Posts Tagged ‘the social safety net is for closers’
Mondayish Reading
* In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests. The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.
* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.
* TV archive discovers couple who beat Kirk and Uhura to first interracial kiss.
* Marquette is hiring a sustainability coordinator.
* “Why I’m Teaching a Netflix Class.”
* What Do You Have to Make in a Year to be in the Top 1% of Your State?
* The Death and Life of Simulated Cities.
* You could call it Rahm’s revenge—the whole point of passing a more ambitious, more politically risky version of Obamacare was to get enough healthy people to buy coverage, and that’s exactly what hasn’t been happening.
* Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America. How to Decimate a City.
* On science fiction and post-scarcity economics.
* I suppose I’ve always been ahead of the curve.
* Junot Díaz talk discusses social activism in academia.
* To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’
* Penn State Cancels Recreational Class Trips To NYC & DC Due To “Safety Concerns.”
* Star Wars, before the EU. Alan Moore’s Star Wars. Hang the Jedi.
* A brief history of judicial dissent.
* On Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s racism wasn’t the matter of a few unfortunate remarks here or there. It was a core part of his political identity, as indicated both by his anti-black policies as president and by his writings before taking office. It is completely accurate to describe him as a racist and white supremacist and condemn him accordingly.
* The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.
* What was it like to be a Nintendo game play counselor?
* Antonin Scalia, fraud, part 87.
* The rise of “white student unions.” They’re probably fake.
So UC Berkeley (a so-called bastion of liberalism and diversity) now has a white student union. pic.twitter.com/zfekufgvLu
— Zoé S. (@ztsamudzi) November 22, 2015
* Use of High-Tech Brooms Divides Low-Tech Sport of Curling.
* When administrations co-opt student movements, Duke edition. Also at Duke: debate over continuation fees.
* CNN, still the worst, forever and ever amen.
* Trump has aggressively weaponized the ability of right-wing politicians to lie with impunity. Though you always wonder if there’s still some limit after all.
* The further I get into my thirties, the more depressed I become.
* Music stops, everybody switch positions on free speech.
* Colbert Drops to 3rd Place Behind Kimmel as New Poll Shows CBS Host Alienating Audiences. I’ve never understood CBS’s plan here.
* The McDonaldization of Medicine.
* The Unholy Alchemy behind Cheetos.
* Super-excited to trust my kids to the wisdom of the public school system.
* In the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, residents tense about its future.
* ‘Hunger Games’ Box Office: Why $101M Weekend For ‘Mockingjay 2’ May Be Cause For Despair.
* A “lost” James Bond movie written by Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, would have seen Daniel Craig’s 007 forced to kill Judi Dench’s spymaster M in a shock finale, according to a new book.
* The tech economy, still a bad joke.
* All U.S. Lab Chimps Are Finally Going To Paradise: A Retirement Home in the South Somewhere.
* Enjoy it while it lasts: Coffee’s good for you again.
* Elsewhere in science facts that are definitely going to hold up forever and ever: Scientists Say Psychopathic People Really Like Bitter Food.
* SyFy wants a Black Mirror too. Syfy is Releasing a Film, De-Rebranding, and Becoming Super Interesting.
* What crime is the founding of a bank, compared to the founding of a police department?
* But just in case you had any ideas that this wasn’t going to be a super-depressing list: Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era.’
