Posts Tagged ‘Steven Mnuchin’
Four-Day-Weekend-Sized Links!
* CFP: Edited Collection on Ecohorror.
* Join English dept faculty, students, and alumni as we debate the question of our age: “Is GAME OF THRONES still good?”
* The five basic narrative conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. society, and New York vs. New Jersey.
* We are not as often reminded that homes and lives may have been saved if officials and policymakers had incorporated the recommendations of sound science in their outlook and preparedness plans. Which is why we need to add a third response to our evolving national post-catastrophic storm mourning ritual: Identifying and investigating the negligent officials who put the public in harm’s way by repeatedly ignoring crucial data and scientific evidence that can help prevent disaster.
* Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like. We’re Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming. How Washington Made Harvey Worse. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history. Texans to be hit with new insurance law making it harder to win contested claims, just one week after Harvey. Why Ordinary Citizens Are Acting as First Responders in Houston. From June. Stop snitchin’. The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that unfold for years. What the Harvey flooding would will look like where you live. How Humans Make Disasters Worse. Within and against capitalism.
* Hundreds dead in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, while millions have been forced from their homes and 18,000 schools shut down across the region. More Than 1,000 Died in South Asia Floods This Summer.
* Time to Decriminalize Pot in Wisconsin.
* Distracted-Boyfriend-Meme Photographer Tells All.
* New Gilded Age Watch: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. Read the thread.
* I try not to be a Pollyanna about these things but I seriously thought we were done with Erik Prince forever.
* Avengers assemble: Mueller taps the IRS and the State of New York to find crimes he can charge Trump and associates with that Trump can’t just pardon. Fascinating stuff: Legal Challenge to Arpaio Pardon Begins. And this one, wow: Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey.
* Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.
* ICE Is Abusing the ACLU’s Clients Because They are Fighting Trump’s Deportation Machine. ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody. Decorated Marine vet may be deported, despite likely U.S. citizenship. GOP lawmaker aims to force vote to protect Dreamers. Everyone can do their part: UK Government’s attempt to deport Afghan asylum seeker fails after pilot refuses to take off.
* Incredible video of a cop abusing a Utah nurse without justification.
* Never off-brand: Mnuchin Doesn’t Endorse Placing Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill.
* Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege.
* The Looming Decline of the Public Research University.
* AAUP: University of Tampa Should Immediately Reinstate Lecturer Fired Over Tweet. Online Harassment of Faculty Continues; Administrators Capitulate.
* The Strategy of Appeasement on Right-Wing Harassment. And from the archives: Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* If White supremacy has no place on an American college campus, then we cannot continue to provide safe harbor to its symbolism. If universities are going to be agents of change, then we must think about our role beyond promoting dialogue. Promoting dialogue is important. But if our primary response is to provide a space to have difficult conversations on sensitive topics, we are little more than pay-to-play community centers. In this moment, in this context, we need our universities to show ethical leadership, to promote the highest of human values through direct, affirming action. Ethical leadership means that Nazis and other White supremacists are not welcome on our college campuses because our universities recognize our right to dignity and personhood as more important than any poorly argued right to free speech.
* So you’ve just gotten tenure.
* Ideology at its purest: All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop.
* Bucking FDA, Peter Thiel funds “patently unethical” herpes vaccine trial.
* Rare instance of the heirs doing what I said in Luminescent Threads they never do: destroying the author’s unfinished works. It’s a pleasing spectacle, but still, who wouldn’t be happy to know it was all an act and the work was still out there somewhere.
* It’s shocking, but somehow not at all shocking, that the pundit class — not to mention the FBI — has already convinced itself antifa is just as bad as these guys.
* The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math.
* Now let us proclaim the mystery of free speech.
* We’re Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR.
* A people’s history of the White Walkers.
* The enduring legacy of Zork.
* Your SF short of the week: Echo//Back.
* I bet this does really well: Drew Barrymore Will Produce a Female-Centric Horror Anthology Show for the CW.
* Facebook has been making people feel so bad lately they’ve even stopped using Facebook.
* Global warming everywhere but in my cold, cold heart.
* Trump is toxically unpopular. He still might win in 2020.
* No amount of Trump White House speculation is going to keep me from feeling happy Sheriff Clarke is out.
* Tired: Subprime mortgages. Wired: Nonprime mortgages.
* Collocations of ‘cock’: What corpus linguistics tells us about porn writing.
* I like my coffee like I like my ceaseless inner monologue.
First Week of School Links!
