Posts Tagged ‘war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again’
Friday Night Links!
* I have two SF reviews coming out in LARB the next few weekends, the first on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the other on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Keep an eye out!
* In the meantime: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Share Booker Prize. As the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo deserved to win alone.
* If you’re a Mac user, don’t update your OS! A ton of legacy applications just won’t work anymore.
* CFP from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities: Urban Spaces, Creative Places: A Blueprint for the Humanities in the City.
* CFP: Star Trek Novels. CFP: Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political, 11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung.
* Great job at a great program in a great place to live! UNC Greensboro is looking for a fiction professor.
* ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.’ Fascism and the Nobel prize.
* Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. The Rise of Indigenous Horror.
* Ken Liu on Chinese sci-fi, ‘silkpunk,’ and his distrust of labels.
* The Tiptree Award is becoming the Otherwise Award.
* Climate fiction is imagining a future beyond the climate crisis.
* Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here’s Why.
* For Jodi Dean, the class war is on — and academics need to pick a side.
* Meanwhile: some grim accounting.
* Weaponizing student evaluations, part I, II, III.
* Ecological Politics for the Working Class. Jane Fonda is arrested leading environmental protest at the Capitol. Capitalism and addiction. The new age of megafires. Crisis in the Amazon. The inequality of climate change. Global finance is funding 4C temperature rise. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. In 2025, the economic craze for millennials is going to be cheap housing in flood zones. Climate change and the end of the Olympics. Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. The New Green Scare. ‘They should be allowed to cry’: Ecological disaster taking toll on scientists’ mental health.
* I think a lot of academics have been plagiarized by mainstream outlets at one time or another — I certainly have — but this story is truly next-level.
* Aaron Bady interviews Jedediah Purdy at The Nation. David M. Perry interviews llhan Omar, also at The Nation.
* Chicago teachers are on strike today. A high school teacher explains to us why the strike is the union’s best tool to fight for better conditions in the city’s schools and an end to austerity.
* The class war is also an intergenerational war.
* In the future, “Frequent Flyer Miles” may refer to a tax penalty, or even a criminal misdemeanor.
* Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?
* Biden just isn’t very good at this. Neither is Beto. And Bloomberg won’t be either! Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Take Aim At Corporate Interests Gutting Journalism. I’m with Nobody.
* Trump’s Worst Betrayal Yet. Ethnic cleanser very excited about ethnic cleansing.
* This G7 thing is just wild. Truly not even pretending anymore. Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies. The 30-minute phone call that could end Trump’s presidency. Only once has Gallup seen more support for removing a president. Nixon was gone four days later. The Senate is likelier to remove Trump after impeachment than you think. Donald Trump Isn’t Julius Caesar. He’s Republic-Killer Tiberius Gracchus.
* Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter Feed Is a Boomer Conspiracy-Theory Sh*tshow.
* Once Trump is gone, the U.S. must completely reform the presidency. The Sick Video Played at a Pro-Trump Conference Is a Glimpse of the Dark Energy in American Politics. A lot of policy debates these days turn on Republicans threatening to kill a lot of people. Life Under the First Thousand Days of Donald Trump.
So we must build geography right into the analysis. Once we start looking at electoral college-weighted, county-level correlates of the Trump swing—Trump’s vote share less Romney’s vote share—a very different pattern emerges. The three strongest predictors of the Trump swing are college graduation rate, population growth rate, and growth in deaths due to drug overdoses in 2003-2017.
* A professor spoke about whiteness at Georgia Southern University. Students burned her book.
* California becomes first US state to ban animal fur products.
* Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants.
* Seven Supreme Court cases that will destroy America in 2020.
* California accidentally destroys freelancing.
* Try to escape the gig economy with this artist collective’s new video game.
* The X-Men’s New Age Is Here, and It’s Horny as Hell. Adding in a free love element when it seems like they’re all definitely being drugged or mind controlled might not be the best story decision, but let’s see where it goes…
* Science confirms Storm is main character of X-Men.
* Tesla is Enron, exhibit XXIV.
* But wait! A new competitor has entered the fray! WeWork shuts 2,300 office phone booths over health scare.
* Pickens County Schools pulls controversial transgender policy. This moral panic, ginned up out of absolutely nothing, just infuriates me. I’m not sure you can find even a single example of an inclusive bathroom policy harming anyone, while the ordinary operation of every high school in the country leads to rampant sexual abuse.
