Posts Tagged ‘The Great Silence’
Saturday Morning Links!
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.
* 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.
* Remembering the strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead.
* Defeated in the courts, Trump may issue an executive order to try to rig the Census. There are no laws in America, only power.
Trump's Census shenanigans and subpoena challenges are a template for people worried he won't accept defeat in 2020. He won't dictatorially assert power despite the election results. He'll cloak his denial of its legitimacy in lawfare and nearly all Republicans will support him.
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 3, 2019
* 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.
* Meet the people fighting for health care access for disabled kids detained at the border.
obviously it is traumatic and terrible for every child in detention, NO child should be in detention, but I worry when my autistic 8yo is w/ a new caregiver for one hour; I cannot even think about disabled kids in detention without wanting to heave https://t.co/pUE31nSlAl
— Nicole Chung (@nicole_soojung) July 6, 2019
* 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.
“Our prison for stolen children isn’t a concentration camp because we’re only killing them accidentally” is not the winning argument you think it is
— Jake Maccoby (@jdmaccoby) July 2, 2019
A Border Patrol agent tells CNN about the "filthy" holding cells at the detention centers and how his boss joked about dead migrants. pic.twitter.com/aA3uqfsJJW
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) July 3, 2019
That the entire political, juridical, clerical, media, academic apparatus of the United States has proven totally inadequate to the task of preventing concentration camps from being erected on US soil is something of a wake up call.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 3, 2019
* 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.
* “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.
One of the fucking what now https://t.co/cvZ3sRhsua
— That is the power of「TENNESSEE PETE」 (@Tennessee_Pete) July 4, 2019
* 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.
Map to twitter pic.twitter.com/Fjm5j57b9r
— Geoffrey (@geofflapid) July 3, 2019
Never forget. pic.twitter.com/J4qi9o1PDR
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) July 4, 2019
* 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.
* 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.
I haven’t seen SPIDER-MAN yet but fundamentally the issue is that unwinding the Snap — politically, economically, philosophically, spiritually — would take more than the rest of all these people’s lives. No going back to school or going on school trips as if nothing happened.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 3, 2019
Leaving the storyworld that way after ENDGAME was a signal from Disney that they just aren’t going to try anymore. So I’m finding it hard to get revved up for FAR FROM HOME knowing where we’re headed from here.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 3, 2019
* Another take: Far from Home as metafiction.
* And nothing gold can stay: The end of MAD.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 6, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 8chan, academia, actually existing media bias, Alaska, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America, Anchorage, apocalypse, asylum, branding, Brazil, capitalism, CBP, Chapel Hill, class struggle, climate change, comics, concentration camps, corporations, cosmology, deportation, DHS, dieback, disability, Donald Trump, Doomsday Argument, eating meat, ecology, email, Endgame, evangelicals, extinction, Facebook, Far from Home, Fermi paradox, Fourth of July, Frederick Douglass, general election 2020, geoengineering, Great Recession, Harry Potter, How the University Works, ice, immigration, infrastructure, journalism, kids today, kind of a big deal, Mad Magazine, many worlds and alternate universes, Marvel, Marx, MCU, mining, Mississippi, neoliberalism, Netflix, North Carolina, politics, prequels, prison-industrial complex, profiteers, science, science fiction, seagulls, slavery, social media, Spider-Man, storytelling, strikes, surveillance society, teachers, technocracy, technology, Ted Chiang, The Avengers, the Census, the courts, The Great Silence, the Holocaust, the laws, the Moon, the rainforest, the university in ruins, The Walking Dead, trees, true crime, Twitter, unions, University of Alaska, veggie burgers, war on drugs, war on education, worst financial crisis since the last one, writing, zombies