Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘turkeys

Thanksgiving Links!

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* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday

* I’m giving the last “Tolkien Tuesdays” talk at the Haggerty on next Tuesday, November 28, on Tolkien and pop culture.

* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.

* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.

* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.

* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!

* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.

* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.

* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.

* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.

* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.

* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.

* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.

* The Dirt on Pig-Pen.

* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.

* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…

* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.

* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.

* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.

* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.

* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.

* ‘A World Cup Built on Modern Slavery’: Stadium Workers Blow the Whistle on Qatar’s ‘Coverup’ of Migrant Deaths and Suffering.

* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.

* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.

* Abortion, Every Day.

* New Rules for a New Game.

* Welcome to the Infinite Conversation: an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.

* ‘I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to be there’: Milwaukee student’s poetry takes her to the White House.

* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.

* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.

* what is the crime for which the turkey was sentenced to death & the sentence nullified by the US President? & what guarantee do we have that the turkey won’t be executed anyway, as soon as the cameras are gone.

* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.

* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.

* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

* Yes, but: the comic.

* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.

* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.

* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’

* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.

* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.

* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”

* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 22, 2022 at 11:35 am

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Black Friday Links! Will Not Save You Money!

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* The Buffy at 20″ special issue of Slayage is out, with an introduction by me and James South, interviews on the future of Whedon Studies with Rhonda Wilcox and Sherryl Vint, and seven terrific articles by conference attendees on “Restless,” “Normal Again,” Fuffy, Spike, mental health, anger, and the soul. Check it out! I think the interview with Sherryl is especially interesting if I do say so myself, and raises some intriguing questions about the status of Whedon Studies as a discipline going forward: “Whedon Studies after Whedon.”

* CFP: 21st Century Climate Fiction.

Students Want to Write Well; We Don’t Let Them. We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know.

* Frankie Muniz doesn’t remember the show that made him famous.

* Becoming Anne Frank: Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?

Here Are the Outrageous Incentives That Losing Cities Offered Amazon for HQ2. How to Stop the Amazon Extortion From Happening AgainBreak up Amazon. More and more and more. And of course.

* It still doesn’t even approach the scale of the Foxconn con. Time to check in on the old job creators.

Indigenous women kept from seeing their newborn babies until agreeing to sterilization, says lawyer. In 2017.

* With illness in shelters and hotels at capacity, wildfire evacuees desperately seek refuge. Made homeless by flames, evacuees face hardship, disease and desperation. California Wildfires Are A Bigger Public Health Nightmare Than Anyone Imagined. Dozens dead, thousands missing.

Air pollution levels ‘forcing families to move out of cities.’ The Ecological Is Political. What were Ocasio-Cortez and 150 young activists doing in Nancy Pelosi’s office? The Green New Deal. And, you know, for kids: the Civ 6 climate change expansion.

For First Act in Power, Democrats Consider Making Their Own Agenda Impossible to Pass.

* Silicon Valley’s boosters say it’s an innovative, meritocratic wonderland that rewards brilliant visionaries and just might save the world. That’s nonsense.

* Presenting your attorney general. This is going to be wild. It’s only been like a week.

“I see this morning we are down to 26 ICE detainees,” Lt. Dan Lindhorst wrote in an email. “Could you please see if you can get these numbers up.”

* Trump spent $200,000,000 on the election stunt of sending 6,000 troops to the border, then withdrew them before the caravan arrived. A steal at twice the price!

* Authorities find a rocket launcher and pipe bombs during massive Florida white supremacist sting. The Great Race Panic. Scary Clowns. Brookings running cover for Bolsonaro, already.

* “Aides squared off against administration immigration hawks over an order they said was beyond the president’s constitutional powers.”

Essentially every right wing media operation in the country is run at a huge loss while screeching about markets, markets, markets. It’s a truly amazing grift.

* On doctors and guns: staying in your lane.

Girl, 13, Who Wrote Essay on Gun Violence Is Killed by Stray Bullet.

Cop not charged, not disciplined, cleared of any wrongdoing and back on the job.

* Is any bit of this legal? The new “Cabinet order” was signed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, not President Donald Trump. It allows “Department of Defense military personnel” to “perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” to protect border agents, including “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention. and cursory search.”

* When your medicine spies on you. It’s becoming a habit.

Northern Michigan U. Compensates 4 Who Were Threatened With Punishment for Speaking of Suicide. Bombshell Lawsuit Against Dartmouth. This gay college athlete was disowned by her parents and left with nothing. Just 96 of 30,000 people who applied for public service loan forgiveness actually got it. Stevens Points doomed to repeat it.

The Gospel According to Mark Fisher.

Of course Wes Anderson’s curated museum exhibit is full of weird oddities.

* The Reckoning. Children of the apocalypse.

* More on when AIs cheat.

