Tuesday Morning Links

* Second Fire In Five Weeks Burns Missouri Mosque.

* Mitt Romney confirms he would end US wind power subsidies. I swear, sometimes it feels as if I’m being personally trolled by the GOP.

* A republic, if you can keep it: The Most Important Voting Rights Law In American History Turned 47 yesterday.

* The federal prison population has gone up 800% in 30 years. 800%. Staggering.

* Hillary Clinton Literally Chased Out of Malawi By Bees.

* A Malay, who we know as Enrique of Malacca but whose real name is unrecorded, would have his life defined by these European schemes. He is, it turns out, the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.

* And an Indiana Jones Easter egg that I think is new to me: R2-D2 and C-3PO in the Well of Souls.

Saturday Night Links

* Breaking: Right-wing Supreme Court Justices don’t take their jobs seriously. Supreme Court May Be Most Conservative in Modern History. Antonin Scalia, semi-retired crank.

* Jonathan Cohn, Scott Lemieux, and Richard Hansen and ponder the legitimacy of a Supreme Court that has actually gone the full monty and overturned the ACA.

* Of course they say the same thing about us. Judge Strikes Down Key Parts Of Walker’s Anti-Public Employee Union Law.

* Don’t check the date, just believe it: Google Maps QuestView for the NES.

* This collection of more-accurate Dr. Seuss titles is one of my favorite things on the entire Internet.

* James Cameron teases the Avatar sequels.

“The best inspiration I got for ‘Avatar’ 2 and 3 was dealing with the master navigator culture in Micronesia,” Cameron said by phone from Tokyo on Friday, where he attended the Japanese premiere of “Titanic 3D.”

The Micronesians, a seafaring culture who navigated the Pacific for centuries without the aid of compasses or charts, already have a lot in common with the blue Na’vi residents of Pandora — they’re an indigenous, matrilineal culture, colonized by outsiders. And the cerulean and aquamarine tones of “Avatar” and its inhabitants seem drawn from postcards from the watery Micronesian region.

* The New York Times has some fun with towards a quantum theory of Mitt Romney.

* 21st Century as Intergenerational War. More here and here.

* Why are colleges acting as volunteer loan collection agents for the banks?

* In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.

* The lottery lie: The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).

* The education reform lie: it’s impossible to talk about primary and secondary education in America in any meaningful way if you won’t allow yourself to discuss class.

* Hunger Games commentary watch: Understanding Katniss.

* If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Yours sincerely, Kurt Vonnegut.

* Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly.

But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.

* Slate continues to pioneer bold new horizons in fantasy capitalism.

* 3 New Studies Link Bee Decline to Bayer Pesticide. No one could have predicted the widespread implementation of insecticides would kill so many insects!

* The government has put the chances of a magnitude 7.3 quake centered in the north of Tokyo Bay at 70 percent over the next three decades, and has estimated there would be about 11,000 casualties and 850,000 buildings destroyed.

* Cancer research: it’s worse than you think.

* “Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement.”

* Orwell and March Madness.

* And Canada will stop issuing pennies. Honestly, they’re decades ahead of us. Could be centuries.

Sunday Night Links

* The New World Order One World Government wants to ban golf! Wake up, sheeple!

* …if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

* From Aaron’s latest Sunday Reading:The Intellectual Situation of n+1. For U.S. universities, a failing grade in economics. The Irish Begin to Wake Up to the Fact That They are Repaying Money That is Then Burned. The Hand That Feeds. Historicizing the Conservative Think Tank. A short history of the vibrator. The Inside Story of How John Carter Was Doomed by Its First Trailer.

* Longform.org flashes back to another This American Life truth panic.

* Roland Barthes’ last doctoral student describes the writing of his dissertation. Via MeFi.

* Scientists think they’ve figured out what’s causing Colony Collapse Disorder (again). Surprise! It’s pesticides. Also via.

* Crooks & Liars has some advice for Lakoff-style reframing.

1. Never say Entitlements. Instead, say Earned Benefits.
2. Never say Redistribution of Wealth. Instead, say Fair Wages For Work.
3. Never say Employer Paid Health Insurance. Instead, say Employee Earned Health Insurance.
4. Never say Government Spending. Instead, say The People Are Investing.
5. Never say Corporate America. Instead, say Unelected Corporate Government.

