Posts Tagged ‘health care’
Friday Links! Tons of Them! Not All of Them Depressing!
* The kids are all right: the editorial in the Marquette Tribune today is anti-edX, anti-robo-graders.
* MOOC as intellectual neocolonialism. Why online education is mostly a fantasy. The MOOC monster will never be satisfied.
* “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am,” said State Sen. Alberta Darling at Tuesday’s hearing. “Here we have accounts of tuition being squirreled away at the same time you raised tuition. What was your intent?” Scenes from the war on higher education in Wisconsin.
* Depression and graduate school.
Perhaps it is the self-aggrandizement the authors seem to share with the ballooning employer-fix-it crowd, but when I encountered this perennial theory in The Innovator’s Prescription, I finally realized that everything I learned as a bartender at HBS was true: things do work out perfectly when we all nod in agreement, sketch it out on cocktail napkins, and congratulate each other for being in each other’s presence.
* Hundreds of Chicago Students Walk Out of Standardized Test. Chicago Public Schools cancels district-mandated standardized test for kindergartens and first graders.
* What does the ubiquitous cheating in reform-era education mean? It means that reformers are so dumb they can’t even set up arbitrary benchmarks for success; they literally fail their own tests despite having written the questions and answers themselves. Imagine a panel of fish oil salesmen riddled with arthritis and clearly suffering from memory loss and you get some idea. What the cheating proves is that these people are liars and cheats, but more than that, it proves that the systems of accountancy and auditing promoted by the liars and cheaters are themselves a lie. The reform is doubly fraudulent.
* US schools weigh bulletproof uniforms: ‘It’s no different than a seatbelt in a car.’ Well, maybe it’s a little different. Can we agree it’s a little different?
* In short, it’s time to cash out of capitalism. Here at http://stocktips.gerrycanavan.com we’ve been rating capitalism as a DON’T BUY for years.
* Workplace Safety and the Gilded Age Theory of Risk. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladesh’s garment workers walk out in protest over factory deaths. Yglesias shrugs.
* Surprise! The Hostess bankruptcy was union-busting.
* A 2010 report produced by a Dallas investment house found that aside from the richest of the rich, among the remaining 90 percent of NFL players, nine in ten of them would be insolvent within ten years of retirement.
* UCLA professor let his students “cheat” on a game theory midterm. I can’t decide if he should have flunked the Lone Wolves or given them A+s.
* Matt Weiner says Mad Men season six is structured by the Wikipedia entry for Dante’s Inferno.
* The spectacle has to be shaped carefully so that suffering takes on the qualities of an elevating narrative the audience can feel part of, an affirmative allegory of capitalism in which hard work and energetic competition show us the most worthy, the winners. Jacobin vs. the Oscars.
* Rachel Maddow vs. Alex Jones.
* May the curse of labor be cursed, may the ineluctability of production become its sorrow.
* Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever.
* And I hate it when politicians break kayfabe. As my friend @mikemccaffrey put it: “Can you please identify the president who assaulted your democracy in this lineup?”
All the Monday Links (A Ton)
* You can read my review of Dan Hassler-Forest’s Capitalist Superheroes (“No Dads: Cuckolds, Dead Fathers, and Capitalist Superheroes“) as the free preview for the Los Angeles Review of Books Digital Edition on Science Fiction.
* “We have been dismayed by news reports of a handful of colleges and universities that have threatened to cut the courseloads of part-time faculty members specifically in order to evade this provision of the law,” a statement from the American Association of University Professors reads. “Such actions are reprehensible, penalizing part-time faculty members both by depriving them access to affordable health care as intended by law and by reducing their income.” More at the Chronicle.
* 18th-Century Connecticutian or Muppet?
* Film School Thesis Statement Generator. This is uncannily good.
Mad Men calls into question the post-war crisis of masculinity through its strategic use of narrative ellipses.
* The people vs. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
* Cathy Davidson explains why she’s teaching a MOOC. Since I know Cathy (a little) and feel bad about disagreeing so absolutely completely with her, I’ll just leave it there.
* Socialism, not capitalism, will get kids out of the mines and away from the drive-through window. And we can’t create that future until we stop the present. Gavin Mueller vs. the machines, in Jacobin‘s special issue on work and automation.