Written by gerrycanavan
November 23, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, activism, administration, air travel, Alan Moore, apocalypse, Barack Obama, bitter people, Black Mirror, Bond, bullying, Channel Zero, Cheetos, chimps, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, CNN, coffee, Colbert, college basketball, college football, college sports, comics, continuation fees, curling, demographics, deprofessionalization, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, Duke, economic bubbles, English, Episode 7, Expanded Universe, Facebook, fake facts, film, free speech, futurity, games, gender, graduate student movements, health care, Hollywood, homelessness, How the University Works, Hunger Games, income inequality, industrial agriculture, ISIS, Islamophobia, judicial dissent, Junot Díaz, kids today, language, LEGOs, lies and lying liars, Marquette, McDonald's, misogyny, Mockingjay, names, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York, Nintendo, panic, pedagogy, Penn State, police state, politics, post-antibiotic bacteria, post-scarcity, race, racism, Republicans, required classes, research, safety, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, sexism, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supreme Court, sustainability, SyFy, Syracuse, teaching, tech economy, television, tenure, the courts, the curve, The Force Awakens, the Jedi, the law, the rich are better, the rich are different, the social safety net is for closers, They Live!, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trolls, Washington DC, white people, women, Won't somebody think of the children?, Woodrow Wilson
However Many Links You Think There Are In This Post, There Are Actually More Links Than That
* First, they cast Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, and I said nothing.
* de Boer v. Schuman re: Hopkins. It’s not the supply, it’s the demand.
* The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.
* Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes.
* If I worked at Kansas University, this post might get me fired.
* Rortybomb v. the social safety net.
* X-tend the Allegory: What if the X-Men actually were black? Essay version. Via.
* “Men’s Rights” Trolls Spammed Us With 400 Fake Rape Reports.
* The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency.’ It’s already here. 96 Percent Of Network Nightly News’ Coverage Of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change. The year in fossil fuel disasters.
* “Unfathomable”: Why Is One Commission Trying to Close California’s Largest Public College? ACCJC Gone Wild.
* San Jose State University has all but ended its experiment to offer low-cost, high-quality online education in partnership with the massive open online course provider Udacity after a year of disappointing results and growing dismay among faculty members.
* Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses.
* CSU-Pueblo revising budget downward; up to 50 jobs at risk, loss of $3.3M.
* For-Profit College Oakbridge Academy Of Arts Suddenly Shuts Down.
* “This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” the billionaire told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.”
* In Defense of ‘Entitlements.’
* Oh, I see, there’s your problem right there. Links continue below the graph.
* “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
* Scott Walker signals he will sign school mascot bill.
* Thieves steal risqué calendars, leave protest signs.
* DC Passes Great Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Days Bills. What’s in Them?
* France institutes a carbon tax.
* Community Season 5 Feels Like An Old Friend Has Finally Come Home.
* 62 Percent of Restaurant Workers Don’t Wash Their Hands After Handling Raw Beef.
* Shock in Ohio: No evidence of plot to register non-citizen voters. That only proves how successful the conspiracy has been!
* Wow: Tampa Toddler Thriving After Rare 5-Organ Transplant.
* The Decline of the US Death Penalty. Still illegal to murder people in Detroit (maybe). 15 Things That We Re-Learned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 20123. Data Broker Removes Rape-Victims List After Journal Inquiry.
* The true story of the original “welfare queen.”
* Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.
* The 16 Colleges and Universities Where It’s Hardest to Get an A.
* Michael Pollan on plant intelligence.
* Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent Interpreter.
* Marriage equality reaches New Mexico.
* A vigil planned as a peaceful remembrance of a teen killed in police custody ended with tear gas and arrests Thursday night in downtown Durham.
* An oral history of the Cones of Dunshire.
* On scarcity and the Federation.
* “Characters” trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2013 at 9:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, Afrofuturism, allegory, Ant-Man, apocalypse, Bitcoin, calling in, carbon tax, catastrophe, Charlie Stross, charts, City College of San Francisco, class struggle, climate change, college, comics, community, CSU Pueblo, Dan Harmon, deafness, death, death penalty, Detroit, Durham, ecology, entitlements, film, for-profit schools, fossil fuels, France, gay rights, God works in mysterious ways, grade inflation, graduate student life, How the University Works, hygiene, illness, income inequality, insanity, Johns Hopkins, Kansas State University, labor, LEGO, manifestoes, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, mascots, Mayor Bloomberg, meat, medicine, men's rights activism, Michael Pollan, minimum wage, misogyny, MOOCs, mundane SF, Native American issues, New Mexico, no future, Ohio, over-educated literary theory PhDs, paid sick days, Parks and Recreation, Paul Rudd, photographs, plants, police brutality, politics, post-scarcity, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, rape, rape culture, restaurants, rich people, San Jose State, scarcity, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, Settlers of Catan, sexism, silence, social media, stamps, Star Trek, television, tenure, The Cones of Dunshire, the future is now, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the social safety net is for closers, the way we die now, true crime, voter fraud, voter suppression, Washington DC, welfare queens, Wes Anderson, words, X-Men, Žižek
Fall Break!
