Thursday Night Links: Liars, Scoundrels, Star Trek, and More

* Transcript from the September 19 meeting of the Cooper Union Board of Trustees. Even putting aside that their short-sighted and obviously bad decisions caused the problem in the first place, the enthusiasm with which these supposed trustees speak about the possibility of closing the school is just unreal.

* All of which brings you back to one central point: if you care about the integrity of elections and people actually being able to vote, the supposed cures for vote fraud are vastly more destructive than the problem. All evidence suggests that vote fraud is a minuscule, minuscule problem. Voter ID and most of the other nostrums are solutions looking for a problem. The people who support these policies are either ignorant of the facts or actually want to cull a certain subsection of the population from democratic participation. There are simply no two ways about it.

* “Since it won’t reform itself, Starfleet needs to be destroyed.” Star Trek into Darkness Hostile to Star Trek, Intelligence.

Remember how Kirk was going to nobly take Khan to Earth to stand trial? Did this actually happen? Is it possible to imagine such a trial ending with a court imposing the punishment of cryogenic stasis? How could a court not demand the other 72 be brought back to life? Wouldn’t such a trial inevitably entail Marcus’s cimes — leading to the exposure of his massive corruption and a public outcry to structurally reform Starfleet?

* Bridge collapse in Washington State, sending vehicles and people into the water. 

* Scenes from the fight over Obama’s judicial appointments. Obama won one battle today.

* The Wisconsin State Legislature is trying to defund United Council, the oldest state student association in the country.

* The best headline ever? The FBI Investigated the Song ‘Louie Louie’ for Two Years.

* Wikipedia’s emergency.

* Diane Kendig’s letter of resignation from her adjunct position at Kent State.

* Senate Accepts Deal to Kick Formerly Incarcerated Off Food Benefits.

* The kids are all right: Teens hate Facebook.

* Historian Helen Fry, who has written a book called The M Room: Secret Listeners who bugged the Nazis, says the information gleaned by the eavesdropping of the German generals was vitally important to the war effort – so much so that it was given an unlimited budget by the government. She believes what was learned by the M room operations was as significant as the code-breaking work being done at Bletchley Park.

* The Boy Scouts inch forward.

* And This Incredible Full Scale Lego X-Wing Is the Largest Model In History. I’ll allow it.

Weekend Links

* My proposed Coursera course will ask students to discover for themselves how and why John Doerr, and your other Venture Capitalists, are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than is the State of California, which clearly has the means to spend much more than it has cost your company to reach a worldwide enrollment in the millions. As the course progresses, my more diligent students will come to see, however, that reducing income gaps through education is not the main problem that Coursera and other Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers are trying to solve in their pitch to investors. That problem is, rather, how and when to price the content that you are now giving away in your current (pre-public offering) phase of development.

* Mike Konczal on a universal basic income.

* “We are the people who live in the rivers where you want to build dams. We are the Munduruku, Juruna, Kayapó, Xipaya, Kuruaya, Asurini, Parakanã, Arara, fishermen and peoples who live in riverine communities. We are Amazonian peoples and we want the forest to stand. We are Brazilians. The river and the forest are our supermarket. Our ancestors are older than Jesus Christ.”

* Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide Against Mayan Group.

* Brezhnev-style capitalism.

Neoliberalism was a political system in which the world was put to the test in some way, it was simply that the tests employed were those which privileged price and entrepreneurial energy. I don’t want to defend this form of testing, which is often cynical, bullying and depressingly unsympathetic to other valuation systems. But there was often some consistency about it and the capacity for an unexpected outcome (for instance, that local economic diversity might be revealed to be more fiscally efficient). Look at Westfield today, however, and you see an economic culture being repeated, without any sincere sense that this represents ‘choice’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘regeneration’, nor any sense that things might have turned out differently even if this had been known. The point becomes to name this as ‘efficient’ and that (e.g. Peckham Rye Lane) as ‘inefficient’, and try and avoid or suppress evidence to the contrary. The fear arises that provable efficiency might involve abandoning one set of power structures in favour of another. And so economics becomes a naming ceremony, not a test.

* “Why do we have all this money to go after man-made terrorist attacks, and then we let our bridges fall down?” Flynn wonders.