Facebook Is a Normal Sleazy Company Now. Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World. Delany, Deny, and Deflect.

* Twilight of Harry Potter.

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive.’ I don’t know, I think we can beat it.

* I only report the facts.

The encounter between sovereignty and the natural life of the turkey is thus a failed one, and therein lies the turkey pardon’s messianic promise. The ultimate sovereign prerogative of the presidential pardon falls idle in its application to a subject who is incapable of guilt or innocence. As against the “zone of indistinction” that opens up between law and life in the sovereign exception, here we have a separation of the two orders without any overlap — a law that is inapplicable, and a life that is simply lived, in blissful ignorance of the legal order. In the messianic kingdom, we will all, in a sense, be the pardoned turkey that is left to live out its life in peace.

* brb working on like six different screenplays

* Sports always turns out to be more interesting than I thought.

I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.

* Hey, Listen! Ocarina of Time, like me, is old. Even more at MetaFilter.

* No other work of art has so beautifully captured the feeling of the Trump years. It was actually a very good night for tweets.

* And nothing ever ends, Adrian.

Happy Trumpsgiving

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* From our family to yours, now more than ever: a Thanksgiving prayer.

Turkeys Are a Nightmare from Which We Are Struggling to Awake.

* How Donald Trump Ruined Thanksgiving.

* The CFP for the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is up: Asymmetry.

* More scenes from the end of the university.

Science fiction triggers ‘poorer reading’, study finds.

By providing the working class with the absolute bare minimum, universal basic income becomes doomsday prep for the tech billionaire.

ICE Says It Separated Immigrant Father From Infant Son Because He Couldn’t Prove Relationship. New York couple set to be deported to different countries, tearing apart family before Thanksgiving. DACA Twins Are Spending Thanksgiving Fighting Their Parents’ Deportation. ICE officials have invited tech companies, including Microsoft, to develop algorithms that will track visa holders’ social media activity.

* As metaphors go, this is a little on the nose.

* “By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states.” That means 30% of the country will have more than a supermajority in the Senate.

The Dam of Congressional Sexual-Harassment Claims Cracks Open.  Two more Franken accusers emerge. Democrats are facing an important test with Al Franken. They’ve failed it before. ‘You’ll never work again’: women tell how sexual harassment broke their careers. How Our Broken Justice System Led to a Sexual Harassment Crisis. How rape culture makes women poorer. I find the cognitive dissonance required to process what was done to that U.S. gymnastics team in the moment of their assent to global fame almost too much to bear.

* Understand false rape accusations.

* Women surgeons are punished more than men for the exact same mistakes, study finds.

* Unreal: Virginia Mother Charged With Felony After Putting Recording Device in Daughter’s Backpack to Catch Bullies.

The forgotten history of Milwaukee’s police station bombing, the largest single loss of police life until 9-11.

* This company truly has everything: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People. Oh, Uber. Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race. And with tech companies this good, why not end Net Neutrality?

* Management openly looting their institution? Gasp!

When they interviewed me and my young trans daughter, both reporters seemed sympathetic to us and claimed to be trans-friendly.  So why did they turn around and write such transphobic articles?  

A transgender professor just won a major court case. Seriously, it’s a big deal.

Alex Azar, Trump’s HHS Pick, Has Already Been a Disaster for People With Diabetes.

In fact, price gouging from Eli Lilly and other insulin manufacturers has already had deadly consequences. Shane Patrick Boyle, a founder of Zine Fest Houston, died on March 18 after his GoFundMe campaign to pay for insulin came up $50 short. Alec Raeshawn Smith, age 26, was found dead in his apartment on June 27. He was rationing his insulin after he aged out of his parent’s insurance coverage. The sad fact is more people would be alive today if insulin was affordable for all Americans.

* Now that’s commitment to a bit.

* Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination.

* By the end of all this they’re going to rename trump cards in bridge.

The Jobs You’re Most Likely To Inherit from Your Parents. I had no idea “college professor” was a congenital condition. March for the cure today.

Teen Mom 2 Asks an Important Question: Is It OK to Shoot Down Drones?

* Disney just does not understand Star Wars fans.

* The story of Star Trek: The Animated Series.

* You’re messing up your kids years before you think you are.

* No one has yet given a full accounting of how deranged this essay is.

And, at last, Rick And Morty reveals Mr. Poopybutthole’s backstory. I still think he’s a parasite.

Tuesday Morning Links!

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A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!

When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.

* A spectre is haunting grad students.

* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They’re so transparently bad that I’d forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.

* For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.

* The university in ruins, English department edition.

This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.

“Schools are segregated because white people want them that way.”

* “No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say.”

How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways.

* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino’s upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who’s had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who’s also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.

Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.

* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!

* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.

Little Man, Little Man is the only children’s book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children’s books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.

It’s wild that The Simpsons is the longest running comedy of all time and also basically Amos and Andy.