* The shutdown is over; bring on the next shutdown! Communists at Standard and Poor’s Determine the Shutdown Took $24 Billion Out Of The US Economy. What You Can Get For The Price Of A Shutdown. Here Is What Republicans Got For Shutting Down The Government. House Republicans Hold Hearing on Why Their Shutdown Shut Things Down.
* Meanwhile, poor children now make up a majority of school children in South and West.
* Who benefits from the safety net? You’ll never guess!
* Gasp! Report by Faculty Group Questions Savings From MOOCs. More here.
* To Prevent Rape on College Campuses, Focus on the Rapists, Not the Victims. How To Fix The ‘College Women Need To Stop Drinking’ Narrative. How To Write About Rape Prevention Without Sounding Like An Asshole.
* Bad Lip Reading presents Game of Thrones: Medieval Land Fun-Time World.
* Is it true that Oreos are more addictive to lab rats than cocaine?
* Gus Lives! And right here in Milwaukee: McDonald’s restaurants allegedly used to launder drug money. I actually make fun of this forlorn-looking McDonald’s all the time; now I know…
* The A.V. Club reviews Schooled: The Price of College Sports.
* And Wes Anderson’s The Grant Budapest Hotel has a trailer. Bring on March!
Written by gerrycanavan
October 17, 2013 at 11:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, addiction, austerity, bad lip reading, Breaking Bad, class struggle, college basketball, college football, college sports, drugs, feminism, film, Game of Thrones, games, gay rights, government shutdowns, homophobia, How the University Works, McDonald's, Milwaukee, misogyny, MOOCs, NCAA, neoliberalism, Oreos, politics, poverty, privatize everything, race, rape, rape culture, Republicans, sexism, the economy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the social safety net is for closers, the South, the West, trailers, Wes Anderson, white people, Wisconsin, Wolverine, X-Men
4/5ths
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 29, 2013 at 8:47 am
A Few for Friday
* It is hard to overstate: This country, in its current condition, has no other option but something close to full employment. Our pathetic social safety net, even absent the contracting effect of austerity measures, can’t fill in the gaps caused by the demise of ubiquitous employment. Even the counterrevolution has no other idiom; the most common epithet directed toward Occupy protests, after all, was “Get a job!” That the near impossibility of getting a job was the point for many who were protesting was too destabilizing a notion to be understood. In the short term, I have no doubt that the unemployment rate will fall. The question is the long-term structural dependability of a social contract built on mass employment.
* Lincoln Memorial, 2013, Anon, latex emulsion.
Lincoln himself, no more than a marble titan cut in his image, does not feel the change. And yet there it is, crawling across him, slithering toward his magisterial tumescence. The artist’s liquid hand is more than mere vestigiality; it is a spiritual kinship with the primitive, making its presence felt in the numinous historiography of neoclassicism, a soupçon of Jung melting into Kantian grandeur. But each is as lurid as the other in its own mythopoeia of the human mind.
* Supreme Court’s Gutting of Voting Rights Act Unleashes GOP Feeding Frenzy. The focus here is on the truly atrocious bill the North Carolina General Assembly passed yesterday.
* Congrats to Forbes’ Top 25 Best Public Colleges in 2013! Too bad one-fifth of them — including the very top three — are currently under fire for allegedly failing to report rape and generally sucking at dealing with sexual assault.
* Ken MacLeod remembers Iain M. Banks.
* And is Arrested Development coming back again? Mitch Hurwitz says “Definitely.”
