Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Waffle House

Wednesday Links!

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* CFP: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century. CFP: JOSF Special Issue on Environmental Studies.

* I saw some tweets tweets last night that turned my head a bit on the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard. I feel very conflicted.

* Academics calling for a boycott against Disability and Society.

* The latest from the Marquette free speech tire fire: University, attorneys differ on ‘permission’ in demonstration policy.

* Student debt is transforming the American family.

No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant, and the fact that high levels of educational achievement strongly correlate with becoming a management consultant doesn’t mean people who become management consultants are any smarter than dental hygienists or taxi drivers or the unemployed. That’s where any honest accounting of meritocracy has to land, but the author can’t manage it.

* Wait — there are ethics in college admissions?

* U.S., France, Britain may be complicit in Yemen war crimes, U.N. report says.

* How Has Climate Change Affected Hurricane Dorian?

How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?

* Incredible image of the devastating flooding in The Bahamas. Yellow lines are original coastline. Look at what’s left. Dorian‘s incredible stall over the island of Grand Bahama appears to set a new record for the slowest moving major hurricane over any 24-hour period since records began in 1851. Climate change is slowing hurricanes. Our first images of Abaco from air.

* As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most. New Elevation Measure Shows Climate Change Could Quickly Swamp the Mekong Delta.

* All good news is also bad news: Joe Manchin Will Stay in the Senate Because He Could Become Its Most Powerful Member.

* The wild corruption of Trump’s golf courses deserves more scrutiny. This Ireland one really is outrageously bad.

* Never a single misstep.

The protesters engaged in a “rolling picket” on August 27, rallying at branches of HSBC, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Prudential in order to pressure the companies to divest from CoreCivic and GEO Group, which imprison immigrants for ICE.

* Under the law, a 16-year-old who has sex with a willing 13-year-old—a crime in Alabama, since the 13-year-old isn’t old enough to consent—could also lose parental rights decades later if he ever has a child, says Gar Blume, a longtime attorney in Tuscaloosa who has received national honors for his work on juvenile law. “It is so broad,” he says of the legislation, “that anybody ever convicted of a sex offense essentially is having their right to parenthood severely constrained, or there’s the potential for that to occur.” He described the law as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

* Nation that never abolished slavery getting a little angsty about it.

South Dakota had a Democratic senator four years ago.

Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking.

* The voting machines don’t help, either.

* At least a little good news: North Carolina Court Says The State’s Districts Are Illegal Partisan Gerrymanders. North Carolina Court Strikes Down Gerrymander, Citing Smoking Gun Evidence in the Hofeller Files.

* “I feel like my kids have been part of a huge massive experiment I have no control over.”

Neal Stephenson Wants To Tell Big Stories.

* Yeah, that sounds like a really bad show!

Richard Gere was set to star as one of two elderly Vietnam vets and best friends who find their monotonous lives upended when a woman they both loved 50 years ago is killed by a car. Their lifelong regrets and secrets collide with their resentment of today’s self-absorbed millennials and the duo then go on a shooting spree.

She spent more than $110,000 on drug rehab. Her son still died.

In Flint, Schools Overwhelmed by Special Ed. Needs in Aftermath of Lead Crisis.

Facing a labor shortage, restaurants are turning to on-demand services for line cooks, dishwashers and other trained workers.

* The app went down, so I couldn’t unlock my car.

* “Ben & Jerry’s new ice cream flavor is inspired by racism in the criminal justice system.”

* Grenada’s Revolution at 40.

* Never say die!

* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.

* There is something inherently entertaining about the self-proclaimed defender of uncomfortable speech on college campuses coming unglued when he found a sentence on the Internet that he didn’t like.

* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

* A review of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel in the wild! I was told they weren’t giving copies to reviewers. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Sequel Is Already Being Developed by Hulu.

* The Book of Prince.

This is a hell of a thread. If you’re concerned about unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators at political protests, you need to understand that the primary instigators of such violence are the police.

* And there’s no idea so bad you can’t make it worse.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 4, 2019 at 8:34 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!

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* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!

* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.

Faith in science fiction and fantasy.

64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.

In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.

How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?

Marquette University

This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.

This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.

How does this school stack up?

The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.

Inside the African essay factories that churn out university coursework for 115,000 cheating British students every year.

Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.

Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.

* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.

* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.

Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.

* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.

* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.

* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”

Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.

Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.

It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.

* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.

Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.

How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.

Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.

7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.

Liberalism in Theory and Practice.

* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.

* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.

North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.

* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.

* The Climate Trail.

How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.

* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.

* Meanwhile, a Maryland teen has been labeled a child pornographer for sharing a video of her own sex act.

* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.

* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).

* In the age of the psychonauts.

* “It’s time to talk about James Mattis’s involvement with the Theranos scandal. He’s selling a book, not saving the country from Trump.”

* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”

* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.

The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.

* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.

* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!

* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.

* Dicey Dungeons rules.

* The Slinky was invented by accident.

* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.

Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.

* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.

* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…

* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.

* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.

* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 1, 2019 at 9:17 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Wednesday Links!

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* After long neglect I’ve updated the “online articles” page on my Professional Website, if you’re interested.

* Studies show kindergarteners do better on standardized tests when chained to their desks in windowless white rooms for fifteen hours at a time, so.

* Jacobin‘s brief history of neoliberalism is quite good, though the claim that the Tea Party is irrelevant or that the GOP is on the ropes seems especially odd after last night’s wonderfully improbable defeat of Eric Cantor.

* You’d think at the “legacy project” point of his presidency Obama might want to avoid phrases like “misspent years” and “talking your way  through” things.

* Pizzeria Boss Fined $334K Because You Can’t Pay Workers In Pizza And Soda. Why not let the free market decide if pizza is currency?

* The Mental-Health Consequences of Unemployment. The jobs with the highest incidence of depression. Both cases seem like prime candidates for the left critique of the medicalization of depression, which is that sometimes you’re depressed because your circumstances are bad, not because your brain is misfiring.

* Headlines you don’t want to read about your new city: “Getting Milwaukee’s rivers to meet state water quality standards won’t be easy.”

* Peru Approves Genocide for Uncontacted Tribes.

* Why I’m sending 200 copies of Little Brother to a high-school in Pensacola, FL.

Temp Nation: How Corporations Are Evading Accountability, at Workers’ Expense.

* Why a California judge just ruled that teacher tenure is bad for students.

* Another study confirms Fox News viewers are unusually misinformed even by American standards.

* Feedly and Evernote Go Down As Attackers Demand Ransom.

* Climate Change: SVU.

* Map: All the Countries John McCain Has Wanted to Attack. I have to believe this is a significant undercount.

* My “but it could actually be good” fantasy script for Batman vs. Superman get less and less likely by the day. Alas.

* And could we finally see another Star Trek TV series courtesy of Netflix? Only if you promise it’s not Captain Worf.

Tuesday Links!

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* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.

* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.

* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.

An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.

* The Church of Science Fiction.

* Heinlein and the Right.

* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just  nightmarish.

* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.

Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.

Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.

We’re not giving moms credit when we pose them as the decisive factor in a child’s development, we’re sticking them with the bill.

* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.

Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.

* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.

* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.

* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.

* Towards a theory of jerks.

* The case against sharing.

How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.

* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.

* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.

* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”

The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.

* The rise of the noncompete clause.

* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”

* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.

If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.

* Review getting picked up: five stars.

* And 4°C only sounds like no big deal.

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