Some More Friday Links

* For a few hours on this Saturday afternoon, the incarcerated fathers will be allowed to take part in an American tradition, the father-daughter dance. “A Dance of Their Own,” thought to be the only event of its kind in the country, will be in the jail’s small, windowless multipurpose room.

* Gerontocracy watch: Will Old People Take Over the World? Oh, what would the world be like if old people ran it for their own benefit at the expense of the young! Truly chilling to think about.

* …they did not find households easily shifting up and down the inequality scale. Instead, they found “the advantaged becoming permanently better-off, while the disadvantaged becoming permanently worse-off.” For men, the added inequality was entirely of the permanent sort. For households, three-quarters was permanent.

* Langston Hughes’ Collection of Harlem Rent Party Advertisements.

* Bonnet Rippers: The Rise of the Amish Romance Novel.

* When J.J. Abrams almost made Superman.

* Twinsters is a project on Kickstarter by a pair of women who look very similar, were both born in South Korea, both born on November 19, 1987, both adopted three months after birth, and have never met. It’s the most compelling Facebook family reunion since last week’s aunt and niece.

* O’Reilly Sounds The Alarm About The Left’s War Against The Easter Bunny.

So, if the far left can marginalize Santa and the Easter bunny, of they can tell the children those symbols are obsolete and unnecessary, they then set the stage for a totally secular society in the future.

Who told him our plan?

* And a set of Penguin style book covers re-imagined for Quentin Tarantino screenplays.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Links

* The new issue of Science Fiction Studies is dedicated to Chinese science fiction.

* Breaking: Liberal arts majors didn’t kill the economy.

* Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS.

* Mark Dery on futureshock.

* In the beginning, God created the wealth and the jobs. Now the wealth was a formless void and darkness covered the sources of value, while the spirit of capitalism hovered over the depths. And then God said, “Let there be jobs,” and there were jobs. And God saw that the jobs were not very good; and God separated the jobs from the surplus-value. God called the surplus-value Wealth, and the jobs he called Generosity. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Genesis 1: A Neoliberal Account.

* SMBC tackles the unholy nexus of predestination and time travel.

* Janet Stephens, amateur hairdressing historian. Fun story, despite the classist overtones.

* The real Cuban missile crisis. So, both JFK and RFK were insane, I guess? Perhaps we should give this quantum immortality theory some serious consideration.

* Fox News screws up every day, but this one is pretty classic.

* There’s obviously some sort of long-term plan here that I don’t yet understand, like the time-bombs hidden in No Child Left Behind: North Carolina to formalize two “tracks” of high school diplomas, “job-ready” and “college-ready.”

* The Talmudic solution to the drone crisis: invent (another) secret, unaccountable court system in lieu of actual due process.

* And George Bush, painter.

Thursday Night Links

* Clay Shirky, getting right to the point: “MOOCs are a lightning strike on a rotten tree.” Okay, now we’re getting honest! Let’s have that conversation.

* Actor James Cromwell has been arrested for allegedly disrupting a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting where he was protesting animal testing.

* Some people like to claim that minorities can’t take jokes; those people have never had to try to take a joke. The frat in question, incidentally, has already managed to be re-suspended.

* A brief history of the first eleven Lady Doctors Who.

* North Carolina Appoints Pre-School Opponent To Head Pre-School Services.

* The Tick That Can Make You a Vegetarian.

* It’s not you, it’s quantitative cost-benefit analysis.

* Average earnings of young college graduates are still falling.

* I’m extremely disappointed to report I haven’t read a single one of the 10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You’ve Never Read.

* The federal prison population has spiked 790% since 1980.

* The Master of The Master of Disguise has watched the Dana Carvey flop 21 times since November.

* Is marijuana the last, best hope for labor unions?

* Black writers at DC comics.

* Justice League starts from scratch.

* Fox News Claims Solar Won’t Work in America Because It’s Not Sunny Like Germany.

* And just to see if Tim Wientzen read down this far: when Joyce sketched Bloom.

Friday Night

* Higher Ed as Cheesecake Factory. Reply from Beatrice Marovich. Reply from Ian Bogost.

* The five year metric is, like so much in education today, an accounting reform posing as educational reform.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union.

* Harvard as hedge fund.