Written by gerrycanavan
July 26, 2013 at 2:49 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, Arrested Development, art, capitalism, class struggle, community, full employment, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, Lincoln Memorial, misogyny, North Carolina, optimism, politics, race, rape culture, science fiction, sexism, the social safety net is for closers, voter suppression, Voting Rights Act, welfare state, yellowism
Links for the Weekend
* What Search Committees Wish You Knew. This is a reasonably good article with one piece of deeply terrible advice. Do not tell a search committee anything about your personal life or your relationships that will harm your chances until after you have received a written offer. Being open and honest about your two-body problem will not help you in the least. UPDATE: When I posted this on Twitter, @academicdave had a much harsher take, and found the piece pretty wanting. I don’t know. I think it’s useful for applicants to try to humanize their imagination of the search committee a bit (which can be hard). And then of course once you’ve done that you have to put brakes on that impulse, because they’re still not your friends, and they don’t really care about you much at all.
* Ads without Products has a great pedagogical post on teaching writing and critical perversity. I think I’m going to steal some of this language for my course next semester.
So how do I teach “practical criticism”? In the seminar groups that I lead, I model and encourage the following “flow chart” of thought: Anticipate what other intelligent readers of this piece might say about it. Try to imagine the “conventional wisdom” about it that would emerge as if automatically in the minds of the relatively well-informed and intelligent. And then, but only then, figure out a perverse turn that you can make within the context of but against this conventional wisdom. “Of course that seems right, but on the other hand it fails to account for…” “On first glace, it would be easy and to a degree justifiable to conclude that…. But what if we reconsider this conclusion in the light of….”
Students tend to demonstrate resistance, early on, to this practice. For one thing, especially in the first year, they don’t really (and couldn’t possibly) have a fully developed sense of what the “conventional wisdom” is that their supposed to be augmenting, contradicting, perverting. At this early stage, the process requires them to make an uncomfortable Pascalian wager with themselves – to pretend as though they are confident in their apprehensions until the confidence itself arrives. But even if there’s a certain awkwardness in play, it does seem to exercise the right parts of the students’ critical and analytical faculties so that they (to continue the metaphor) develop a sort of “muscle memory” of the “right” way to do criticism. From what I can tell, encouraging them to develop an instinct of this sort early measurably improves their writing as they move through their degree.
But still (and here, finally, I’m getting to the point of this post) there’s a big problem with all of this. I warn the students of this very early on – generally the first time I run one of their criticism seminars. There’s a big unanswered question lurking behind this entire process. Why must we be perverse? What is the value of aiming always for provocative difference, novelty, rather than any other goal? Of course, there’s a pragmatic answer: Because it will cause your writing to be better received. Because you will earn better marks by doing it this way rather than the other. Because you will develop a skill – one that can be shifted to other fields of endeavour – that will be recognised as what the world generally calls “intelligence.” But – in particular because none of this should simply be about the pragmatics of getting up the various ladders and depth charts of life – this simply isn’t a sufficient response, or at least is one that begs as many questions as it answers. What are, after all the politics of “novelty”? What are we to make of the structural similarity between what it takes to impress one’s markers and what it takes to make in “on the market,” whether as a human or inhuman commodity? What if – in the end – the answers to question that need (ethically, politically) answering are simple rather than complex, the obvious rather than the surprising?
* A possible example of critical perversity from Deadspin: Everything You Need To Know About Pennsylvania’s Lawsuit Against The NCAA (And Why You Should Support It). Though frankly I’m pretty sympathetic to the claim that the NCAA has no jurisdiction over criminal conspiracies, much less that it followed a rational procedure to adjudicate competing claims in this case.
* Bousquet asked the audience why police departments are far more diverse than English departments, by and large. Noting the silence in the audience following his question, Bousquet noted, “We have made it too difficult for those who are not advantaged” to enter the profession. Asked whether he believes faculty diversity is a priority for elite institutions, such as the one he now teaches at, Bousquet said such institutions are “constantly trying to work on the question of diversity.
