Posts Tagged ‘Tiger Woods’
Friday Links! SpoOooOOOOOoOOOOooOOooky
* Remarkable reversal: James Tiptree’s name will be removed from the Tiptree Award after all.
* Meritocracy purports to ensure that social and economic rewards track achievement rather than breeding and, in this way, to underwrite deserved advantage, squaring hierarchy with democratic fairness and squaring private gain with the public good. The book’s central charge is that this account of merit is a sham.
* Aggression sensors. Classroom barricades. How architects are transforming schools for the era of mass shootings. The Mad Rush to Bulletproof American Schools.
* Emails Show Falwell Mocked Students, Staff For Years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* Green and white nationalism.
Right-wing extremists have seized on the opportunity to claim to speak, like Dr Seuss’s Lorax, for the trees. In some of the dimmer corners of the internet, the Pine Tree Gang – fond of using an arboreal emoji on Twitter, until journalists smelled them out – demands a white separatist homeland in the northwestern United States. Their founding philosopher is ‘Uncle Ted’, the Unabomber; they circulate such slogans as ‘Save trees, not refugees.’ Quoting both Mosley and Heidegger, the alt-right publisher Greg Johnson asserts that saving the ecosystem requires saving the white race. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, a religious homestead movement named after a series of novels, combine racial myths with environmental mysticism.
Most of these are tiny, fringe movements. But there are signs that green and white nationalism is scaling up. In the recent European elections, France’s National Rally claimed that ‘borders are the environment’s greatest ally.’ Marine Le Pen declared that someone ‘who is rooted in their home is an ecologist’, whereas those who are ‘nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland’. Across the Atlantic, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed to be against illegal immigration because it ‘produces a huge amount of litter’, while the far-right pundit Ann Coulter has suggested that Americans must ‘choose between a green America and a brown America’. In India, public tree planting and reverence for sacred groves reinforce the government’s majoritarian claim that only Hindus are the nation’s true stewards.
* Someone who is good at the economy please help me.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: A program on civic virtue at UNC-Chapel Hill is raising concerns about secrecy and funding.
* John Bolton and the Fox News Century.
* Science corner! A bold new perspective suggests space-time isn’t a fundamental entity but emerges from quantum entanglement, says physicist Sean Carroll.
* ‘I Lost Everything’: The Obscene Cost of Being a Woman with a Chronic Health Problem.
* Actually existing media bias: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday.
Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.” The report, which was produced by researchers at Define American, a nonprofit media and culture organization, and Media Cloud, a project of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focuses on immigration reporting in those outlets over a four-year period starting in 2014.
* The richest man in the world has some news for his workers at Whole Foods.
* Bizarre comet from another star system just spotted. Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
* In my home timeline, Tiger Woods was on You Can’t Do That on Television for a season.
* In 1949, LIFE magazine broke it down.
* And your Lord of the Rings after-the-credits stinger.
Friday Friday Night Night
* Fox News: Don’t send your kids to college because they could catch the libralz. But if you do at least they won’t be as dumb as 30% of Texans.
* Stories to watch: activists may actually manage to bring the public option back from the death. Reid himself signaled he’s open to the idea today. Ezra Klein explains the politics at work:
No one I’ve spoken to — even when they support the public option — thinks that its reemergence is good news for health-care reform. It won’t be present in the package that the White House will unveil Monday. Everyone seems to be hoping this bubble will be short-lived.
But it might not be. The media is talking about it, liberals are organizing around it, none of the major actors feels politically capable of playing executioner, and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson don’t have the power to do the job on their own. As of now, the strategy only has 20 or so supporters, and it’ll need at least another 20 or 25 to really be viable. But if it gets there, White House and Senate leadership are going to have some hard calls to make.
Ezra also says that as long as we’re playing make-believe it should be the Medicare buy-in we bring back.
* Rachel bestows unto Meet the Press another Maddow Bump. Will she do the same when she improbably shares a bill with me on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio this Sunday?
* I can’t help it: I love to see Wil Wheaton and William Shatner get work.
* Breaking: rich people are rich, pay no taxes.
* Iain M. Banks, Please Destroy The Culture! Via io9.
* Flowchart of the day: Does Tiger Woods owe you an apology?
* And Gynomite dramatically underestimates my level of interest in the penny’s new design. Coming Monday, my new blog, bringbacktheoldpenny.blogspot.com…
Tabdump #2
* If you invested $100,000 on Jan. 1, 2000, in the Vanguard index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500, you would have ended up with $89,072 by mid-December of 2009. Adjust that for inflation by putting it in January 2000 dollars and you’re left with $69,114. Krugman says things have not yet turned around.
* In search of the world’s hardest language.
* Should we believe the thorium hype?
* Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is fixing for another boycott.
* Behold, the divorce gene. Via Eric Barker.
* And everyone is criticizing Brit Hume for suggesting on-air that Tiger Woods must become a Christian in order to be forgiven, but of course Hume was right: a well-publicized conversion experience would be a painless way for Woods to immediately rehabilitate his brand.
A Few for Wednesday
I hate to bury the more important Afghanistan posts, but I’ve been working hard to avoid my work this morning and I wanted to memorialize my efforts with a linkdump.
* Via The Rushmore Academy, Richard Brody says The Darjeeling Limited is the second-best film of the decade. Coming as this does just one day after a lunchtime argument with Ryan over whether Wes Anderson is a “serious” filmmaker, I think my affirmative case has now been definitively proved.
* Matt Yglesias had a good post this morning on the way institutional pressures in the military-industrial complex drag America’s foreign policy to the right no matter who is president.
* Bad behavior from conservative Democrats in the Senate has put Snowe and Collins’s votes back in play on health care.
* UC-San Diego’s Gordon H. Hansen: Despite all this, illegal immigration’s overall impact on the US economy is small. Low-skilled native workers who compete with unauthorized immigrants are the clearest losers. US employers, on the other hand, gain from lower labor costs and the ability to use their land, capital, and technology more productively. The stakes are highest for the unauthorized immigrants themselves, who see very substantial income gains after migrating. If we exclude these immigrants from the calculus, however (as domestic policymakers are naturally inclined to do), the small net gain that remains after subtracting US workers’ losses from US employers’ gains is tiny. And if we account for the small fiscal burden that unauthorized immigrants impose, the overall economic benefit is close enough to zero to be essentially a wash. The bolded phrase represents the reason why, despite ongoing shrieking nativism from the Republican party base, immigration reform never actually occurs. (via @mattoyeah)
* Kottke: Photos of Dubai in decline are the new photos of Detroit in decline. Have to admit I laughed at Stewart’s sad “It’s now Du-sell” pun last night.
* And Scott Lemieux has today’s deep thought.
I am absolutely shocked that, despite a near-total lack of precedent, a wealthy professional athlete has engaged in sexual relations with persons to whom he is not married, and I hope that cable news will devote more time to these remarkably surprising and important revelations.
Gerry Canavan 