It is insufficient to respond by pointing to productivity gains to justify automation — that’s a management trick. Automation’s prime function is to destroy the ability of workers to control the pace of work. The results are bloody. As Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin document in Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, while management attributed productivity gains in the auto industry to automation, black workers credited “niggermation”: the practice of forcing them to work at high speeds on dangerous machinery.
Such shocking terminology underscores a crucial truth. Robots weren’t responsible for those cars; rather, it was brutalized black bodies. A 1973 study estimated that sixty-five auto workers died per day from work-related injuries, a higher casualty rate than that of American soldiers in Vietnam. Those who survived often suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. This bloodbath is directly attributable to the disempowering effects of automation. Had workers retained control, they wouldn’t have worked at such a deadly pace.
* Life on Mars to become a reality in 2023, Dutch firm claims.
* AIDS ‘Patient Zero’ was a publicity strategy, scholar writes.
* How damaged are NFL players’ brains?
* Violence, mournability, and West, Texas.
* Movies in Color, The Color Palettes of Stills from Famous Films. More links below Stevesie.
* Can slaughterhouses be humane?
* Four college coeds dream of trading their rote lecture halls and cinderblock dorms—is this a for-profit university?—for the debauchery of Florida spring break. Standing between them and their escape is a shortage of ready cash. Lacking alternatives like Mastercards, they solve their liquidity crisis by knocking over a local fried chicken joint. Most jarring in these opening moments is not the violence of the robbery, but the obviously incredible possibility that four college students in the United States lack access to easy credit. After all, what is a student today without the potential for indebtedness? “High as Finance,” from The New Inquiry‘s critical supplement on Spring Breakers.
* Gunfire Erupts at Denver Pro-Marijuana 4/20 Celebrations, Injuring Three. Gunman Sought After Shootout at Nuclear Power Plant in Tennessee.
* Spoiler alert: They’re going to overfish the Arctic till it dies.
* The headline reads, “China Wants to Ban Superstition, Mandate Science.”
* Disney said no to Iron Man 3: Demon in a Bottle. The fools.
* Despite allegations that he knew about a rape and tried to protect his players who committed it, despite widespread criticism that he didn’t punish his team enough and that he should be fired, and despite a grand jury that could charge him looming next week, the powerful Steubenville High football coach Reno Saccocia has been approved for a two-year administrative contract, the city superintendent confirmed to The Atlantic Wire Monday afternoon.
* Presenting the Calvin and Hobbes app.
* And “university professor” is only the 14th best job in the country. Damn you, actuaries!
Even More Tuesday Links (Collect Them All!)
* Wisconsin, unfortunately, has become a case study in the failure of austerity economics at the state level.
* The NCAA wants you to know that its unpaid workers absolutely definitely have health insurance.
* Contingency Plan: Outsourcing Education.
As Maisto puts it: “The most vulnerable students tend to get taught by the least supported faculty. And if that doesn’t bother people, it should.”
Stick around for some eye-popping rationalizations from senior administrators.
* Of those students who place into remedial math at CUNY, 20 percent have progressed to a for-credit course two years later. After six years, just one in four have managed to earn any degree. A national research report published last year called remediation a “bridge to nowhere.” System Failure: The Collapse of Public Education.
“If you start in remediation,” says Tom Sugar of Complete College America, the think tank that published the “bridge to nowhere” report, “there’s virtually no chance you’re going to end up with a college degree.”
* A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise.
“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”
* Tough times in the U.K.: the Queen got a mere $5 million dollar raise this year.
* The Associated Press announced today that it will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
* New journal: The Journal of Popular Television, Volume 1, Number 1.
* And your Tumblr of the minute: Mean Girls + Mad Men = Mean Mad Men. So good I don’t even care if I’ve done this one before.
Thursday Night Links: Neoliberalism, The University in Ruins, Is the Pope Catholic?, and More
* CFP: Ecology and the Environmental Humanities symposium at Rice University.