Meanwhile, during most of these years, Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times that figure, rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow—or were forced to pay double their current tuition—the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.

* “Fox News Op-Ed Says Women’s Nature Is To Be Dominated By Men.” GO HOME FOX NEWS YOU ARE DRUNK

* If you’re gay, your basic civil rights now depend on what mood Anthony Kennedy is in when he wakes up in the morning. Like the Founders intended!

* The FAA will maybe possibly consider letting you use your iPad or Kindle during takeoff on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly hurt anything.

* Vice President Joe Biden is quietly working with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to try to pass an inclusive version of the Violence Against Women Act in the lame-duck Congress. And so far, sources tell HuffPost, Cantor is on board as long as one thing is stripped from the bill: a key protection for Native American women.

* What Are the Near-Term Climate Pearl Harbors? What a weird analogy, especially with “climate change fiscal cliff” just sitting there.

* This is the kind of obscene administrative blight you normally only see on a college campus: 

Denver Public Schools plans to buy a 13-story building at 1860 Lincoln St. downtown to house its administration offices and the Emily Griffith Technical College.

According to a memo Superintendent Tom Boasberg emailed late Thursday to DPS staff and the board of directors, DPS is buying the 330,000-square-foot building with $24 million in bond money approved by Denver voters on Nov. 6.

* Why the NCAA Doesn’t Care about Concussions.

What happened to Whitmer wasn’t a mistake in NCAA concussion protocol for the simple reason that there isn’t an NCAA concussion protocol. The ambiguity is by design—in order to remain legally blameless, the association can’t involve itself too closely in the health of the athletes. That’s why the job of devising a response to head injuries is left to the schools themselves. As a consequence, when football programs obfuscate what exactly happened to a woozy-looking quarterback, there’s no one—not the local beat writer, and most certainly not an NCAA investigator—to hold them to account. In both the pros and in college football, the risk of legal liability is dictating the response to a medical crisis.

* The War on Superman’s Underpants.

* Your sleight of hand of the day.

* Pennsylvania still wants to rig the electoral college.

* Arrested Development NES Games.

* Moon flights for a mere $750 million. Back to the Future With 1970s Space Colonies.

* And you won’t have Kevin Smith to kick around anymore. Didn’t he do this same thing a few years ago?

And Even More Monday Links

* Lincoln Against the Radicals and Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy.

* 5 Charts About Climate Change That Should Have You Very, Very Worried. I was worried already!

* What happens now that the war on drugs has failed?

* President Obama Briefly Worried That His Unaccountable, Murderous Power Might Fall Into Republican Hands.

* Eight years after Capturing the Friedmans, Andrew Jarecki is still trying to overturn Jesse Friedman’s conviction.

* Florida Republicans Admit Voter Suppression Was The Goal Of New Election Laws. Gasp!

* If Democrats remove the procedural roadblock by which Republicans prevent any laws from being passed, they’ll have no choice but to prevent any laws from being passed.

* If every state of the USA declared war against each other, which would win? Hard to imagine anyone but California or Texas walking away from this thing in one piece.

* Ask an Economist: Which Bond Villain Plan Would Have Worked (and Which Not)?

* And the very worst thing you’ll read today. Enjoy!

Sunday Night Links

* False hope watch: Could Obama Win Arizona? Here’s The Math. I’m skeptical this is a possibility, but it’d be great to see the reaction from Fox News if systematic undercounting of Spanish speakers lead to a surprise Obama win.

* The 2012 Election in Three Sentences.

Romney can tell you exactly what he wants to do, but barely a word about how he’ll do it. Obama can’t describe what he wants to achieve, but he can tell you everything about how he’ll get it done. It’s a campaign without real policies against a campaign lacking a clear vision.

* The public editor takes up the New York Times‘s complicity with drone warefare.

* If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.

* The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

* “It’s all over,” says TC Boyle. “This planet is doomed. In a very short time, we’re probably not even going to have culture or art. We’re going to be living like we’re in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” In 2000, Boyle published A Friend of the Earth, a novel set in 2025 in a California recently devastated by ecological collapse, where numerous animals have become extinct and rain falls heavily for the majority of the year. “Looking back,” he says, “I should have probably moved the date forward to 2015. We live in a very different world to the one that 19th-century novelists lived in. It’s a godless world, without hope.”