* The New York Times covers the catastrophic failure of leadership at Cooper Union.

* Everything you want in the worst possible way: Not-Quite-Community renewed for a fifth season.

* Aaron Swartz Was Right.

* The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.” This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well.

* Law would stop Tesla electric car sales in NC.

* Morale crisis in Americans nuclear forces?

* Flying car crashes near school in Vernon, B.C.

* Julian Assange explains the coming super-surveillance state.

* Nearly 800 children under 14 were killed in gun accidents from 1999 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly one in five injury-related deaths in children and adolescents involve firearms.

* The New York Times profiles Dr. David A. Patterson.

His American name is David A. Patterson, his Cherokee name Adelv unegv Waya, or Silver Wolf. He is a tenure-track assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. His groundbreaking research on the pitfalls facing Native Americans is both informed and inspired by his own story of deliverance.

* And the L.A. Times profiles Elizabeth Warren.

Wednesday Night Links

* George Zimmerman in custody, charged with second degree murder.

* Dinosaur Times: probably a lot less fun than you think.

* Neal Kirby remembers his father, Jack.

* The Port Huron Statement at 50. Warning: this is primarily about the compromised second draft.

* The Fraiser theme song explained. Finally.

* Bad polling news for Romney in North Carolina, Colorado, and pretty much everywhere else. Who could have predicted that aggressively alienating 51% of the voting population would have turned out so badly?

* Tough primary season for God: Every candidate he encouraged to run has dropped out.

* Chris Christie lied about the Hudson Tunnel project he unilaterally canceled? Say it ain’t so!

* The headline reads, “National Review Fires Another Racist Writer.”

* Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America. Just heartwrenching. Below: A 12-year-old in his cell at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. The window has been boarded up from the outside. The facility is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private company. In 1982, a fire killed 27 prisoners and an ensuing lawsuit against the authorities forced them to reduce their population to maintain an 8:1 inmate to staff ratio.

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.

‘We’re Building Things Based on a Hydrological Lie’

The headline reads, “World’s Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions.”

Money for Nothing

The United States government can currently borrow at a -0.34% yield, meaning we’d actually have to pay back less money than we borrow after adjusting for inflation. It’s literally free money. Meanwhile we have a deep recession, high unemployment, and tons of important infrastructure work that needs to be done. This is the whole reason national debts exist in the first place.

I have no idea what the White House could possibly be thinking. Cutting government spending in this context makes absolutely no sense. We should be borrowing like crazy. Here’s Ezra:

The path forward is obvious: We should borrow now and put in place a firm plan to cut deficits later, once the economy is back on track and investors have other places to put their money. But refusing better-than-free money now in order to talk about reducing our deficit later? Well, that may be the craziest sentence I’ve ever had to include in a column.

Tuesday Night

* A Note to Parents from Bruce Springsteen, High School Cross-Country Coach.

* Unexpected: Conan beat everyone last night.

* How to serve Koopa meat. Via Kottke.

* And the Hudson River Tunnel lives (maybe). Meanwhile Christie needs to cut the feds a check for ruining everybody’s day.

Chris Christie, Supergenius

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has made a final decision to cancel a planned $8.7 billion rail tunnel, local media reported on Tuesday.

…

The tunnel, in the works for 20 years, is designed to supplement a century-old two-track tunnel and would double train capacity between New York and its populous New Jersey suburbs. Officials estimate it would provide 6,000 construction jobs immediately and as many as 40,000 jobs after its completion in 2018. Construction began last year.

My beloved home state gets another lesson in why you should never vote Republican.

Links for Tuesday

* Obligatory: So you want to get a Ph.D. in the humanities.

* Donald Brown at Penn State’s Climate Ethics blog is the latest person to suggest that corporate behavior in the face of climate change could constitute a new class of crime against humanity.

* Good Jersey, Bad Jersey: You can have new anti-bullying legislation, but Christie’s still not sure about the Hudson River Tunnel.

* As the candidates arrived, a group of Paul supporters pulled a female MoveOn member to the ground and held her there as another Paul supporter stomped on the back of her head and neck.

* Outraging conservatives everywhere, the Texas Supreme Court has cited international interplanetary law.

* Durham: Proud to be one-half of America’s 4th smartest city. Duke doesn’t even make the list of most dangerous colleges, though nearby NCCU clocks in at #7.