* And here comes the Romney shadow cabinet. It’s even worse than you think!

Thursday Morning

* Fox News is unbelievably terrible. Jon Stewart reports.

* Today in Taser news: Man Tasered to Death After Running Stop Sign.

* Now you can tag products in your Facebook photos! Finally!

* Mike Huckabee’s Time Travel Academy. Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story!

* Silicon Valley needs humanities PhDs! Probably two or three of them.

* And then cellphones killed all the bees.

Tuesday Morning Catch-up Links

* Fringe was right! Our cosmos was “bruised” in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background. We must destroy the other universe at once.

* Victory declared in American class struggle.

* “The strategic mistake of the decade”: Democrats should have let the filibuster die back in 2005.

* How the Bush administration destroyed the planet: honeybee edition.

* Climate Change: a web comic.

* James Clifford on “The Greater Humanities.”

* The assassination of Yogi Bear by the coward Boo-Boo.

* 13 awesome and awful pilots for sci-fi series we never got to see, including longtime sentimental favorite Heat Vision & Jack.

* Mapping Facebook.

* The picture above is from Emily’s great and prolific Tumblr blog, which posts something awesome every five minutes.

* And the New Yorker profiles the architect of all my dreams and nightmares, Shigeru Miyamoto. They had a really solid piece on fundamental flaws in the scientific method recently, too, but unfortunately it’s subscription-only.

Cocaine’s a Hell of a Drug

A hell of a drug: bees on cocaine ‘behave like humans.’

News Roundup

News roundup!

* Surprising sat: 2/3 of U.S. corporations pay no taxes at all.

* In the latest sign of trouble in the planet’s chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released yesterday. More at Political Animal.

* ‘Honeybee deaths reaching crisis point’ in U.K.

* And they’ve finally, finally invented Mr. Fusion. For real this time. (We’re saved.)

Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Bees’

The bees are back—and they’re angry.

Like Pigs in Shit

Michael Pollan has an article in The New York Times today about sustainability, especially when it comes to agriculture and food production:

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

The article goes on to focus on two stories in the news this year that suggest a sustainability tipping point could be upon us, antibiotic-resistant staph infection and Colony Collapse Disorder. Via Pandagon, which gets this right, I think:

Pollan argues that the word “sustainability” is losing its meaning, and it’s clear why—it’s incompatible with capitalism, and openly arguing for economic systems to replace capitalism is simply verboten in our society. Taboo, unacceptable, off the table. And it will be until it’s too late to reverse the damage done by the need for unchecked growth for profit.

Environmental Capitalism (and Two More)

* When capitalism gets it right: a five-year retrospective on Philly CarShare.

“In this region, one million people get to work without a car,” Lane says. Not always by choice, he notes. Car ownership, duh, is expensive. Once you own one, it’s only rational to drive it. You’ve already sunk money into the purchase, tax, tags and insurance.

“With car sharing, you flip it around,” Lane says. “If you don’t need to use the car, you avoid the cost.”

* Thirty illnesses sorted according to whether or not you can eat the victims. At McSweeney’s.

* Crooks & Liars catches up with the missing honeybees and colony collapse disorder.

New Yorker roundup: Today I put aside an hour or so and caught up on the New Yorkers I hadn’t been reading the last few weeks—which means I’ve now got a bunch of good articles to link to.

* Dept. of Entomology: Where have all the bees gone?
* Annals of Technology: A brief history of email Spam.
* The article everybody and their mother linked to, the look inside the CIA’s “black sites.”
* Shouts & Murmurs: Aesop In The City.
* The Lost Poems of Joe DiMaggio.

Enjoy.

Khaled Diab goes behind the Zion curtain, at the Guardian Online. (via MeFi)

Groovy Green says organic bees are doing just fine. (via my dad)

Literary bad timing: releasing a book about two people traversing a post-apocalyptic American landscape…now. Feel bad for Jim Crace, but even worse for me: I haven’t even started my post-apocalyptic novel yet, and The Road‘s already out there sucking all the air from the room. (via Bookslut)