Long Time Coming

Two advance copies of Polygraph 22 arrived in my mailbox yesterday! Subscribers’ and contributers’ copies will start going out once the other 698 arrive. Now to start updating Amazon and the Polygraph web site…

Contents:
Introduction—Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu
The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files—Imre Szeman
Ecology after Capitalism—Timothy Morton
When Nature Calls; Or, Why Ecological Criticism Needs Althusserian Ideology—Andrew Hageman
Inverted Astronomy: Ungrounded Ethics, Volcanic Copernicanism, and the Ecological Decentering of the Human—Ben Woodard
Philosophy and Ecosystem: Towards a Transcendental Ecology—Anthony Paul Smith
The Ecology of Consumption: A Critique of Economic Malthusianism—John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
The Animal and the Political: Biopolitics, Sovereign Power, and the Hydrologic of Immanent Space—Robert Geroux
Black Nature: The Question of Race in the Age of Ecology—Britt M. Rusert
The Anti-Nuclear Movement in Germany—Joachim Radkau (Translated by Lucas Perkins)
Embodied Materialism in Action: An Interview with Ariel Salleh—Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu
Science, Justice, Science Fiction: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson—Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu
On Ecology: A Roundtable Discussion with Timothy Morton and Kathy Rudy—Timothy Morton, Kathy Rudy, and the Polygraph Collective
Living in the End Times—Slavoj Žižek
Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen—Michael Hardt

If You See a Little Girl Chasing a Ball Into the Street, Don’t Slam the Brakes

It’s just a moronic traffic “safety” initiative from Vancouver police. Also via MeFi.

A Cure for HIV?

Amazing if true: A team of researchers from the Hebrew University has developed a treatment that completely destroys HIV-infected human cells in laboratory cultures, according to an article published last month in the scientific journal AIDS Research and Therapy.

The therapy, developed by scientists from the university’s Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences and the Institute of Chemistry, destroys cells infected with HIV without damaging adjacent healthy cells. Via MeFi.

Tough Out There for Nerds

SF Signal has your fall television preview. Fringe and The Walking Dead aside, it’s looking pretty bleak.

Lost Generation

The total balance of all outstanding US student loans (given as $730 billion in DIY U, based on OMB estimates) is now estimated by Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org at more like $830 billion—$605.6 billion in federally guaranteed student loans, which have interest rates fixed and in some cases interest subsidized by the government, and a further $167.8 billion in private student loans, with interest rates that hover around 18-20%. Furthermore, Kantrowitz says, $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.

This means the total balance of student loans has just surpassed the total balance of credit card debt for the first time in history.

Links for Thursday

* Oh, good, I’m the enemy of the week again.

“I have news for you. There are a lot of universities that are as dangerous with the indoctrination of the children as terrorists are in Iran or North Korea,” said Beck.

* Dude, where’s my immigration crisis? Between 2000 and 2005, an average of 850,000 people a year entered the United States without authorization, according to the report released Wednesday. As the economy plunged into recession between 2007 and 2009, that number fell to 300,000.

* Dutchtopia: The Dutch government is getting ready to close eight prisons because they don’t have enough criminals to fill them.

* The Dune Encyclopedia is online.

* I’m looking forward to watching Obama take on the entire Democratic House caucus to fight for cuts to Social Security. Because, you know, bipartisanship.

* And you had me at “Kristen Bell Starts Twitter Campaign For Veronica Mars Movie.”

Chart of the Day: Lost Decade

Your chart of the day (via Ezra Klein) charts the Bush-era decline in real wages—through 2007, before the start of the Great Recession.

Questions No One Should Ask Until I Have Tenure

When will the college tuition bubble burst? More here.

What Do Students Think of College Professors with Tattoos?

The answer may surprise you:

128 undergraduates’ perceptions of tattoos on a model described as a college instructor were assessed. They viewed one of four photographs of a tattooed or nontattooed female model. Students rated her on nine teaching-related characteristics. Analyses indicated that the presence of tattoos was associated with some positive changes in ratings: students’ motivation, being imaginative about assignments, and how likely students were to recommend her as an instructor.