* Harvey. Hell and High Water. Houston has been hit with a 100-year flood — a rainstorm that, going by previous records, has a 1 percent chance of happening in one year — in 2015 and in 2016. Now in 2017 it’s enduring what will probably be the worst flood in the city’s history. Hurricane Harvey Probably Isn’t a 500-Year Event Anymore. The trouble with living in a swamp: Houston floods explained. 9 Trillion Tons. ProPublica’s report on how zoning made this even worse. “No one could have predicted.” Why Houston wasn’t ready for Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Harvey Could Also Be a Major Pollution Disaster. FIRST-UG 102: Critical Disaster Studies. Here’s how to help.
* CFP: “200 Years of the Fantastic: Celebrating Frankenstein and Mary Shelley,” ICFA 39, March 14-18, 2018.
* “Teaching first-years today? Here are some things my son, starting college today, was never taught.” And from the archives: Shadow Syllabus.
* Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit.
* Announcing the Brittle Paper Literary Awards: The Shortlists.
* I hope someone is optioning “That 70s Suitcase” for a film trilogy. Here’s the creator’s answer. Via MeFi.
* William Gibson on living in the retrofuture.
* Gene Roddenberry, megalomaniac.
Alexander: Are there any subjects that you haven’t tackled on The Next Generation that you would like to?
Roddenberry: There are subjects, yes, but I will keep them secret, because you have to wait until a certain level of thinking permits these things to be thought about openly and in writing. I have many thoughts which, if I were to voice them now, would turn many people against me. People would think, “My God, behind this is such inequity!” [Laughter.]
Alexander: People would be surprised at how big a revolutionary you really are? [Laughter.]
* Fan fiction in the New Yorker.
* When you come at the young-adult-literature community, you best not miss.
* Because you demanded it: a Tolkien biopic.
* Try to imagine a society with no need for confinement, with no one being locked up after a brutal act, and it is difficult not to feel one has lapsed into utopianism. Yet, try to determine what socially useful purpose prisons have fulfilled, sift through the wreckage looking for a residual ‘good’ prison system, and it is hard not to feel you’re wasting your time on a pointless abstraction. For and against abolitionism.
* Well, this barely lasted a week: Why I’m glad the generals are in control in the Trump administration.
* It’s Time: Congress Needs to Open a Formal Impeachment Inquiry.
* We’ve been covering Joe Arpaio for more than 20 years. Here’s a couple of things you should know about him… Another Arpaio thread. The Joe Arpaio I knew. The year I spent in Joe Arpaio’s tent jail was hell. He should never walk free. Trump has realized that he can use his pardon power to bypass the lawyers and judges and investigators he so despises. Arpaio was a test run. Now he will know it works. Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is an Impeachable Offense. President Trump Should Be Impeached for Pardoning Joe Arpaio.
* Leaked Chats Show Charlottesville Marchers Were Planning for Violence. University officials say white supremacists are recruiting their students. Brandeis U. Is Closed After Receiving Email Threats. We’re Tracking Confederate Monuments. Tell Us What’s on Your Campus.
* Fearing Trump Administration Crackdown, Immigrants May Stay in Hurricane Harvey Zone. ICE Left 50 Immigrant Women And Kids Stranded At A Bus Station Before Hurricane Harvey Struck. ICE detains DACA-protected immigrant trying to post bail for someone else. ABQ woman jailed after ATF informant lured her into drug deals. Salvadoran asylum seeker with brain tumor seized from Texas hospital. After ICE arrests in Saratoga Springs, some migrant workers fear showing up for racing season. I’m a DACA Student and I’m Praying ICE Doesn’t Pick Up My Parents.
* After all this mere tax gimmicks seems almost innocent.
* The End of the Goldwater Rule.
* White House Sets Rules for Military Transgender Ban. All but promising to end DACA.
* Stories that already seem a thousand years ago and a million miles away: Special Counsel Examines Possible Role Flynn Played in Seeking Clinton Emails From Hackers. How are we ever going to find time to be angry about Mnuchin misusing public funds to get a better view of the eclipse? I’d forgotten this one even happened and it was last week.
* They’re not even pretending they think he’s competent.
* A whole lot of people with absolutely nothing to hide.
* Trump order could give immigration agents a foothold in US schools.
* An intimate history of antifa.
* Can Anyone Stop Trump From Launching Nuclear Weapons?
* In the richest country that has ever existed in human history: “She eats out of dumpsters so she can afford long-term care for her husband.”
* Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
* Fired for unexpected periods.
* The Upper Midwest is terrible for racial inequality, and Wisconsin tops the list.
* A solid B-. Not bad.
* Boomers are news-illiterate couch vegetables stuck in front of their yelling, ad-saturated TVs.
* There is no such thing as western civilisation.