* Decriminalise drug use, say experts after six-year study.

* University Endowments Face a Hard Landing.

* And I have no idea how Princeton Review cooked up its “twenty most apathetic colleges list,” but they picked Duke for #4, so there must be something to it…

Tuesday Night Links

* The Passion of Andrew Sullivan.

* The CEO Who Built Himself America’s Largest House Just Threatened to Fire His Employees if Obama’s Elected. If anything this makes the already excellent Queen of Versailles even more awesome.

* “We are athletes, we are not gladiators,” Winston told Kansas City reporters. “This isn’t the Roman Colisseum. People pay their hard-earned money to come in here. I believe they can boo, they can cheer, they can do whatever they want. But when you cheer somebody getting knocked out, I don’t care who it is, and it just so happened to be Matt Cassel, it’s sickening. It’s 100 percent sickening. I’ve been in some rough times on some rough teams. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life to play football than at that moment right there.” I wonder if the NFL will exist in 20 years.

* Seems legit: Deadly Meningitis Outbreak Demonstrates Need For Less Government Regulation.

* Wesleyan Sued Over ‘Rape Factory’ Frat House.

* And your Tumblr of the night: Fuck No Sexist Halloween Costumes.

Morally Odious Morons

…I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.

Gerry-Built Monday Links

* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.

* Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law Is Constitutional.

* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.

* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.

* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.

* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.

* The Muppets vs. Fox News.

* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”

* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.

* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.

* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.

Sunday Reading™

* Babies born this year are the best babies. Fact.

* Gingrichmania! Republicans in disarray! How he did it. Nate Silver:

But South Carolina’s seeming rejection of Mr. Romney goes beyond cultural or demographic idiosyncrasies. Mr. Rtaxomney was resoundingly defeated by Mr. Gingrich, losing badly among his worst demographic groups and barely beating Mr. Gingrich among his best ones. Had you extrapolated the exit poll cross-tabulations from South Carolina to the other 49 states, Mr. Romney might have lost 47 of them. Moreover, the decline of Mr. Romney was almost as significant in national polls as it was in South Carolina.

Now poor Romney has to release his tax returns. Onward to Florida!

* Great moments in Fox News: Newt Gingrich’s repeated betrayals of the people closest to him suggest he’ll make a trustworthy president.

* 11 Lesser-Known 2012 Presidential Candidates.

* “One of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.” Via zunguzungu.

* When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke,President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

* Steve Shaviro reviews Carl Freedman’s The Age of Nixon. I actually bought this one just on the strength of the author and title.

* Another absolute must-have: Alison Bechdel’s followup to Fun Home, Are You My Mother?

* David Graeber: The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity.

* Michael Greenberg: What Future for Occupy Wall Street? Also on the OWS tip: diluting the 99% brand.

* They’re still trying to make a movie out of Jeff Smith’s Bone.

* And the Chronicle of Higher Education has an obituary for Dean Jo Rae Wright. I only knew her over email, but I was very sad to hear this. She was a very generous supporter of graduate projects at Duke.

Saturday Night Links

* SOPA update from Cory Doctorow: The Judiciary Committee will have another chance to pass the bill out of committee at a special session on December 21.

* The headline reads, Australia’s most cherished marsupial, the koala, is in danger of becoming extinct in the wild within 30 years after an outbreak of chlamydia.

* The headline reads, Two deaths from brain-eating amoeba linked to sinus remedy for colds. Does the world seem a little strange today to anyone else?

* Only the super-rich can save us now! An anonymous cabal of millionaires and billionaires is looking to do something in the 2012 election by running an independent candidate in all 50 states. Just what is that something? I guess we’ll find out.

* Obama vs. the pipeline? As @thinkprogress notes, that’s the whole point of this payroll tax blackmail in the first place.

* Media Matters celebrates Fox & Friends, 2011.

* I’m with Ta-Nehisi: Occupy Wall Street shouldn’t turn into Occupy Trinity Church. If that puts me at odds with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, well, so be it…

* Today in the permafrost apocalypse: A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

* Glenn Greenwald: To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. More, specifically on Hitchens, from Lenin’s Tomb.

* And your game of the night: Greens Survive Only When Reds Die. Like Lemmings for sociopaths. Enjoy!