* Confirmed: the Moon has water. Let’s go back and get it.

* Crooked Timber coins the term: zero-dimensional chess.

After two years of operating at loggerheads with Republicans, Mr. Obama and his aides are planning a post-election agenda for a very different political climate. They see potential for bipartisan cooperation on reducing the deficit, passing stalled free-trade pacts and revamping the education bill known as No Child Left Behind — work that Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s education secretary, says could go a long way toward repairing “the current state of anger and animosity.”

Translation: Mr Obama and his aides plan a series of pre-emptive capitulations, after which the Republicans will demand the repeal of the healthcare act (or maybe abolition of Social Security). When/if that is refused, the Repugs will shut down the government, and this time they will hold their nerve until Obama folds.

* And Paul the Psychic Octopus has died. Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Speeding Down an Increasingly Rubble-Strewn Path to a Region Where Being Second Rate Is Good Enough

The railroad tunnel project, all set and ready to go, would have provided jobs for 6,000 construction workers, not to mention all the residual employment that accompanies such projects. What we’ll get instead, if it is not built, is the increased pollution and worsening traffic jams that result when tens of thousands of commuters who would have preferred to take the train are redirected to their automobiles.

Bob Herbert unloads on Chris Christie as a symptom of everything going wrong in America. There’s more collapsing empire watch from Glenn Greenwald, who notes:

Just to underscore the rapidity of the decline, as recently as 1999, the U.S. was ranked by the World Health Organization as 24th in life expectancy.  It’s now 49th.  There are other similarly potent indicators.  In 2009, the National Center for Health Statistics ranked the U.S. in 30th place in global infant mortality rates.  Out of 20 “rich countries” measured by UNICEF, the U.S.ranks 19th in “child well-being.” Out of 33 nations measured by the OECD, the U.S. ranks 27th for student math literacy and 22nd for student science literacy.  In 2009, the World Economic Forum ranked 133 nations in terms of “soundness” of their banks, and the U.S. was ranked in 108th place, just behind Tanzania and just ahead of Venezuela.

There is, however, some good news:  the U.S. is now in fifth place in total number of executions, behind only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and comfortably ahead of Yemen and Sudan, while there are two categories in which the U.S. has been and remains the undisputed champion of the world – this one and this one.  And, of course, the U.S. is not just objectively the greatest country on the planet, but the greatest country ever to exist in all of human history — as Dave Roberts put it in response to these life expectancy numbers:  “but we’re No. 1 in bestness!” — so we’re every bit as exceptional as ever.

Understanding Nuclear Weapons

Great cartoon via Sam.

And All of It for Nothing

Twilight of the Bombs:

How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—all of the Cold War players, major and minor, told Rhodes that everyone knew that the bombs must not and could not be used. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear “ahead,” even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.

…At dinner Rhodes reflected that nuclear weapons may come to be seen as a strange fetishistic behavior by nations at a certain period in history. They were insanely expensive and thoroughly useless. Their only function was to keep a bizarre form of score.

Via Kottke.

Friday!

* First, the big news: Casey Affleck has admitted I’m Still Here is a hoax. Shock! Terror!

* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will hold “competing” rallies on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to restore sanity and keep fear alive respectively. I think this is a good idea and I’m glad they’re doing it, but it’s frustrating to once again see legitimate criticism of Bush equated with totally insane criticism of Obama in the name of “balance” and “moderation.”

* Our long national nightmare is finally over: Karl Rove has surrendered to Christine O’Donnell.

* Science has proved Facebook causes flu and little kids have been mocking us this whole time.

* Understanding the Tea Party, from Glenn Greenwald. A good pullquote: Given all that, I’d really like to hear what it is about Christine O’Donnell, or Sharron Angle, or any of these other candidates that sets them apart from decades of radical right-wing elected officials who came before them?  They seem far more similar to me than different.  When was this idealized era of GOP Adult Reasonableness?