* Rather than enlarge the moral imagination and critical capacities of students, too many universities are now wedded to producing would-be hedge fund managers, depoliticized students, and creating modes of education that promote a “technically trained docility.” Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities are now driven principally by vocational, military and economic considerations while increasingly removing academic knowledge production from democratic values and projects. The ideal of the university as a place to think, to engage in thoughtful consideration, promote dialogue and learn how to hold power accountable is viewed as a threat to neoliberal modes of governance. At the same time, higher education is viewed by the apostles of market fundamentalism as a space for producing profits, educating a docile labor force, and a powerful institution for indoctrinating students into accepting the obedience demanded by the corporate order. Neoliberalism and the Politics of Higher Education: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux.
* “We believe the current (higher education) leadership is pursuing a bad model that will decrease affordability for students and parents, eliminate good jobs, increase inequality and reintroduce a class-based system where the rich will receive a good, four-year liberal arts education, and everyone else will get trained for jobs that will last 10 years and then disappear.” The SEIU considers higher education.
* The Commercialization of Academia: A Case Study.
This has been the one constant in my experience. Each of the ten academic years I’ve been at my current institution has been subjected to some fundamental reorganization, to the point where my colleagues have a joke about it: it’s a Mao-esque permanent revolution. In this time, my department has been based in two faculties under four (soon to be five) deans, housed in three (soon to be four) “schools”, with four different heads of school, and my department has had five chairs. The university writ large has seen a massive building program, the consolidation of branch campuses on the main campus, the reduction in faculties from eight, to five, and then a year later four. Physically, my department has moved offices twice in two years, and for some three times. We’re facing yet another physical move in the summer of 2014, as our extant offices are redeveloped into on-campus housing for students. My own major has been reduced to a minor twice; once in 2005, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious but corresponded with the sacking of two colleagues. Following the byzantine process of validation, which I’ve now achieved a certain proficiency at, it relaunched three years later, only to have it suddenly pulled on that Saturday morning, three years ago.
* Disinvestment watch: State Budgeters’ View of Higher Ed.
* 72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit, even if they did well in the class. More importantly, these are the professors who voluntarily took time to teach online courses, which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher.
* Walmart “is in the early planning stages of a service that would see in-store customers rent space in their vehicles and their time to the mega-retailer to deliver products it sells online. The move would combat same-day delivery ideas from Amazon and reportedly what’s in the works with Google, which might have already signed on Target for such a service.”
* Idaho teacher investigated for saying ‘vagina’ during biology lesson. What should she have said?
* The group of 12 young people who had their feet washed and kissed by the pope included two young women – the first time a pope included females in the rite. The ceremony has traditionally been limited to men, since all of Jesus’ apostles were men. Via TPM, that “has traditionally been limited” thing appears to have some real force.
* With natural gas production on the rise—it has jumped 26 percent since 2007, chiefly because fracking now makes it economically viable to pursue gas trapped in shale deposits—and unconventional practices such as dewatering ramping up domestic oil development, the wastewater deluge is expected to get worse. Operators are injecting more water than ever into drilling wells, while boring new wells to accommodate the overflow. Yet nobody really knows how all this water will impact faults, or just how big an earthquake it could spawn. In the West, small quakes don’t often cause much damage because of stricter seismic regulations but also because the underground formations—buckled, with younger rock—absorb all but the biggest events. Induced quakes, however, are happening primarily in flatter states, amid more rigid rock, making them more destructive—a stone makes a bigger splash when it’s hurled into a glassy pond than a river of raging whitewater. Fracking’s Latest Scandal? Earthquake Swarms.
* Things you didn’t even know you needed to worry about: Are Exploding Manhole Covers In Washington DC Caused By Shocking Levels Of Leaking Natural Gas?
* Screen Daily teases The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé.
The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting, the battle for an enormous family fortune and the slow and then sudden upheavals that transformed Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
* Charlie Stross predicts 2043.
* Contagion was right: How The Meat Industry Is Fueling The Rise Of Drug-Resistant Diseases.
Sunday, Sunday
(some links via Aaron’s Sunday Reading, which as always has so much more)
* The greatest nation in the world: A few nights a year, Tennessee holds a health care lottery of sorts, giving the medically desperate a chance to get help.
* A Truly Devastating Graph on State Higher Education Spending.
* In sentencing the boys to a minimum of one year in juvenile jail, Judge Thomas Lipps doled out some advice to their peers on how to avoid the same fate. He urged them “to have discussions about how you talk to your friends; how you record things on the social media so prevalent today; and how you conduct yourself when drinking is put upon you by your friends.” Tweeting wasn’t exactly the problem in Steubenville, though, now was it.