A Few of My Favorite Things

Hodgman, Muppets, class struggle.

Monday!

* The Brad Delong That Failed: “Things that I think I have gotten really, really wrong so far in my career.”

* TPM games out the early primaries and says Mitt Romney may be in even worse shape than it seems. Of course, with the way horse-race political coverage works in this country, this could just be setup for the inevitable “comeback kid” narrative. Meanwhile, I hope the Republican primary never ends.

* Newt’s Tax Plan: Just give rich people free money. It can’t fail!

* And more Newt: Rick Santorum’s consistency and courage on Iran has been a hallmark of why, if we do survive, it will be in part because of people like Rick who’ve had the courage to tell the truth about the Iranians for a long time. If!

* Military-industrial-academic complex: Blackwater to change its name again to Academi.

* Next year’s Supreme Court schedule should be interesting.

* Ask Louis C.K. anything.

* The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.

* The case against Santa.

* The case against charts.

* The case against charts, Fox News Edition.

* The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Discussion at MeFi.

*  The last question American Morning asked the two is what they would call an Occupy Wall Street-themed flavor. “Choccupy?” suggested Ben Cohen. Guys, really, I already solved this.

* When Verizon trolled New Jersey.

* Two from Longform’s Best of 2011: The Movie Set That Ate Itself and This Tech Bubble Is Different. #1:

Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home

and #2:

There’s always someone out there crying bubble, it seems; the trick is figuring out when it’s easy money—and when it’s a shell game. Some bubbles actually do some good, even if they don’t end happily. In the 1980s, the rise of Microsoft (MSFT), Compaq (HPQ), and Intel (INTC) pushed personal computers into millions of businesses and homes—and the stocks of those companies soared. Tech stumbled in the late 1980s, and the Valley was left with lots of cheap microprocessors and theories on what to do with them. The dot-com boom was built on infatuation with anything Web-related. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporizing about $6 trillion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure that has come to benefit businesses and consumers.
…

So if this tech bubble is about getting shoppers to buy, what’s left if and when it pops? Perlman grows agitated when asked that question. Hands waving and voice rising, he says that venture capitalists have become consumed with finding overnight sensations. They’ve pulled away from funding risky projects that create more of those general-purpose technologies—inventions that lay the foundation for more invention. “Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things,” he says. “We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings.”

And if that fuel of innovation is exhausted? “My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”

* And then there’s Abed Is Joker Now.

Tuesday Night Links

* How to Draw Comics the New 52 Way.

* Today Occupy Wall Street occupied foreclosed homes nationwide.

* Fox News vs. the Muppets. At least we got a great new hashtag out of it.

* It’s long been surmised that the Mayan empire fell largely because of a 200-year drought that struck the region in 800 AD, but now it appears that the drought may have been amplified by Mayan agricultural practices.

* Weird ecology: The Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Florida has been so good to the American crocodile that the reptile was recently taken off the endangered species list. But the croc’s newly thriving condition has nothing to do with nuclear power itself; rather the species has cottoned to the 168 miles of manmade cooling canals that surround the plant, adopting the system as a new natural breeding ground. (Thanks, Lindsey!)

* Tennessee firefighters let another house burn down for failure to pay subscription fee.

* And via Kottke, a profile of Nigel Richards, perhaps the best Scrabble player in the world.

In the tight, little world of Scrabble, Nigel Richards stories are legendary. Nigel read the 1,953-page Chambers Dictionary five times and memorized all the words. Nigel bicycled fourteen hours overnight to a weekend tournament, won it, then biked home and straight to work on Monday morning. With a rack of CDHLNR?, Nigel played CHLORODyNE# through three disconnected tiles (the two O’s and the E). Nigel played SAPROZOIC through ZO#. Nigel played GOOSEFISH$. Nigel averaged 584 points per games in a tournament. Nigel’s word knowledge was so deep, his point-scoring ability so profound, his manner so unflappable, that a competitor once made a T-shirt reading: I BEAT NIGEL RICHARDS.

What a Perplexing and Completely Inexplicable Result

Making the rounds of literally every left-leaning blog today is a study out of Fairleigh Dickinson showing Fox News viewers are actually less informed than people who don’t watch any news at all.