* A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago.
* The big business — and questionable effectiveness — of mass shooter trainings. “Questionable” seems… generous.
* This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were left with nothing.
* The Midwest Is One of the Worst Places for African Americans to Live.
* Meet America’s newest military giant: Amazon. Amazon Workers May Be Are Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage.
* Today in the nightmare society.
* Truly horrible story out of Fort Worth. Fort Worth Officer Charged With Murder In Killing Of Atatiana Jefferson In Her Home. Policing just needs to be rethought completely in this country, on every level.
* UK to deport academic to Democratic Republic of Congo – which she has never visited. And here at home: The New War on Naturalized Citizens.
* Tough week for fans of the use/mention distinction.
* New federal data: suicide rate of children age 10 to 14 “nearly tripled” between 2007 and 2017.
* The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.
* The Joy of Being a Horrible Goose in a Time of Moral Crisis. Honks vs. Quacks: A Long Chat With the Developers of ‘Untitled Goose Game.’
* No, I simply refuse to admire Shep Smith, not even a little bit.
* Now NBC killed its Weinstein story.
* I think you could write a very interesting cultural history of contemporary America about the way it loses its mind every time the First Lady role seems like it might get disrupted. Today’s chapter: Rosario Dawson.
* A whole new twist on institutions abusing Title IX.
* A month away from 40, BA, MFA, PhD, professor for seven years, and I still regularly have dreams where it turns out I missed some requirement and have to go back to high school.
* God, you know, I just can’t stop thinking about this.
* A two-year-old’s reaction to seeing the Hulk go bananas for the first time.
* Miracles and wonders: A Drug Was Made For Just One Child, Raising Hopes About Future Of Tailored Medicine.
* Joker today, Joker tomorrow, Joker forever.
* I refuse to consider the possibility that Watchmen will be remotely good. I don’t care how many critics say otherwise! The Never-Ending Challenge of Adapting ‘Watchmen.’
* It’s back! How many European cities can you name?
* Ancient ‘lost city’ of the Khmer Empire uncovered in Cambodia.
* Paris zoo unveils the “blob”, an organism with no brain but 720 sexes. Take off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
* Spotted on Facebook, and it checks out.
* Gaming out season two of Picard.
* “One thing I like to do at Target is pretend their novelty coffee mugs are gravestone epitaphs.”
* And this Studio Ghibli news is (for a particular sliver of the population) a genuinely shocking development and a huge coup for HBO Max. I know for me it flipped from “lol no” to “well, I guess I’ll be subscribing to that” in an instant…
Monday Night Links!
* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.
* We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering.
* I study collapsed civilizations. Here’s my advice for a climate change apocalypse.
* I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.
* Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?
* US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria. Top Military Officers Unload on Trump. Sounds like my man is on the brink of self-impeaching. Trump at serious risk of losing the mandate of heaven. Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman: Trump wrong to seek help from Ukraine, China. ‘Out on a limb’: Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump’s possible impeachment. Trump allies sought Ukraine gas deal. Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson. Nine scenarios.
* Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.
* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.
* Slain witness Joshua Brown was expected to testify in lawsuit against Dallas police.
* How the Prison Economy Works.
* Journalist says a CBP officer withheld his passport until he agreed he writes ‘propaganda.’
* Robots to Cut 200,000 U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says.
* 24 Reasons “Angel” Was Perfect, and one pretty big reason why it wasn’t.
* Joker and the vacuity of influence. Joker and white male resentment. (I liked what Noah Berlatsky had to say on this subject, too; I thought a lot about it while I was watching.) Joker Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. ‘The Greater Danger to Society May Be If You Don’t See This Movie.’ My own meager contribution to The Discourse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
* I think I linked this once before, but I saw it on Twitter and wanted to link again: Ida Yoshinaga’s Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films.
* This tweet got inside my fucking head.
* In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.
* They say America’s best days are behind it, but Someone Beat Minecraft Without Mining Any Blocks.
* Of course you had me at hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map.
* But at least Rick and Morty‘s coming back. Everything’s coming up Canavan!
Just a Few Thursday Links!
* Climate change is now a bedtime story.
* Geek temporalities and the spirit of capital.
* Ohio State loses its brazen attempt to trademark the most common word in the English language.
* Hype vs. reality at the MIT Media Lab.
* Sociologists against student evaluations.