* Stunning narrative of decades-long abuse (of all kinds) in a New York City high school. The level of administrative incompetence (shading into malice) is just one of the shocking parts of this story; I finally watched Bully last night and couldn’t believe this was how school administrators would act in general, much less when they knew they were being filmed.
* March Madness as class struggle.
* Do Corporations Enjoy a 2nd Amendment Right to Drones?
* So what exactly was in all those old fallout shelters?
* The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. “I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me,” wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum. That was the message of the Iraq war: There is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.
* Rand Paul Is Right On Marijuana, And That Should Scare Democrats Into Action.
* University of Wisconsin professor warns of dangers of reintroducing extinct animals. Spoilsport!
* The world’s first LEGO museum is coming.
* And all about the next board game I’d like to learn to play, Twilight Struggle.
And Some Links
* The theme for MLA 2014 is “Vulnerable Times.”
A decade has passed since the National Collegiate Athletic Association rolled out its academic reform package. In that time, there is strong evidence that the reforms designed to open access to higher education to more athletes and punishing coaches and institutions failing at academics came at the expense of the integrity of the academy. The landscape of the NCAA’s program is scorched with scandals surrounding admissions, academic fraud, major clustering and clever gaming of the system for the wealthiest institutions to avoid penalties. We conclude that it has significantly damaged higher education.
* Kennesaw State to add football. I’m shocked any Board of Trustees would volunteer to take on this kind of liability, knowing what we know…
* Tesla catches the New York Times deliberately tanking its review of its Model S electric car, while at the same time revealing the truly staggering amount of data they can log while you’re driving.
* Apocalypse now: “Think of carbon as a global pollutant that affects the ocean everywhere it touches the sky,” explains Stanford University marine science professor and Hopkins Marine Station director Steve Palumbi. What does ocean acidification mean for sea life?
* Sad coda to the Oscar Pistorius story: Olympic Hero Oscar Pistorius Charged With Murder in Shooting Death of Girlfriend.
* Abolish the states watch: Scott Walker edition.
Yesterday Scott Walker finally announced his much-awaited decision about how to deal with the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act. And he managed to come up with a “solution” that simultaneously lets him express solidarity with his nullification-minded soul-mates in the Deep South while increasing federal involvement in health insurance in his state and also costing Wisconsin taxpayers some serious money! Quite the triple-gainer, eh?
* Woman Says She’s Had the Same Song Stuck in Her Head for Three Years.
* New Atlanta Braves Logo Features Gruesome Depiction Of Trail Of Tears.
Evening Links
* World saved from Zack Snyder Star Wars movie.
* But it was too late for the Atlantic, powerless before Tom Cruise’s superpowers.
* 2013 in franchise science fiction, from io9. Only Brad Bird’s 1952 can save us now.
* New York Times already hyping Ender’s Game.
* The best companion says she won’t be back for Who‘s 50th.
* The Disneyland of paranoia. See also McSweeney’s:
First, they came for unregulated handguns in the possession of citizens with violent criminal records, and I said, “You know, that sounds reasonable. Someone with a violent criminal record has probably lost his or her right to possess a handgun. So, yeah, sounds good.”
Then they came to require background checks, gun licenses, and regular gun safety courses, and I said, “All of this sounds fine to me. Guns are dangerous, and we regulate every other dangerous product. So, really, whatever you want to do on this is also fine.”
Then they came for my assault rifle, and I said, “Assault rifles? You should have started with assault rifles. You’re doing this backwards. But OK, of course you can have my assault rifle. Why do I need an assault rifle?”
Then they came to guarantee mental health care to everyone, because our treatment of our most vulnerable citizens is a measure of our dignity as a society, and I said, “This one is obvious. In fact, I can’t believe we HAVEN’T been guaranteeing mental health care for everyone who needs it. Let’s get going on this.”
* And just one political link: The high price of being single in America.
The Degree of Civilization in a Society Can Be Judged by Entering Its Morgues
Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.
