Posts Tagged ‘the rich are different from you and me’
Monday Morning Links!
* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”
* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.
* Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical.
* I just can’t believe “crip theory” is really a brand with staying power, but it’s showing up in job titles now.
* Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship.” Oh, if only it were “creeping!”
* All Things Must Pass: McDonald’s franchisees say the brand is in a ‘deep depression’ and ‘facing its final days.’
* Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
* Teach the controversy: Is UC spending too little on teaching, too much on administration? More links below the chart.
* The Plan to Make California Wet By Bringing Back Beavers.
* Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.
* Free the cheese bandits. Free all political prisoners.
* I still think Democrats are severely discounting the possibility that Clinton gets indicted.
* Vox, the website that explains the news, suggests Nordic genetic superiority might explain Denmark’s social institutions. Interesting, but not dispositive! I get that this is supposed to be a troll, but all the same…
* Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money.’
* Fukushima Looks Like An Apocalyptic Ghost Town 4 Years After The Nuclear Disaster.
* A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month.
* I’ll allow it: Larry David Fulfills Destiny, Plays Bernie Sanders In SNL Cold Open. Bonus David Content! Larry David’s Daughter’s Instagram Will Make You Wish She was Your Best Friend.
* Beowulf vs. Satan vs. Grendel vs. Dracula.
* I’ve seen this movie: Aer Lingus Passenger Flips Out, Bites Fellow Passenger, Dies.
* And somehow I always knew it would end like this: Japan Engineers Design Robotic Bear to aid in Assisted Suicide.
Happy Happy Monday Monday Links
* I just draw it for myself. I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it’s kind of depressing. TCJ: The Bill Watterson Interview (1989).
* “Nada”: The comic adaptation of the short story that inspired They Live!
* Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114. Taking the “over” on whether there’ll still be human beings alive in a hundred years, I guess…
* Anthropocene or Capitalocene?
* It was the final night of Uncivilization, an outdoor festival run by the Dark Mountain Project, a loose network of ecologically minded artists and writers, and he was standing with several dozen others waiting for the festival’s midnight ritual to begin.
* Terrible New York Times article on a fascinating topic: the “year zero” project of cultural destruction in Mali.
* Aboriginal rights a threat to Canada’s resource agenda, documents reveal.
* In order to pay for his son Cole’s life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught. Eighteen years later, his family, and the man who prosecuted him, are still working to set him free.
* Women prisoners sterilized to cut welfare costs in California. Of course it was illegal.
* Half of New York City Teens Behind Bars Have A Brain Injury, Study Finds.
* Every once in a while Matt Yglesias still writes something good: The case for confiscatory taxation.
* Carceral leftism: jail time for wage theft?
* Piketty reviews from James K. Galbraith and Doug Henwood.
* Synanon’s Sober Utopia: How a Drug Rehab Program Became a Violent Cult.
* Inside the “certified miracle” that will make Pope John Paul II a saint.
* The Case for Drawing and Doodling in Class. Can’t we just medicate this impulse away?
* The liberal version of unskewing the polls is declaring victory in election cycles that are years away. We’ve got them right where we want them!
* College is probably cheaper than you think, though that’s not saying much.
* I Ran the Pyongyang Marathon.
* Powdered alcohol: what could possibly go wrong?
* Your personal information is worth just $0.16.
* Coming out as a porn star. From Vox, the site dedicated to explaining the news with clarity and specificity traditional news outlets can’t afford.
* Meanwhile, at a traditional news outlet: Can the Klan rebrand? They’ve tried before. Kudos, CNN, you remain the absolute worst.
* Hugo nominees 2014. If you know who Vox Day is, you know how messed up things are about to get.
* Criminal Cab Driver Mastermind (Allegedly) Evaded 3,000 Tolls.
* Abandon all hope watch: “The Democrats have a mega-donor problem.” Why can’t these naive billionaires see that Democrats who won’t support good policy are better than Republicans who oppose good policy!
* On a crisp morning in late March, an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes filed into a cozy auditorium at the White House, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
* There’s A Hidden Timebomb In The Senate Rules That Will Go Off If A Supreme Court Justice Retires. But don’t you dare suggest anyone retire now to avoid disaster.
* Life is not a game. Neither is Candy Crush.
* Tumblr of the week: They Get It.
* This was the story of the Hurricane. Hurricane Carter’s dying wish.
* Marek Edelman: Last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
* I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load. If you can’t tell that an A+ student in anything is doing singularly impressive work I don’t think “rigor” is your strong suit.