Hat tip to Eric Barker via @quidebo via @aaker. In general, if you’re not reading Eric’s site daily you’re missing out.

Google as God

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” From William Gibson’s op-ed on Google as superorganism in the New York Times.

Fox News as Radio Rwanda

Taibbi makes the provocative but sadly compelling comparison here.

A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues — where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn’t explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we’re seeing.

In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:

* On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. “They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it.” He also said that “we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, ‘Kill all white babies.’”

* CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: “Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls.”

* On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that “top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy,” marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. “The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” Adams wrote. “During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected.”

* July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “protect and represent” the New Black Panther party.

* July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an “invasion”: “I guess the judge is saying it’s not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don’t know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.” That same day, Rush says this: “Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they’re from. You cannot even act like we know where they’re from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them.”

* July 29: The Washington Times asks “Should Arizona Secede?” and says the Supreme Court “is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy” with the aim of creating a “socialist superstate.” The paper writes: “The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution.”

* July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, “If the feds won’t protect the people and Governor Brewer can’t protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?”

There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

I hate to quote so much of the post, but his idea of targeted micro-boycotts against Fox advertisers seems like a very good one:

I’m beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven’t been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic “Love” slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the fuck? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I’d like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn’t that at least the first move here? It’s beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.

To a limited extent this is already happening, although almost exclusively around Glenn Beck.

European-Style Photoblogging

I’ve finally thrown up some photos from our European vacation on Flickr, including (among other things) a lot of shots of those Belgian comics murals we were so taken with. Enjoy, if you’re so inclined…

Links for Tuesday

* Cleveland, the true birthplace of Superman. Via Boing Boing.

* In the future, Google prioritizes your email for you.

* A majority of Republicans think Obama “probably” wants to impose Sharia law. In other news, a majority of Republicans are apparently complete idiots.

* The dog that hasn’t barked (but we keep hoping): the infinitely prolonged dissolution of the GOP. Meanwhile, Gallup’s methodological problems aside, Democrats appear doomed this November. At least we have a good shot at getting rid of Richard Burr.

* America may not ever recover from the financial crisis.

* I came across this somewhere over the weekend and now can’t get it out of my head: “Girlfriends from the Past,” a highlight of the disappointing second season of Flight of the Conchords.

*And this, from Stanley Fish: In the brief period between the bombing and the emergence of McVeigh, speculation had centered on Arab terrorists and the culture of violence that was said to be woven into the fabric of the religion of Islam.

But when it turned out that a white guy (with the help of a few of his friends) had done it, talk of “culture” suddenly ceased and was replaced by the vocabulary and mantras of individualism: each of us is a single, free agent; blaming something called “culture” was just a way of off-loading responsibility for the deeds we commit; in America, individuals, not groups, act; and individuals, not groups, should be held accountable. McVeigh may have looked like a whole lot of other guys who dressed up in camouflage and carried guns and marched in the woods, but, we were told by the same people who had been mouthing off about Islam earlier, he was just a lone nut, a kook, and generalizations about some “militia” culture alive and flourishing in the heartland were entirely unwarranted.

This switch from “malign culture” talk to “individual choice” talk was instantaneous and no one felt obliged to explain it. Now, in 2010, it’s happening again around the intersection of what the right wing calls the “Ground Zero mosque” (a geographical exaggeration if there ever is one) and the attack last week on a Muslim cab driver by (it is alleged) 21-year-old knife-wielding Michael Enright.

Confidential to Graduate Students

Always backup, to multiple drives, including one off-site.

John Boldt is pleading for the return of his hard drive, which contains research and notes for the thesis he was writing for his master’s degree in history. He only had three chapters left to write before his paper was complete.

Unless he gets it back, Boldt will have to abandon his dream and quit at the University of Calgary.

Via Gawker.

Viewers Can’t Handle Ambiguity. Not Even a Little.

Overthinking It tries to distill lessons from the successes and failures of Lost, particularly in light of an ongoing fan backlash following the (really not that bad) final episode and the (okay, pretty bad) DVD epilogue.