Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘the VA

Tuesday Morning Links!

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Active shooter drills are scaring kids and may not protect them. Some schools are taking a new approach.

* The adjunct underclass.

* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre Dame.

* Palpatine post-ROTJ in the new EU.

* Homestuck may be the most important work of twenty-first-century art I genuinely do not have the time to try and figure out.

* 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change.

* If you want a vision of the future, imagine having a runny nose — forever.

* Weld is the first major intra-party challenger against a sitting president since Pat Buchanan took on George H.W. Bush.

* ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Their daughter is now left parentless.

A new policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits. The proposal, which reportedly aims to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims would, monitor the profiles of disabled people and flag content that shows them doing physical activities. When it comes down to it, the policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be seen living their lives for fear of losing vital financial aid and, possibly, medical care. Veterans too.

United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for first time.

* Two’s a trend: Just two weeks after Burger King announced it was partnering with Impossible Foods to offer a new meatless burger, Del Taco has announced it’s partnering with Beyond Meat to offer new meatless tacos.

* Heroes with feet of clay.

Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers.

* I’m afraid the Dewey Decimal System… is cancelled.

Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out.

* I’m on it, Suze!

* I think Bernie should boycott Fox, but it couldn’t have gone better for him.

* Shoot a ninth season, you cowards. broke: Bran ruined the story. woke: Bran is the story.

* #10 really tells a story.

* And Gene Wolfe has died.

Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!

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With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!

* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.

Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.

* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.

* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!

* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.

Resisting and Persisting: An interview with the contributors to Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler.

Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.

The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.

David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.

* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).

* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.

Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.

Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.

“Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.

Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.

6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?

* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”

Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.

No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”

* Just another headline here in hell.

* Should Rivers Have Rights?

* The rule of law is a curious thing.

* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.

* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.

* Spaaaaaaace Fooooooooorce!

* Elon Musk and his space-baron brethren want our admiration. Their narcissistic exploits deserve nothing but our scorn.

An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?

How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.

* The Church of Trump.

* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.

When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.

* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.

* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.

* Fascism and the university.

Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.

* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.

* Building a Better MFA.

Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.

“Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”

* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.

* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.

* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!

U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.

* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.

* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.

When did parenting become so fearful?

The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.

* Down with the Philosophy Factory.

The man who was fired by a machine.

* The Labour Movement in 2018.

How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.

* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.

* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?

* No, you’re not too old.

* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.

* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.

* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.

* Lead is useful; lead is poison.

* College admissions vs. the shy.

* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”

* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.

* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”

I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.

* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”

* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.

* It’s immoral to be rich.

* Socialism in our lifetime.

Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.

‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’

* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.

* Startling jump in NFL player claims for Parkinson’s and ALS pushes payout projections past 65-year total in 18 months.

Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.

* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.

* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.

* The man who owns the Moon.

* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?

Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.

* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.

* PFT explains Louis C.K.

Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.

* Wiffle Ball 2.0.

* Insulin should be free.

* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.

All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.

* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.

* The Village Voice is officially dead.

* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.

* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.

* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.

* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.

* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.

* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?

* On Wakandacon.

* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 13, 2018 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Tuesday Links!

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* CFP: Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

* CFP: Sexual Violence, Social Movements, and Social Media.

* Tonight! I’m talking at this event about Black Panther, oppression, and liberation for the MU Amnesty International chapter.

* The Revealer has an excerpt from Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia.

Kim Stanley Robinson Makes the Socialist Case for Space Exploration.

Revisiting my nerd-fiction collection, I realize how much I needed pure lore when I was a kid, and how little I need it as an adult.

* How neoliberalism shapes the global economy and limits the power of democracies.

* America as glitching AI.

The Professor Who’s Warning the World About Facebook and Google.

How Dual Enrollment Contributes to Inequality.

Reading on the Chaos in the UW system.

* “Wisconsin Won’t Remove Names of KKK Affiliates From Buildings. It Will Build an Exhibit Instead.” Could do both, you know!

Which Animal Kills the Most Humans?

* Woman condemned to live in hell forever.

* “James Cameron Compares His Avatar Sequels to The Godfather, But Admits That Could Be a Huge Mistake.” Oh, you think that could be a mistake, do you?

* Obviously.

The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy.

* The good news for Trump is that this is the last bit of embarrassing tape footage out there [pauses, touches finger to ear] I’m being told the pee tape is real.

Woman fined $500 for taking her in-flight apple off the plane.

* Shock report: Man whose only qualification was physical proximity to Trump may not be qualified to run the VA.

* Unbelievable desecration on the Cinderella Blu-ray. Who signed off on this?

* Walking Dead and Fringe Director Seith Mann Will Bring BLACK to the Big Screen.

* The Science of Making CS Gas “Safe.”

She created a document to warn women of sexual harassers. It’s haunted her ever since.

* This App Can Tell You the Indigenous History of the Land You Live On.

* Your Next Job Interview Could Be with a Racist Bot.

* Here come the climate gentrifiers.

* It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler.

* Husband-wife Gaffigan comedy team will be Marquette’s spring commencement speakers.

* I say teach the controversy.

* And holy moly.