* Beyond the quantum computer: temporal computing.
* Nebraska School Gives Most Idiotic Advice Ever to Deal with Bullies. Don’t defend yourself, don’t ask for help…
* Paging Margaret Atwood: Drug that wipes out vultures may cause an EU eco-disaster.
* The Farscape movie is happening.
* Why did the TV version of Game of Thrones change Jaime Lannster into a rapist? More here. I’d gotten the impression that Jaime’s arc in the novels goes from “does the worst possible thing imaginable in very first appearance” to “kind of heroic?”’; last night’s episode makes that reading seem impossible.
All of which is build-up to pointing out that in the book, the reunion between Cersei and Jaime is seen from Jaime’s point of view. And once we consider that, those moments when Cersei has questions of propriety in the middle of their love making can take on a more sinister tone. What if we’re being kept from the true horror of what Jaime’s doing because we’re inside his head?
* The politics of the liberal arts nanny.
* And the 26 Best Cities In The World To See Street Art. Below: Philadelpia.
Wednesday Morning!
* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.
* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.
* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.
* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.
* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?
* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.
* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.
* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.
* Academic freedom with violence.
* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.
* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.
“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.
* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.
* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.
* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.
* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.
* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”
* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”
* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.
* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!
* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.
* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.
* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.
* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.
* How the north ended up on top of the map.
* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.
* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.
Sunday MLA Hangover Links
* Horrors and horrors: Missouri prosecutors say they are unable to bring rape charges in the brutal Maryville case, though one of the boys involved will be charged for abandoning the 14-year-old to die in the snow afterwards. The victim in the case attempted suicide last week.
* For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates.
* Run the university like a sandwich: The University of East London paid a total of £589,000 in settlement to three senior managers, including its former vice-chancellor, who resigned before news emerged that two overseas ventures had collapsed.
* A student’s request to be excused from course work on religious grounds so he would not have to interact with female peers has opened a fractious debate over how institutions navigate between competing human rights.
* A Bang, and Then a Whimper: Some Thoughts On the Death of Cooper Union.
* The Poverty Line Was Designed Assuming Every Family Had a Housewife Who Was a ‘Skillful Cook.’
* As many as 300,000 West Virginians have been warned not to use their water for drinking, cooking, or bathing following a massive chemical spill. The 6 Most Terrifying Facts About The Chemical Spill Contaminating West Virginia’s Drinking Water. Radio Disney’s pro-fracking elementary school tour sparks outrage. Freedom Industry.
Freedom means this happens constantly, a little bit. Freedom means sometimes it happens a great deal.
* With the implementation of tighter carbon emissions caps and more responsible household energy use, it is not too late to reverse the dire course of global warming, a panel of scientists who know full well that it is far too late and we are all doomed told reporters today.
* A Side Benefit of Legal Weed Is the Cops Go Broke.
* Public service announcement: These Twenty Cities Are Allowed to Complain About the Cold.
* I think I did this one before, but Google can’t find it: Population distribution of the US, as measured in Canadas.
* Poverty rates soar in US suburbs.
* Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500.
* Neat tech demo for a puzzle game premised on manipulating forced perspective.
* Horace Lamb said he’d have two questions for God. I’d have just one.
* Baby monkey reacts to the touch of cold metal.
* America gains yet another weird marriage status on its endless road to marriage quality: Obama Administration To Recognize Utah Same-Sex Couples’ Marriages.
* A series of unrelated events: College football and rape culture.
* Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women.
* No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States.
* Everybody knows it isn’t sweet and right to die for one’s country. But what this column presupposes is…
* Signs of the times: Tens of Thousands of Dead Bats Are Falling From the Sky in Australia.
* How the blind are socialized to understand race.
* Why having a woman’s body under patriarchy is a job in itself.
* Understanding white privilege.
* Norway is ludicrously wealthy.
* Antinomies of Ultimate Spider-Man. Does anyone know if the described theory of Miles Morales as at least partially anti-Sony flack has any evidentiary basis?
* Chewbacca Actor Peter Mayhew Unloads Stockpile of Star Wars Set Photos.
* Disney appoints a group to determine a new, official Star Wars canon. I hope to develop the first official heresy.
* Grantland rates every aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s career on an UNDERRATED, OVERRATED, PROPERLY RATED scale. See also a seven-part interview with the Boss from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
* Poetry Magazine has your Game of Thrones fanficpoetry of the week.