“For me, the question is why do they fail so much, despite all of those efforts. And I think one of the reasons, amongst many, is the irrationalism of faculty compensation.” Bousquet adds, “Eighty percent of faculty are working like for $15,000 a year” taking into account adjuncts and graduate students.
* “Sustainable Teaching Fail”: The conditions of non-tenure-track faculty are setting us up to be failures as effective pedagogues.
* Lincoln explains the modern GOP.
“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.”
* But don’t worry! There’s a hack for that! The self-evident Calvinball lunacy of this trillion-dollar-coin thing is all the proof I need that our system is broken and our elites are insane.
* Politicians Should Learn Bigger Lessons From Their Pet Causes.
But too many politicians, and this especially includes self-described fiscal conservatives, simply can’t draw the obvious conclusion from all this: namely that you shouldn’t support help for the poor and the sick and elderly only if you personally happen to know someone who’s poor or sick or elderly. All of these people exist whether or not they happen to be family members.
* Blue Mars: What Mars would look like with oceans and life.
* A California appeals court has found that raping a sleeping woman isn’t illegal if she’s unmarried. I swear to God, I don’t even know where to begin with this bullshit anymore.
* Elsewhere in rape culture atrocities: Basically an entire town colludes to protect their football team from rape prosecution.
* House GOP lets the Violence Against Women Act expire for first time since 1994. I mean really.
* Inside Chernobyl’s Abandoned Hospital.
* More Evidence Shows That Pro Sports Teams Don’t Boost The Economy.
* There Are Two Law School Grads for Every Lawyer Job.
* The Original Star Wars Trilogy As Maps.
* Commander Riker lorem ipsum.
* Everything that’s wrong with football, in ten seconds. WHAT A HIT! I’M SO EXCITED I CAN’T EVEN WAIT TO SEE IF THE PLAYER HAS BEEN HURT OR KILLED! VIOLENCE! EXCITEMENT! YELLING!
* Google is not an illegal monopoly, so they can go on ruining all their products with dumb attempts to monetize your data. Hooray!
* And George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year. Sold!
Written by gerrycanavan
January 4, 2013 at 8:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Abraham Lincoln, academia, academic jobs, adjuncts, books, California, Calvinball, Chernobyl, class struggle, college basketball, critical perversity, diversity, domestic violence, English departments, enough bullshit already, football, George Saunders, Google, high school, How the University Works, income inequality, Kim Stanley Robinson, law school, lawyers, lorem ipsum, maps, Marc Bousquet, Mars, Mars trilogy, MLA, NCAA, nuclearity, Ozymandias, pedagogy, Pennsylvania, platinum-coin seigniorage, politics, rape, rape culture, Republicans, ruins, rule or ruin, sports, Star Wars, tenure, the dark side of the digital, the law, the social safety net is for closers, two-body problem, Violence against Women Act, what it is I think I'm doing, Won't somebody think of the football team?, writing
Thursday!
* Let’s Talk about Debt: The Real World Economy versus the Grad School Economy. The Catch 22 of Grad School Economics. Debt & Regret. The Golden Handcuffs of Employment (aka “Public Service”).
* Also making the rounds: The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program. This story is very sad, and a large part of what makes it sad extends beyond academia specifically to the failure of the social safety net more generally.
* Sarah Lawrence, With Guns: Teaching English at West Point.
* The decisive objection to the quest for original meaning, even when the quest is conducted in good faith, is that judicial historiography rarely dispels ambiguity. Judges are not competent historians. Even real historiography is frequently indeterminate, as real historians acknowledge. To put to a judge a question that he cannot answer is to evoke “motivated thinking,” the form of cognitive delusion that consists of credulously accepting the evidence that supports a preconception and of peremptorily rejecting the evidence that contradicts it. Posner v. Scalia.
Now your troubled firm – let’s say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company’s bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level…
Also in Rolling Stone: The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney.
* What It’s Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time.