* Survival, Daniel believed, was possible with the proper accommodations. “One simply needs something along the lines of a greenhouse with good air filtration to grow plants,” he wrote on 4chan, “and a fallout shelter.” Thanks to his mother’s death, he had the means to build one: She’d left him a trust worth $2.6 million.
So with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal under the direction of a new, fanatical leader, Daniel had the freedom to undertake his most ambitious experiment yet. Alone in the house, he chose a spot in his basement and began to dig.
* Trump’s got a taste for human flesh now.
* Lin-Manuel Miranda and the dialectic.
* In the richest country in human history: 9-year-old student’s hot lunch is taken away over a $9.75 unpaid balance, grandmother says. The Ohio boy was given a cheese sandwich to eat instead. The incident happened on his birthday, his grandmother said.
* And has the world moved past the Avatar franchise? Does it even remember Avatar?
Wednesday Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.”
* A glossary of dirty tricks websites use against their readers.
* 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.
* 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.
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Essays on Hootie & the Blowfish. Call for Papers: Reappraising Stephen King. Call for Papers: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 41: Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
* Looking for a postdoc? Here’s one on the history of Viagra.
* Congrats to the Hugo winners! And here’s a special shoutout: Why Archive of Our Own’s Surprise Hugo Nomination Is Such a Big Deal. “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist.” Jeannette Ng, John W. Campbell, and What Should Be Said By Whom and When.
* We Have Ruined Childhood. Wait a minute here, don’t you try to pin this on me!
* How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.
* The notion that students have somehow been coddled is just 100% bullshit. It’s the opposite. They’ve been asked to run a gauntlet which is disengaged from a sense of community, family, even their own natures.
* Persistent Partisan Breakdown on Higher Ed. The partisan rift over college will haunt us.
* Life expectancy drops in Wisconsin due to alcohol, drugs.
* The 1619 Project. Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage? The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves.
* Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.
It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”
* Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded. WHAT YEAR IS IT
* Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class? No. But It Might Ruin Higher Education.
* The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness.
* Alaska Regents Vote to Terminate Exigency Declaration.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.
* Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. The Amazon Is on Fire and the Smoke Can Be Seen from Space. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad. On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe. Scientists decry ‘ignorance’ of rolling back species protections in the midst of a mass extinction. We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon. At the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, climate scientists find troubling signs. Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief. Don’t forget the Siberian forest fires. The guy whose sole platform was climate change never polled higher than 1%. The Case for Climate Rage.
* Huge, if true: Golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism.
* Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction.
* On Representations of Disability: A Reading List.
* India’s military blockade of Kashmir is breathtaking in its brutality and violence. We can’t let them silence Kashmir’s dreams for freedom and justice.
* Militant Neo-Nazi Group Actively Recruiting Ahead of Alleged Training Camp. Militant Neo-Nazi now the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Militant Neo-Nazis run the New York Times.
* How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico. After ICE. An undocumented Chinese restaurant worker has been fighting for backpay to the tune of $200K. Then ICE arrested him while giving a deposition in a lawsuit. The Trump Administration Wants To Hold Undocumented Children In Detention Indefinitely. Trump admin weighs letting states, cities deny entry to refugees approved for resettlement in U.S. The US won’t provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps. How the US Exported Its Border Around the World.
* Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times. Donald Trump Is Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy. Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump. The President Is on Some Real Shit Right Now, Honestly. Trump draws another primary challenger. Meanwhile, I’ve laid my marker down.
* Buying Greenland isn’t a good idea — it’s a great idea.
* The more I look at it, the more this photograph is punctum, punctum, punctum. It barely holds together. It is all disturbance, all accident. Even the wallpaper starts to tremble: Who at the University of El Paso Medical Center violated the Hippocratic Oath by approving this particular photo-op?
* Not exactly a democracy, now, is it.
* The boomers going bust: why elderly bankruptcy is rising in America.
* Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.
* In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.
* NYPD fires officer who put Eric Garner in chokehold. I lost my job for keeping Charlottesville police accountable. I’d do it again. Fearing for his life, Cleveland cop…
* School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say.
* “We’ve wasted all their fucking resources to make this rally,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said in video captured during the latest extremist rally held Saturday in Portland. “We want them to waste $2 million and we’ll do it again in two months.”
* I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one.
* Amazon’s Ring wants police to keep these surveillance details from you.
* Pressured To Spy On NYC Mosques For Two Years, An Immigrant FBI Informant Seeks A Way Out.
