remains the last great mystery.

* The madness of school shooting drills.

* YouTube pivots to pedophiles.

* Not the Catholic Church’s best week.

* “And then he’d still be Captain America, instead of a lying, indolent, murdering sack of shit.”

* I for one welcome our new insect overlords.

* “Mars, Nestlé and Hershey pledged nearly two decades ago to stop using cocoa harvested by children. Yet much of the chocolate you buy still starts with child labor.”

* Tremendous wealth mysteriously producing tremendous poverty.

* And sing to me, muse, of Reviewer 2.