Every president is in the best physical and mental condition they were ever in throughout the course of their presidency. Fatal maladies have been cured, but any lifelong conditions or chronic illnesses (e.g. FDR’s polio) remain.
The presidents are fighting in an ovular arena 287 feet long and 180 feet wide (the dimensions of the [1] Roman Colosseum). The floor is concrete. Assume that weather is not a factor.
Each president has been given one standard-issue [2] Gerber LHR Combat Knife , the knife [3] presented to each graduate of the United States Army Special Forces Qualification Course. Assume the presidents have no training outside any combat experiences they may have had in their own lives.
There is no penalty for avoiding combat for an extended period of time. Hiding and/or playing dead could be valid strategies, but there can be only one winner. The melee will go on as long as it needs to.
FDR has been outfitted with a [4] Bound Plus H-Frame Power Wheelchair, and can travel at a maximum speed of around 11.5 MPH. The wheelchair has been customized so that he is holding his knife with his dominant hand. This is to compensate for his almost certain and immediate defeat in the face of an overwhelming disadvantage.
Each president will be deposited in the arena regardless of their own will to fight, however, personal ethics, leadership ability, tactical expertise etc., should all be taken into account. Alliances are allowed.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 30, 2012 at 10:18 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, bailouts, Bain Capital, deafness, English, grad student nightmares, health care, How the University Works, Matt Taibbi, Mitt Romney, music, originalism, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, Presidents, Richard A. Posner, Scalia, student debt, Supreme Court, the law, the social safety net is for closers, thought experiments, West Point, what it is I think I'm doing
Down Here It’s Just Winners and Losers and Don’t Get Caught on the Wrong Side of That Line
Circulating on Facebook: what the debt deal cut, and what it left intact.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 25, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with America, austerity, charts, class struggle, debt ceiling, inequality, politics, taxes, the deficit, the social safety net is for closers, ugh
Nickel and Dimed 2011
Barbara Ehrenreich on still (not) getting by in America.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 10, 2011 at 1:56 am
It’s Only ‘Government Support’ When Other People Get the Money
In 2008, I conducted a survey to gauge the degree to which Americans who had received various government social benefits recognized them as such. Not surprisingly, most beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill who took part in the survey acknowledged that they had been given a leg up by the government. But of the respondents who made use of tax-advantaged Coverdell or 529 education savings accounts, 64 percent said they had “not used a government social program,” as did 59.6 percent of those who used HOPE and Lifelong Learning Tax Credits. There’s more at the link. Via MeFi.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 29, 2011 at 4:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with education, government subsidies, politics, the social safety net is for closers
The Social Safety Net Is for Closers (and More Links from the Weekend)
* Salman Rushdie is to make a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories. Are you listening, English department hiring committees? Look for my dossier this fall. (Thanks, Erica!)
* For the first time in years, the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA), the largest union representing coal miners, has found common cause withenvironmental and community advocates who are seeking to end mountaintop-removal coal mining.
* Ten Charts That Prove the U.S. Is a Low-Tax Country.
* In a Pure Coincidence, Gaddafi Impeded U.S. Oil Interests before the War.
* Democratic Leaders Perfectly Coordinate Message on Anthony Weiner, Can’t Do It For Anything That Actually Matters. I happen to agree that Weiner should probably resign—if only to finally end the story—but why aren’t Democratic leaders sending synchronized press releases on jobs or Medicare?
* MetaFilter covers the weird, sad decline of David Mamet. We’ll always have Glengarry Glen Ross…
* And the first bit of remotely interesting news from the D.C. relaunch: Grant Morrison will be writing Action Comics. Now that’s something I might actually read.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 12, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academic jobs, Action Comics, America, Anthony Weiner, class struggle, coal, comics, David Mamet, DC Comics, Democrats, ecology, English departments, Gaddafi, Glengarry Glen Ross, Grant Morrison, imperialism, Libya, novels, oil, politics, reboots, Republicans, Salman Rushdie, science fiction, Superman, taxes, Tea Party, television, the social safety net is for closers, unions, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again