All the Midweek Links There Are
* My media empire: I have a piece on climate change and science fiction in the new New Inquiry issue on weather, which has gone out to subscribers but isn’t online yet. I’ll let you know when you can read it, though for a mere $2 you could read it this very minute.
* “It’s one of those situations where everybody says it’s an issue but the people who have the most influence and the most ability to do something about it are not acting on it,” said Gary Rhoades, professor of higher education at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education and director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education, a virtual think tank supported by faculty and labor groups. He called the adjunct issue a “widely acknowledged challenge” with deep, interwoven roots – many of which pit administrative prerogatives against labor concerns and educational outcomes.
* IRS Says Colleges Must Be ‘Reasonable’ When Calculating Adjuncts’ Work Hours. What if the adjuncts shrugged?
* Yesterday marked the 202th anniversary of the largest slave revolt in US history.
* Game of the day: run from Michel Foucault. Do not become enamored of power.
* Another great rundown of science fiction in China. Via io9.
* zunguzungu is gathering notes towards a canon of post-9/11 literature. I contributed Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” as well as the inevitable science fictional treatments: Battlestar Galactica, District 9, Nolan’s Batman…
* Warmest Year On Record Received Cool Climate Coverage. It’s so hot in Australia they’ve had to add a new color to the weather map.
* This paper uses annual variation in temperature and precipitation over the past 50 years to examine the impact of climatic changes on economic activity throughout the world. We find three primary results. First, higher temperatures substantially reduce economic growth in poor countries but have little effect in rich countries. Second, higher temperatures appear to reduce growth rates in poor countries, rather than just the level of output. Third, higher temperatures have wide-ranging effects in poor nations, reducing agricultural output, industrial output, and aggregate investment, and increasing political instability. Analysis of decade or longer climate shifts also shows substantial negative effects on growth in poor countries. Should future impacts of climate change mirror these historical effects, the negative impact on poor countries may be substantial.
* The Seven Lady Godivas: Dr. Seuss’s Little-Known “Adult” Book of Nudes.
* io9 celebrates the classic tabletop role-playing game Paranoia.
* The American Prospect considers the legal hyperformalism the GOP has embraced in the face of longterm demographic crisis and declining real power.
What all these efforts have in common is that they are all perfectly legal, and yet they all violate the norms of how American politics had been practiced for decades or even for centuries. All of them exploit some loophole in the law or the Constitution to give Republicans some immediate advantage in the basic ground rules of how political issues are contested.
* National Geographic’s photographs of 2012.
* The great moral question of our time: On heckling.
* The Superhero Delusion: How Superhero Movies created the Sad Perfect Badass Messiah, and what that says about America.
* Installing the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History.
* Science catches up to what the poets always knew: Our perception of time changes with age, but it also depends on our emotional state. Research is steadily improving our understanding of the brain circuits that control this sense, opening the way for new forms of treatment, particularly for Parkinson’s disease.
* Debating that rape viral infrographic.
* Great moments in advertising: the UC spends $4.3 million to attract a single student.
* The forever war on women: Under Obama, a Skew Toward Male Appointees.
* And Mitch Hurwitz teases the new Arrested Development. I am…optimistic?
Thursday Afternoon
* Reminder: Don’t eat beef in the United States. The Kansas City Star reports. Via MetaFilter.
* Maps of Earth Showing Where Severe Weather is Most Likely to Kill You.
* A map of the United States as 50 states of equal population.
* Deep poverty: Americans living on two dollars a day.
* Life without Parole: Four Inmates’ Stories. The School-to-Prison Pipeline Gets Its First-Ever Airing in the Senate.
* Actual headline, or log-line for the next Stephen King novel? “USF researchers find 19 more graves at Dozier School for Boys.”
* The state agency in Wisconsin that oversees for-profit colleges is considering a proposal that would require those institutions to meet certain performance standards—much like a controversial federal rule—in order to be allowed to operate in the state.
* The average American in the year 1900 had an I.Q. that by today’s standards would measure about 67. Since the traditional definition of mental retardation was an I.Q. of less than 70, that leads to the remarkable conclusion that a majority of Americans a century ago would count today as intellectually disabled. Given that IQ tests are definitely objective and reliable and are definitely a meaningful indicator of intelligence, this is indeed the only possible conclusion!
* As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
* Kevin Drum notes they’ve chosen the worst possible filibuster reform. No one could have predicted!
