Posts Tagged ‘talk radio’
Trapped Inside of LAX with the MKE Blues Again
* A great Storify from the great @moyabz of the great Octavia Butler conference at the Huntington this weekend. By universal acclamation, one of the best-loved moments. Check out the exhibit of her papers if you’re able to get near there! It’s gorgeous.
* You are living in a death cult.
* Every lie Trump has told as president, a very long list by the New York Times.
* Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.
* Union-busting for God: Catholic colleges and adjunct organizing.
* Student Evaluations at Center of American University Tenure Fight. Given the research on the implicit bias of student evaluations and the obvious perverse incentives involved it is incredible to me that any college administration in the country feels empowered to use them for anything.
* When the Dean Quashes Your Class: An Interview with Jay Smith.
* Major medical groups call for rejection of Senate health bill. This is the biggest pure giveaway to the rich in the Republican health bill. Can’t wait to hear from the centrist Dems why it’s wrong for Bernie to do this. No single payer in Communist-run California, of course.
* Trump’s election integrity commission needs to redress voter suppression, not fraud. Counterpoint: it’s a voter suppression commission, that is literally the entire point of it.
* Trump says pretending to have Comey tapes “wasn’t very stupid.” The video is stunning even by Trump standards. Still, after this, I’ll probably vote for him.
* Once more with feeling: Never Trump is not a thing.
* Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing. Indentured servitude in the transportation industry in California.
* Mountain lions have better politics than just about every human being.
* Science isn’t an exact science with these clowns.
* Surely the best ending of any New York Times column ever.
* From the archives! No one goes dark like children’s literature goes dark.
“Personally I am very pessimistic,” Miyazaki says. “But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making.”
* Every generation gets the folk-hero bandits it deserves: Canada police investigate theft of mummified human toe served in drinks.
* And a great Tumblr mashup: The Weird Adventures of Tin-Tin, by H.P. Lovecraft.
Late Night Sunday B-B-B-Bonus Links! May Cause Depression!
* Alternet, against charter schools: Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed.
* Cops in Baton Rouge arresting people under a sodomy law overturned a decade ago. The police officers who are participating in this ought to be thrown in jail.
* Could a Private University Have Made a Difference in Detroit? It’s an interesting thesis but requires a bit more data than just a spitball.
* Reuters’ Climate Coverage Slashed Under “Skeptic” Editor. White House warned on imminent Arctic ice death spiral. Does Lake Michigan’s record low mark beginning of new era for Great Lakes?
* New Jersey Nightmare: A Mind-Boggling New Proposal Could Make The Next Superstorm Even More Deadly And Destructive. This is honestly insane:
Now, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, as coastal communities are still in the rebuilding process, Governor Chris Christie has a bill on his desk, S2680, that would give the green light to development on piers — all of which are now classified as high-hazard V-zone areas, according to FEMA’s new post-Sandy flood insurance maps.
* That’s one lesson delivered by San Jose State, though it’s unclear whether the school knows it. Of the $150 the students paid for each online course, the university kept only $40, with the rest going to Udacity.
* Competitive no-pay fellowship at Bard Graduate Center. (Don’t) apply today!
* But it’s not all bad news! Fast food workers will strike in seven cities tomorrow, including Milwaukee.
* An end to Limbaugh and Hannity? Where’s the anti-Kickstarter for this?
* After having bananas thrown at her during a political rally, Cécile Kyenge, Italy’s first black minister, told reporters that she would continue doing her job and that protesters should stop “wasting food.” Bananas. (Marc) Marone.
Thursday Morning Link Transmission!
* American says no to MOOCs. So does SFSU.
* Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University says no to tenure.
“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”
Far better for them to spend those five or six years trying to get a TT job at another school.
* Scenes from the Fitness Palace at Purdue.
* In practice, however, that doesn’t happen. The scholarships go towards “merit aid”, which is often, dismayingly enough, a polite way of saying that the college is helping to pay for wealthy kids to attend, even if they’re not particularly smart. Some 20% of students with GPAs below 2.0, for instance, receive merit aid. And at the same time, the “need aid” is carefully calibrated so that poor kids won’t take the colleges up on their offers… See also: Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students as Aid Funneled to Rich.
* The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor. And its equally unhappy, equally exploitative shadow.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to cut student interest rates to near zero.
* Food service workers in St. Louis have gone on strike. So might adjuncts in Chicago. Amazon workers sue over mandatory post-shift search. Cooper Union Students Occupy President’s Office To Protest Tuition.
* Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Medical Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Keep Naked Girls on Leashes.
* NYC Considering Allowing Non-Citizens To Vote. Good!
* “Demolishing the Competition: The Longitudinal Link Between Competitive Video Games, Competitive Gambling, and Aggression,” a new study that will appear in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that aggressive behavior is tied to competition, not violence, in videogames and gambling, according to Forbes.
* Scientists also say that guns are bad, glass is not a liquid, and the Toba catastrophe may not have happened.
* This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl).
* Here’s another example — I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (several times) and I never noticed that Riker doesn’t know how to use a chair. When the guy sits down he pulls the chair back and dramatically slings his leg over the back of it like he’s mounting a freakin’ horse. He apparently does this all the time, regardless of the situation. It’s nuts.
* Lucas wanted Indiana Jones 2 to be a dinosaur movie. I honestly can’t decide if this is the best or the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Thursday
* National Louis, a private, nonprofit institution based in the greater Chicago metropolitan region, served about 10,000 students before the restructuring process in 2012. In addition to terminating 63 faculty members, among them 16 tenured professors, the institution eliminated four departments in its College of Arts and Sciences: English, fine arts, mathematics and natural sciences. Today, about 8,300 students attend the university — 9 in 10 on a part-time basis. What does this school teach if not English or math or arts or science? What’s left?
* The fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas on Wednesday night was fined by the Environmental Protection agency in 2006 for failing to have a risk management plan that met federal standards, an EPA report shows.
* Yesterday’s Senate Gun Control Vote Was Even More Undemocratic Than It Appeared. Angus crunches the numbers.
In twenty-one of the nation’s 50 states, both Senators yesterday voted in favor of the Manchin-Toomey background check amendment. Although those 42 Senators represent less than half the body, they represent more than half the country — 157 million people out of 313 million. The 16 states whose Senators both voted against the amendment, in contrast, represent less than a quarter of the nation, but nearly a third of the senate. That’s the equivalent of dividing the country up into states of equal population, but giving the no-vote states three senators each, and the yes-vote states just two.
And what of the other states, the ones who split their votes yesterday? Well, if you allocate half of their population to each senator, and add up the totals, you find that senators representing 62.7% of the nation’s population voted for Manchin-Toomey yesterday.
* Gun Violence Victims Detained, Put Through Background Check For Yelling ‘Shame On You’ At Senators. Conservative radio host: Families of Newtown shooting victims can ‘go to hell.’
Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss.
They lost their kids. What would Bob Davis have lost even if the bill passed?
* What Happened to Working-Class New York?
* And Bill to Create ‘New University of California’ Dies. Here’s the current state of proposed flexible online education in California. Amended Steinberg is still privatization.
Gerry Canavan 