* Making the film versions of every kid in America’s childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.

* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!

Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.

* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.

* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.

* Normal country doing normal country things.

* Meet One of New York’s Best Professional Dungeon Masters.

In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.

* Black Mirror literally did this one.

* Abolish the Bushes.

* And just for fun: The coming coup.

Don’t Let Them Know What You’re Against or What You’re For

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Saturn devours his young: President Trump.

* So weird to see Donald Trump going through all the traditional rituals of assuming the presidency, like the ceremonial settling of your $25 million fraud cases.

* When Mike Pence Went To See Hamilton. (UPDATE: God forbid me, I don’t think this is absolutely insignificant.)

* The Problem of Judas in Amos Oz’s new novel.

* Film analysis minute: Indiana Jones and the collaborators.

* I feel sad.

* Dan Berger in Jacobin: This fall’s prison strikes are a model of how to both survive and challenge an authoritarian, racist order.

It starts with accepting a simple fact: the Republican Party nominated a candidate better suited to winning a presidential race in 2016.

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* Suicide contagion in the Age of Trump. The Banality of Trump. While You Weren’t Looking, Donald Trump Released a Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges. Hey, just out of curiosity, are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?

Let me tell you a story about a major party’s nominee for President of the United States.

* I come to you now, at the turn of the tide: Finally, the MLA speaks.

* What the: Minnesota Woman Sues Her Trans Teenager for Transitioning Without Her Consent.

* Before the Flood.

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* Pokémon originalism is a thing now.

* Give it a chance.

What kind of New Jersey accent do you have? What’s the most New Jersey thing you can think of?

* Two days after Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the Canadian government quietly tweaked our immigration system to make it easier for many Americans to move to Canada.

75 million years ago, turkeys were 7 feet tall and built for speed. And one day, they’ll have their revenge.

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Avoid Your Family with This Very Special Thanksgiving Edition of Thursday Links

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* America’s Founding Myths.

* 100 New Debate Topics You and Your Uncle Can Turn into an Argument about Republicans.

* Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Police violence. Ferguson. America. Ferguson. Turkey pardons. Ferguson. New York. Cleveland. Cleveland. Utah. Everywhere. Everywhere.

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Winners are mad when winning lights the shadows.

Nation Doesn’t Know If It Can Take Another Bullshit Speech About Healing.

We should get rid of local policing. Ferguson shows why the system just doesn’t work.

* All my heroes are monsters.

* Rescind Cosby’s honorary doctorates?

* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”

An expert hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) argued in court that a 9-year-old girl seeking damages after she was sexually assaulted would be protected from emotional stress by her low IQ.

* It’s almost as if the profit motive and what’s best for our schools and students are not well aligned!

Accumulation by Lockout.

* 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes.

* While Detroit contended with largest municipal bankruptcy, its lawyers were robbing it blind.

* Tyler Cowen, for one, welcomes the hyper-meritocracy.

* Anthropology as white public space.

* In praise of Lovecraft.

* The Downside of the Boom.

* Here’s the guy who wants to run to Hillary Clinton’s left. Democrats! Catch the fever.

* While he wasn’t second in command of the United States nuclear arsenal, Rear Adm. Timothy M. Giardina not only had a 15 hour a week gambling habit he also may have had a one-man poker chip counterfeiting operation in which he used paint and stickers to make $1 poker chips into $500 poker chips. This led to repeated bans from local casinos, eventually a lifetime ban and finally his nuclear weapons were taken away.

* What is your research agenda for the coming year?

* Just another Afrofuturism megapost.

* Town Bans Winnie The Pooh For Lack of Genitals, “Dubious Sexuality.” Finally, someone said it.

* At some point this guy took a moment and smiled to himself, secure in the knowledge that he’d covered all his bases.

SDSU suspends all frat activities after members wave dildos, throw eggs at rape protesters.

UVA has expelled 183 students for honor code violations — and none for sexual assault.

End Fraternities.

* Alexey Pajitnov, hero, creator of Tetris.

Frederik Pohl Made Doing Literally Everything Look Easy.

* Strange Horizons reprints Darko Suvin’s “Estrangement and Cognition,” with a 2014 postscript.

All of us on the planet Earth live in highly endangered times. Perhaps the richer among us, up to 5% globally but disproportionately concentrated in the trilateral U.S.A.-western Europe-Japan and its appendages, have been cushioned from realizing it by the power of money and the self-serving ideology it erects. But even those complain loudly of the “criminality” and in general “moral decay” of the desperately vicious outside their increasingly fortress-like neighbourhoods. We live morally in an almost complete dystopia—dystopia because anti-utopia—and materially (economically) on the razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective.