*Something something “A good start”: Law school applications are collapsing.
* Did the Zipingpu Dam Trigger China’s 2008 Earthquake?
* Big Catholic? Marquette, DePaul, Georgetown, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova leave the Big East.
* Honest internship ad. A non-defense.
* And today in “hilariously missing the point:” The CW is Planning a Hunger Games-Based Reality Show.
Saturday Night Link Fever (No Cure)
Linkdumps from earlier in the week, Tuesday, Tuesday Night, Thursday, and Friday. There’s also one or six more worth seeing.
* More from the Reddit wars from Jezebel, Chad, Aaron, and Lili.
* Middle Earth: pretty much all dudes.
* What is happening is a dramatic policy shift whereby the rights and entitlements the US working class has fought for and come to expect are now declared to be, for the foreseeable future, unreachable and unjustified. To put it in media terms, it is “the end of the American dream,” signifying the historic severance of US capital from the US working class, in the sense that US capitalism is becoming completely de-territorialized and is now refusing any commitment to the reproduction of the US workforce.
* A bit out of their jurisdiction, don’t you think? It’s True: The FBI Urged Martin Luther King to Commit Suicide.
* $134,078.44 lien for unpaid hospital bills filed against unarmed man shot by police while fleeing gunman. In a movie called America 2012, it’d be a little too on-the-nose.
* ZeFrank recaps the vice-presidential debate. Bonus Get Your War On.
* Poll panickers relax: Obama is crushing it in Ohio, and Ohio is basically the whole game this year.
PPP’s newest Ohio poll finds Barack Obama leading 51-46, a 5 point lead not too different from our last poll two weeks ago when he led 49-45.
The key finding on this poll may be how the early voters are breaking out. 19% of people say they’ve already cast their ballots and they report having voted for Obama by a 76-24 margin. Romney has a 51-45 advantage with those who haven’t voted yet, but the numbers make it clear that he already has a lot of ground to make up in the final three weeks before the election.
Need more? Fluke, almost certainly incorrect poll puts Obama up in Arizona!
* Okay, go ahead and panic a little: Romney Debate Gains Show Staying Power. For what it’s worth Obama spiked a bit upward on the 538 graphs today.
* Of course there are still those who think the worse, the better.
Why Romney? Because his transparency as a Neanderthal may, just may, bring people into the streets, while under Obama passivity and false consciousness appear almost irreversible.
Elsewhere on the Web, the affirmative case for Obama has more or less reduced to pure spite.
Do these folks really want their bigoted in-laws and racist YouTube commenters to have the satisfaction of having been right all along? Because that’s what they’ll take away from this.
* ‘Million Muppet March’ Planned. I’ll allow it, but know you’re on a tight leash.
* Side Effects of Global Warming You’re Not Worried About Enough Yet.
* Agent Coulson will return for S.H.I.E.L.D. Then why didn’t Joss use my awesome final shot for The Avengers?
* Isn’t-it-pretty-to-think-so-filter: Why near-death experiences don’t constitute proof of an afterlife.
* And just in case you’re still out there in the cold: Presenting SmartSocks+: the smartest socks in the world.
A Few Sunday Night Links
* Another great Muppet thing that never was: Douglas Adams and Jim Henson tried to develop a TV special about the Muppet Institute of Technology.
* Given Politco’s track record, I think we can expect Mitt to make a comeback in the next few days.
* I’ve been fascinated all week by the stories about Sean Smith, one of the U.S. foreign service workers killed in the consulate attacks this week, and his virtual life in EVE Online as “Vile Rat.”
* The Boy Scouts have a pedophile blacklist dating back to 1919. Of course, they never actually involved the cops, or, you know, did anything about it. Heavens no.
* Will Self, “The Trouble with My Blood.”
* Unpaid internships in the New York Times.
* And just for laughs: A spokesman for Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-N.Y.) is facing criticism after advocating violence against female Democratic senators in a Facebook post.
My question today… when is Tommy boy going to weigh in on all the Lilly Ledbetter hypocrites who claim to be fighting the War on Women? Let’s hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators who won’t abide the mandates they want to impose on the private sector.
“Acid in Female Senators’ Faces: Opinions Differ.”