* And Steven Moffat says he never bothered to plot out Sherlock season three because he’s been too busy plotting out seasons four and five. Yay?
1/2 Links
* All years are terrible years; the predicament of being human tends towards the negative. We read the news and are left feeling nothing more noble than “only I have escaped to tell thee.” A given year can be pronounced good only in a solipsistic sense.
* This headline seems like it was generated by some dystopian headline generator: Yakuza Gangsters Recruit Homeless Men for Fukushima Nuclear Clean Up.
* And then there’s this one: Climate Change Vastly Worse Than Previously Thought.
* If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.
* And then there’s this: Drone Testing Sites Announced In Six States.
* “Diversity is something that’s being marketed,” Pippert says. “They’re trying to sell a campus climate, they’re trying to sell a future. Campuses are trying to say, ‘If you come here, you’ll have a good time, and you’ll fit in.’ “
* How the Tenured are to the Job Market as White People are to Racism. Waving The White Flag On Tenured Vs. Adjunct.
* At the Ivies, It’s Still White at the Top.
The drop follows two years of modest gains, but even those gains hadn’t come close to returning to the level of openings before the economic downturn hit in the fall of 2008. This year, the AHA posted 686 jobs, and the pre-recession total was 1,064.
* Handed up by an Orange County, N.C., grand jury, the indictment charged Nyang’oro with “unlawfully, willfully and feloniously” accepting payment “with the intent to cheat and defraud” the university in connection with the AFAM course — a virtually unheard-of legal accusation against a professor. It’s simply incomprehensible to me how the alleged behavior could have been accomplished by just one person acting alone.
* The philosopher posited chains and a key.
* Asimov predicts 2014 in 1964 (and 1997 in 1977).
* “In 1969 the median salary for a male worker was $35,567 (in 2012 dollars). Today it is $33,904. So for 44 years, while wages for the top 10 percent have continued to climb, most Americans have been caught in a ”Great Stagnation,” bringing into question the whole purpose of the American capitalist economy. The notion that what benefited the establishment would benefit everyone, had been thoroughly discredited.”
* Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke.
* 10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014.
* Spied On from My iPhone: NSA has “backdoor access” to iPhones.
* RIP, James “Uncle Phil” Avery.
* Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower.
* And now an annual tradition: What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?
End of 2013 Mega Link Dump – All Links Must Go!
* This gentleman violently inserted his finger into dozens of victims’ anuses. Sometimes his friends held guns to the victims’ heads to force them to comply. Why was he sentenced to just two years in prison? Because he was an officer with the Milwaukee police department! Officer who forced dozens of anal cavity searches for fun gets only 2 years in prison.
* I wonder if it worked: The Soviet Union spent $1 billion on mind-control program.
* Utah solving homelessness problem by giving the homeless places to live. Madness!
* Once you insist that lives that are worth respecting are the lives that are most devoted to pecuniary gain, you have reached a road that has no ending, and a particularly strange one for humanists to walk.
* Rhetoric and Composition: Academic Capitalism and Cheap Teachers.
* The humanities are saved! Brain function ‘boosted for days after reading a novel.’
* Using detailed publication and citation data for over 50,000 articles from 30 major economics and finance journals, we investigate whether network proximity to an editor influences research productivity. During an editor’s tenure, his current university colleagues publish about 100% more papers in the editor’s journal, compared to years when he is not editor. In contrast to editorial nepotism, such “inside” articles have significantly higher ex post citation counts, even when same-journal and self-cites are excluded. Our results thus suggest that despite potential conflicts of interest faced by editors, personal associations are used to improve selection decisions.
* Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions are the still the only ones you need. More links below!
* Skeleton thought to be Etruscan prince is actually a princess. Prehistoric cave prints show most early artists were women.
* A Gender-Neutral Pronoun (Re)emerges in China.
* We still don’t really know how bicycles work.
* But it’s a lie. Winning does not scale. We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.
* In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.”
* Gasp! California Attorney General: Legalizing Marijuana Would Save Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars A Year.
* Huffington Post blogger argues just straight-up ripping off your babysitter because, I don’t know, freedom or something.
* And then we robbed all the pensions also because freedom I guess.
* Cancel all the unemployment insurance because freedom! North Carolina Shows How to Crush the Unemployed.
* 10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe.
* The life of a fast food striker.
* If you thought Southern California mansions could hardly get more outlandish, consider the latest must-have feature: A moat encircling the property.
* One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy: My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl..
* It’s Kwanzaa everywhere but Paul Mulshine’s heart.