* Given the enormous amount of data to support these findings, and given the field in question, one might think male scientists would use these outcomes to create a more level playing field. But a recent paper showed that in fact, male STEM faculty assessed the quality of real research that demonstrated bias against women in STEM as being low; instead the male faculty favored fake research, designed for the purposes of the study in question, which purported to demonstrate that no such bias exists.
* Stories like this one were why I thought supporters of Title IX (like myself) needed to get ahead of the problem and reform it while we still could. Almost certainly too late now.
* The water you just drank was filled with self-replicating nanobots. Understanding Noah’s Ark. Be careful what you wish for.
* We talk about broad-strokes when assessing the slogan “Make America Great Again,” but what if — alongside the racism and toxic nostalgia — there is a more intimate way people are hearing it: make my children love and respect me again, make my community a place where people don’t automatically want to leave and never come back again, make America a place where getting ahead in life isn’t synonymous with dissociating yourself from me. Right-wing media — and here I am thinking of Trump fundamentally as a media phenomenon, which is how our parents experience him — has exploited this situation in a despicable and probably unfixable way, but they didn’t create the underlying dynamic. In other words, ultimately Fox News isn’t what’s tearing families apart, but it’s profiting from the fact that they’re already being torn apart by the geographic concentration of wealth and opportunity.
* Why no one can say Trump lost the election. Democrats’ 2018 gerrymandering problem is really bad.
* Nuclear missiles were once ready to launch from Milwaukee’s suburbs.
* Profiles in courage getting out ahead of the story.
* Your mandatory Game of Thrones wrap-ups: Why Game of Thrones has become so incoherent. Every city in the world is built on wildfire. 27 questions (about last week’s episode). Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story. Game of Rewrites. Maps and fantasy. I’d watch at least a few episodes of a George R.R. Martin-helmed Star Trek series. And sure to be squashed fan theories we can believe in: Is Bran Stark the Night King?
* In the wake of the Game of Thrones finale, indulge in the nostalgia of Dragonlance. Are you listening, TruTV?
Tuesday Night Links!
* AHCA/BCRA is dead but Obamacare repeal is still alive. The past 24 hours in health care, explained. They’ve already moved past “repeal and delay” to “let make Obamacare fail.”
* Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, is hurtling toward his first fiasco. Second when you remember Batman v. Superman.
* Trump, Putin had second, undisclosed talk at G-20. Donald Trump Jr. Met Russian Accused of Laundering $1.4 Billion.
* Even Wormtongue’s looking for the exits: Christie: ‘Probably against the law’ to get opposition research from Russia.
* Trump’s Air War Has Already Killed More Than 2,000 Civilians. 12 civilians a day.
* “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas. Very good piece, as is to be expected from Rortybomb.
* Bernie Sanders needs a protégé.
* What happens to local news when there is no local media to cover it?
* The city needs to do more to minimize arrests. District attorneys can take the lead by refusing to prosecute most, if not all, of these cases.
* Aaron Bady on Game of Thrones as it enters its final stretch.
This is a problem that afflicts Westeros as a whole. In a world where “everywhere…they hurt little girls,” as Cersei reminded Oberyn, the limits to rational knowledge are something only those who have been hurt seem to understand. Sansa doesn’t know the military stuff—her father never allowed her to learn—but she knows what Jon seems not to, that Cersei is a nightmarish vortex of danger for them, and that she will find a way. Jon is complacent about the south, but Sansa knows what he doesn’t: the Lannisters might be broke and outnumbered and beset on all sides, but the machinations of the plot will not allow them to fall, not yet. (And she is right, they will). Meanwhile Cersei knows what her brother doesn’t seem to know, that troop numbers and logistics and gold are not so important in a world where Euron Greyjoy can have his best ships stolen but still somehow show up with an armada of a thousand ships. But it’s not because they’re women that they know something that men don’t know, or not precisely that: having had their worlds destroyed around them—having had the unthinkable and unspeakable happen to them—they have brought out of their experiences a useful skepticism about the things that people think they know, in their security. It’s because Jon and Jaime only know what they know, and are satisfied with it, that their knowledge has limits. The world makes sense to them, as the patriarchy does for patriarchs.
* Iron Man says Ultron is an existential threat to humanity.
* The Rise and Fall of F. Lee Bailey, the Lawyer Who Set O.J. Simpson Free.
* 355 issues of sci-fi golden age magazine Galaxy are now available at The Internet Archive.
* The cure came too late for me, alas.
* No.
* And No One Looks Good in the Ugly Drama Surrounding Kermit the Frog’s Firing. No, I don’t expect anyone would…
Gerry Canavan 