End of the Semester Links, Spring 2017

It’s been a long year, long for many reasons, but here’s a backlog of some links. (Some very good news is imminent. . . .)

 

Nuclear and Environmental

New York Times Editorial Board, “The Finger on the Nuclear Button.”

Rebecca Savranksy, “US May Launch Strike if North Korea Moves to Test Nuclear Weapon.”

Kaveh Waddell, “What Happens if a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan.”

Radiolab, “Nukes.”

Laurel Wamsley, “Digitization Unearths New Data From Cold War-Era Nuclear Test Films.”

Michael Biesecker and John Flesher, “President Trump Institutes Media Blackout at EPA.”

Brian Kahn, “The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information.”

Zoë Schlanger, “Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored It on European Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated.”

Cass R. Sunstein, “Making Sense of Trump’s Order on Climate Change.”

Laurie Penny, “The Slow Confiscation of Everything.”

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End of the Semester Links, Spring 2016

Nuclear and Environmental

Justin Gillis, “Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries.”

Ross Andersen, “We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction.”

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “On Extinction and Capitalism.”

Robert Macfarlane, “Generation Anthropocene.”

Will Worley, “Radioactive Wild Boar Rampaging around Fukushima Nuclear Site.”

Rebecca Evans, “Weather Permitting.”

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July 2015 Links

In addition to the release of The Rocking Chair by Blue Sketch Press on 1 August 2015, and “Poetics of Control,” my recent review of Alexander R. Galloway’s The Interface Effect (2012), I’ve completed a number of exciting projects over the last three months, so be on the lookout for a couple essays, another review, an interview, and more poems in 2015 and 2016. For now, however, some links have been piling up over this historic month.

 

US Politics

Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide.”

David M. Perry, “A New Right Grounded in the Long History of Marriage.”

Transcript: Obama delivers eulogy for Charleston pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

Claudia Rankine, “‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.'”

Emma Green, “Black Churches Are Burning Again in America.”

The Editorial Board of The New York Times, “Take Down the Confederate Flag, Symbol of Hatred.”

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End of the Year Links

As I have been lax in posting things, yesterday I posted a bunch of links on recent stories regarding the NSA. Today I’m posting links of more general interest. I’ve tried to organize them by category.

 

Iran

The biggest story I have not had time to address were the diplomatic talks regarding Iran’s nuclear program. So here are some links to that.

On 5 November 2013 Reuters reported that Iran, Israel, and Middle East countries “took part in a meeting two weeks ago about prospects for an international conference on banning nuclear weapons in the Middle East.”

Temporary nuclear pact.

UN nuclear inspectors in Iran.

“Iran, from Enemy to Ally.”

Right on the verge of a nuclear agreement, perhaps the biggest event in nuclear nonproliferation in my lifetime, Bob Mendez fights Obama on imposing new sanctions on Iran, as do fifteen other democrats. More here.

Though from today: progress in nuclear talks.

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Link Dump: Nuclear, Archival, and Other

My apologies, it’s been a busy few weeks and I haven’t had time to add anything new. So here’s couple things I’ve stumbled across recently.

In nuclear news, Craig Whitlock reports for The Washington Post that “the Air Force on Friday fired the general in charge of all land-based nuclear missiles, the second time in a week that a senior commander of the country’s nuclear arsenal has been let go for allegations of personal misconduct.” (I wonder if his misconduct had anything to do with precious bodily fluids.)

Three things from Fukushima: Mari Yamaguchi asks, “Japan’s Water Leaks: How Dangerous?” for the AP. The Sleuth Journal reports that “Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Systematically Poisoning the Entire Pacific Ocean.”

radioactive-water

And if that weren’t bad enough, Andrew Breiner for Think Progress writes how a “Once-A-Decade Typhoon Threatens Already Leaking Fukushima Nuclear Plant.”

And though I think I’ve reported on this/posted a picture of this before, Flickr has an arresting series of images of archival decay from the abandoned Mark Twain Branch Library in Detroit.

SONY DSC

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Labor Day Links

Lois Weiner has a very interesting piece in Jacobin, “This Labor Day, Thank a Teacher,” on how teacher’s unions are revitalizing the labor movement.

The levels of radiation leaking out of Fukushima are considerably higher than was previously reported.

And there may be a bigger surveillance system then PRISM, as reported on in The New York Times by Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan in “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing the N.S.A.’s.”

Fukushima Over Two Years Later

In “Fukushima: Vast Amounts of Radioactive Water Creeping Towards Sea,” Mari Yamaguchi has reported for Talking Points Memo that “deep beneath Fukushima’s crippled nuclear power station a massive underground reservoir of contaminated water that began spilling from the plant’s reactors after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has been creeping slowly toward the sea. Now, 2 1/2 years later, experts fear it is about to reach the Pacific and greatly worsen what is fast becoming a new crisis at Fukushima: the inability to contain vast quantities of radioactive water.”

Fukushima, Apple, The Manhattan Project, and The Anthropocene

A bunch of interesting stories today:

“Water Leaks on the Fukushima Plant Could Contaminate Entire Pacific Ocean.”

The Faces of Project Y: the security badges for those working on the Manhattan Project.

And in further news from the Orwellian security state: “Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem ‘sensitive,’ and ‘protected from externalities.'”

The Atlantic has amazing time-lapse satellite images showing the massive changes to the human-built world. An archive of disaster.

A conversation with Leigh Phillips, Gwyneth Jones, Marge Piercy, Ken MacLeod and Kim Stanley Robinson.

And from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The National Institutes of Health announced on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement to give the family of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, some control over researchers’ access to the genomic data of cells derived from her tumor, according to The Wall Street Journal.”

All Nuclear Reactors in the US are Flawed

As Matthew L. Wald reports in yesterday’s New York Times, “All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology.” This flaw became apparent after the Fukushima meltdown, which the Times reported on here. This is a striking admission, coming as it does from the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Images from Fukushima and New Archival Impulses

As R. pointed me toward today, Google sent in its Street View cameras to Fukushima and captured some arresting images of deserted and uninhabitable space. David McNeil writes about this at The Independent.

And it is being reported that the FBI is seeking to expand its digital surveillance capability and the “CIA has agreed to a cloud computing contract with electronic commerce giant Amazon, worth up to $600 million over 10 years.”