In a look backwards to my writing of the 1960s from this most endangered cusp of history, I see a main limitation to my “Poetics of SF” essay in its innocently and naively Formalist horizon. That is, I presupposed the tide of history was flowing, even if with regrettable eddies, towards socialism or democratic communism, and concentrated on the problems of understanding, pleasure, and form within that tide. Thus I seem to have felt I could freeze or even freeze out history, as all pursuits of aesthetics do: transcending the moment. I was wrong.

* The official SF short film of the Thanksgiving holiday: Survivors Of A Nuclear War Find A Secret Bunker—But There’s A Catch

* Maybe the most twenty-first-century artifact possible: ‘Sunburn!’, A Gravity-Based Puzzle Video Game Featuring a Doomed Spaceship Crew That Is Determined to Die Together.

* Cli-Fi Is Real.

The good news: There is no substantial technical or economic barrier that would prevent the U.S. from reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that would help put the world on track to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. In fact, there are multiple pathways to that target, each involving a different mix of technologies. Achieving the goal would cost only around 1 percent of GDP a year out through 2050, and if we started now, we could allow infrastructure to turn over at its natural rate, avoiding stranded assets. The bad news: Pulling it off would require immediate, intelligent, coordinated, vigorously executed policies that sustain themselves over decades.

Trotsky at the IMF.

* LEGO is dead, long live LEGO.

* But really, do they know.

* Guys, it’s not all bad news: After The Sun Incinerates Earth, Life Could Evolve On Titan.

* And this blog’s most sacred annual tradition: William S. Burroughs – A Thanksgiving Prayer.

Thanksgiving!

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Sunday Links

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* I left for Thanksgiving travel in a rush and wasn’t able to post a link to my traditional Thanksgiving post.

* What happens to turkeys that are pardoned?

“The birds are then, in proverbial fashion, said to live happily ever after. In reality, however, they are usually killed within a year and stand-in turkeys are supplied. This goes on year after year. The chosen birds are killed because they have been engineered and packed with hormones to the point that they are unfit for any other purpose than their own slaughter and consumption. They are fast-forward turkeys. Presidential turkey caretakers have explained that most succumb rather quickly to joint disease—their frail joints simply cannot bear the weight of their artificially enhanced bodies. The sturdiest survivors may live a little more than a year. But the birds are always finally put out of their growing misery. Then they are buried nearby in a presidential turkey cemetery—the ritualistic significance of which remains to be explored. (May the archaeologists of the future excavate it!)”

The reason that these turkeys are so ill suited for their lives of freedom is that they are supplied by the National Turkey Federation. They are products of industrial farms, bred to grow fat quick rather than live long. Much could be said about the fact that corporate lobby’s interests trumps even the symbolism of the ceremony, making even the pardon itself a lie within a lie.

To pardon, after all, is to forgive. And, if we’re talking about a turkey, it becomes difficult to discern what criminal or immoral behavior on the bird’s part may be said to establish the necessary preconditions for its forgiveness.

What we have here is a situation where a company offered a wage in the marketplace and couldn’t get any workers to accept it. Consequently, it went out of business.

* David Mitchell on how they filmed his unfilmmable novel.

* What Would Combat in Space Be Like?

* All about Münchausen syndrome.

Farmers Told To Buy Insurance If They Don’t Want To Get Sued By Monsanto.

If Walmart were a country, its GDP (US$443.9bn) would be greater than that of South Africa’s ($422bn). Visa would be bigger than Zimbabwe, Wells Fargo dwarfs Angola, and eBay, Amazon, Costco, Proctor & Gamble would swamp Madagascar, Kenya, Sudan and Libya respectively.

* A Roundtable Discussion featuring Jacqueline Dutton, Daniel Heath Justice, Kim Stanley Robinson and Lorenzo Veracini.

I am very reluctant to speak of “climate change adaptation” in this connection, because I feel that that phrase is a seized term, like “sustainable development,” and both are coded ways of saying “business as usual” or “capitalism must endure no matter the damages.” Because of that I think we should still be insisting on “climate change mitigation” as the appropriate task for our time. Ultimately, however, the entire biosphere will be adapting to the new physical conditions we are creating by our impacts, and we are going to have to get involved with that adaptation to make the best of it, meaning keeping the number of extinctions to a minimum, and trying to steer the biosphere toward best outcomes for all the species on the planet. This is necessary, because all the species together form one single supra-organism, and the health of all together determines the health of any individual species, including ourselves. Because of that reality, inhabiting the Earth successfully in the centuries to come will necessarily be a utopian project. It’s become a case of utopia or catastrophe.

* Year-to-date Temperature Anomalies for Contiguous US.

* Outstanding achievements in bullshitting: John Podhoretz.

Chevy Chase Is Leaving Community, Effective Immediately. Bring back Dan Harmon? It’s not too late!

Alicia Keys Sings the Gummi Bears Theme Song.

* Action Philosophers has a digital exclusive issue 13 at Comixology.

* And finally: Zissou vs. the whale.