* Twee fascism. Cupcake fascism.
* Another scene from the war on education in Chicago. Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils: Math of Today’s Jammed Schools. Silicon Valley techno-wizards sending their kinds to a tech-free school.
* Worst people in the world watch: But over the past decade, the number of “hospice survivors” in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying, a Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.
* Just kidding, the worst person in the world is Andrea Peyser.
* How Doctor Who Betrayed Matt Smith.
* The death of the alt-weekly.
* Are dolphins intelligent? Well, they get high.
* Previewing World Cup 2022: The Qatar Chronicles.
* Having already inaugurated full communism, radical De Blasio turns his pitiless mayoral gaze to horse-drawn carriages.
* Looking for a New Year’s Read? Magical realism/surreal books by women.
Weekend! Links!
* Program for the 2014 MLA Subconference, January 8-9 at Columbia College Chicago.
* CFP for “Joss Whedon: A Celebration” at DePaul University this May.
* The New Yorker considers Kim Stanley Robinson: Our Greatest Political Novelist?
Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.
* It is an open question as to whether academics today, in their heart of hearts, still realize that the choice between the employability agenda or the death of universities actually means the death of universities through the employability agenda.
* Our football team here at Purdue went 1-11, losing the final ten games in a row by an average of almost 25 points and going 0-8 in Big Ten play, including a 20 point blowout to arch-rival Indiana. The lone victory on the season came through a nail-biting 20-14 performance against Indiana State… an FCS school… who themselves went 1-11. If beating the doormat team of the Missouri Valley Conference is the highlight of your season, it’s perhaps time for a reevaluation of priorities. After ranking 122nd in points scored a game and 114th in points against a game, making a legitimate case for being the worst team in FBS football, the campus is buzzing about how long a rebuild will require and whether first-year coach Darrell Hazzell is the man to lead it. With the season’s “One Brick Higher” slogan now seeming like a sad joke, my message to the Purdue community is simple: don’t rebuild. Retreat. The best path forward for Purdue University is to dismantle its football program altogether.
* I also liked Freddie’s piece on how the permanent squabble between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty plays directly into the hands of administrators.
* This Thousand-Year Institution Could Really Learn Something from These Fly-By-Night Scams: Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge.
* Invisible Rituals: Pre-Graduate School Programs and Developing Diversity.
* “If you haven’t been in a hen plant, you don’t know what hell is”: Animal rights activists vs. the agribusiness industry in Rolling Stone.
* Liberalism is a game the rich play with themselves. They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen: Liberalism in the tank.
* Aaron Bady considers Mandela, all of him.
If you’re a president, it probably feels good to think about this, about how a revolutionary came to defend the stability of the society he once threatened to overturn. It probably also feels good to think of him as historical, as past: like Nkrumah or Lumumba, he is no longer our problem, no longer our responsibility. Instead of a defiant refusal to stop short of victory and a refusal to compromise or negotiate on principles, he can represent the passing away of that very thing.
* Want the best person for the job? Don’t interview.
* Why Don’t Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?
* Jackson’s Hobbit II so little resembles the book, it may as well be called Some Further Adventures in Middle-earth. The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction.
* Here’s Every Time Paul Rudd Has Shown the Same Movie Clip on Conan.
* Jaws retold as Peanuts comic.
* Everything in the oceans is dying.
* The Economy Looks Good Because The Data Has Been So Bad For So Long.
* No Civilian Leadership for NSA After All.
* Ph.D.s With and Without Jobs.
* Please excuse Davontaye, he suffers from povertenza.
* Belgium took a big step on Thursday to becoming the first country to allow euthanasia for incurably ill children, after the upper house of Parliament voted by a large majority to extend to minors a 2002 law legalizing the practice for adults.
* A national study being released today in book form found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely than those with just average or below average looks to go on to earn a four-year college degree.
* Take that, conventional wisdom! Study: Long Distance Relationships Can Work.
* Whether you agree with the ASA’s boycott of Israeli state institutions or not, I think we can all agree that to boycott Larry Summers.
* The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.
* America, 2013: No charges after man pulls gun on ‘b*tch’ with disabled kid over Walmart parking delay.
* Your odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million. As of Oct. 22, those odds changed to 1 in 259 million. The Lottery Is a Predator and You Are Its Math-Illiterate Prey.
* Space Race back on! China lands on the Moon!
* Hollywood finally goes too far.
* And Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation. Overflow Error: Abort, Retry, Fail….
Gerry Canavan 