* To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands. Abolish the Priesthood.
* A first grader who found his grandmother’s loaded gun at school this spring pointed it at another student, according to an email released Monday by Highland Local Schools in Morrow County.
* $48M Michigan high school has places to hide in case of mass shooting.
* What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?
* Designer babies are on the way. We’re not ready.
* In this way, the violent, cathartic fantasies of Tarantino’s recent historical-ish trilogy allegorize the very function of fiction itself. They intervene in matters of fact not to rewrite the record, but to remind us that stories are the spaces where we consider alternatives, rework our real-world mythologies, rethink history, and expand upon ideas.
* California’s Forgotten Confederate History. A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.
* Who’s to Blame When Algorithms Discriminate? No one, silly, that’s the whole point!
* DoorDash is still pocketing workers’ tips, almost a month after it promised to stop.
* Dungeons and Dragons Rules for Progressives.
* Dr. Evil wants to refresh his moonbase.
* One Man’s Modernism: J. R. R. Tolkien.
* There is no Africa in African studies.
* The dialectic of enlightenment.
* My life as a background Slytherin. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Our favorite candid photographs of wild animals—taken via camera trap.
* Another good thread: What’s the fantasy or SF book that’s not some big famous award winning thing that you think I should read?
* The language of Mario Maker.
* Twilight of the MCU. Here comes Matrix 4, at least.
* The arc of history is long, but Marquette has prohibited motorized scooter use on campus property.
* From the archives: 50 years later, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash remains mysterious.
* And this is some extremely relatable content.
Monday Morning Links!
* Now this I’d watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?
* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.
Friday Morning Links GUARANTEED* Not to Send You Into a Tailspin of Misery and Despair!
* In effect, more than a third of all cinema tickets bought in North America are for a Disney movie.
* UAA students, staff respond to impending, unprecedented budget cuts.
* ‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Brought Down Trump. New disclosures about lewd Trump video reveal his mastery of the GOP.
* Really, are the liberals okay?
* A “cheerful white woman” who voted for Trump loses her birth certificate, can’t get a passport, gets stuck in expensive and frightening citizenship limbo. Concludes “I don’t think anyone should be treated like that, period.” Plans to vote for Trump again. What a journey.
* ICE Told Agents ‘Happy Hunting!’ as They Prepped for Raid.
* Mother Whose Toddler Died After Leaving ICE Custody Tells Harrowing Story To Congress.
* On the brink of being homeless in a sanctuary city.
* Immigrants in U.S. Illegally Are Hiding Out, Staying Home From Work Amid Looming ICE Raids. Immigration law firm worker says silent raids in SoCal have already begun.
* When news broke that thousands of current and former Border Patrol agents were members of a secret Facebook group filled with racist, vulgar, and sexist content, Carla Provost, chief of the agency, was quick to respond. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see — and expect — from our agents day in and day out,” Provost said in a statement. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.” About that…
* Cop lies. Cop lies. Cop lies.
* Pleading guilty just to go home.
* Today in the richest country in human history.
* In the time of Stranger Things, this seems like a gimme: Paper Girls Ordered to Series By Amazon Studios.
* And speaking of which: The Real Monsters in Stranger Things Are Adults. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game — hard to think of a classic SFF text where this isn’t the case. Why Stranger Things‘ nostalgia isn’t quite as magical in season 3.
* Indeed, the only thing the domestic outrage over the Iraq War seemed to accomplish has been a massive effort waged by the government and the corporate elite to engineer a public that doesn’t complain and doesn’t care when their government meddles or invades another country.
* Martian time-slip: How Should Space Settlers Keep Track of Time?
* What old age is really like.
* The Once and Future MetaFilter.
* In a dark time, Americans stood up: Thousands of people have taken a Facebook pledge to storm Area 51 to ‘see them aliens.’
* Do you think there’s a meaning of life?
* “Fatal Accident With Metal Straw Highlights a Risk.”
* Conservationists have coined a new term—“The Fifth Season”—for the month or two of wildfires that now descends on much of the West each late summer. Red sun; yellow skies; oddly chill, acrid air. A nightmare inversion of summer. In addition to the Jemisin reference, this is also a running joke on the podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern, where the magical land of Foon has an extra season where the whole world just burst into constant flame for a few months.
* And now I’m anxious about this! Thanks for nothing.