* The first Earth-like planet orbiting another star will be announced in May next year, if the discovery of extrasolar planets continues at its present rate, say researchers Samuel Arbesman from Harvard Medical School in Boston and Gregory Laughlin at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

* The U.S. poverty rate is at its highest level since 1994. Matt Yglesias:

Melissa Boteach, my colleague who focuses on poverty issues, points out that congress has the opportunity to act before things get even worse:

In just two weeks a job-creation engine known as the TANF Emergency Fund will expire, forcing states to begin shutting down successful partnerships with the private sector that have already created nearly a quarter-million jobs for low-income families. Congress must act before September 30 to extend the TANF Emergency Fund for another year and allow this innovative jobs program to continue.

Unfortunately, congress is typically more interested in the tax burden of millionaires than in the welfare of the poor and near-poor.

* Self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing, the Baby Boom generation at last has the chance to step out of the so-called Greatest Generation’s historical shadow. Boomers may not have the opportunity to save the world, as their predecessors did, but they can still redeem themselves by saving the American economy from the fiscal mess that they, and their fathers and mothers, are leaving behind. Via the latest MetaFilter post on the ongoing Third-Worldization of America.

* Making puppets with Jim Henson. Also via MetaFilter.

* And All-Star Superman will be made into animated movie. I don’t know why it hasn’t been green-lit for the next live-action Superman yet. Jon Hamm could kill it.

Links for Tuesday

* The Great Divergence: A new Slate series on inequality in America. Part 1, Part 2, more to come.

* Playboy yes, Ulysses no: A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a Virginia prison policy that denies inmates access to classic literature with sexually explicit passages yet allows them to peruse Playboy magazine.

* Obama contrarianism contrarianism contrarianism: $50 billion dollars in new infrastructure spending is a nice but inadequate idea that won’t pass anyway.

* Can’t win for winning: The GOP now has more control over the federal judiciary than it did under Bush, despite two years of Obama appointments. Thank the Senate.

* Tom Toles explains it all.

* I’m more than a bit worried about the future of Mad Men now that I know the “real” Don Draper married the “real” Peggy Olson. That’s not a storyline I want to see at all.

* And even the editor of even the liberal New Republic thinks Muslims aren’t really citizens:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Obama Contrarianism Contrarianism

Jaimee says this article about Green Recovery provisions hidden in the stimulus bill made her feel better about Obama (and about the future) than she’s felt in months, and though it’s setting the bar even lower I tend to agree.

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world’s largest venture-capital fund. It’s pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet.

…

The green industrial revolution begins with gee-whiz companies like A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass. Founded in 2001 by MIT nanotechnology geeks who landed a $100,000 federal grant, A123 grew into a global player in the lithium-ion battery market, with 1,800 employees and five factories in China. It has won $249 million to build two plants in Michigan, where it will help supply the first generation of mass-market electric cars. At least four of A123′s suppliers received stimulus money too. The Administration is also financing three of the world’s first electric-car plants, including a $529 million loan to help Fisker Automotive reopen a shuttered General Motors factory in Delaware (Biden’s home state) to build sedans powered by A123 batteries. Another A123 customer, Navistar, got cash to build electric trucks in Indiana. And since electric vehicles need juice, the stimulus will also boost the number of U.S. battery-charging stations by 3,200%. (See how Americans are spending now.)

“Without government, there’s no way we would’ve done this in the U.S.,” A123 chief technology officer Bart Riley told TIME. “But now you’re going to see the industry reach critical mass here.”

The Recovery Act’s clean-energy push is designed not only to reduce our old economy dependence on fossil fuels that broil the planet, blacken the Gulf and strengthen foreign petro-thugs but also to avoid replacing it with a new economy that is just as dependent on foreign countries for technology and manufacturing. Last year, exactly two U.S. factories made advanced batteries for electric vehicles. The stimulus will create 30 new ones, expanding U.S. production capacity from 1% of the global market to 20%, supporting half a million plug-ins and hybrids. The idea is as old as land-grant colleges: to use tax dollars as an engine of innovation. It rejects free-market purism but also the old industrial-policy approach of dumping cash into a few favored firms. Instead, the Recovery Act floods the zone, targeting a variety of energy problems and providing seed money for firms with a variety of potential solutions. The winners must attract private capital to match public dollars — A123 held an IPO to raise the required cash — and after competing for grants, they still must compete in the marketplace. “They won’t all succeed,” Rogers says. “But some will, and they’ll change the world.”

The investments extend all along the food chain. A brave new world of electric cars powered by coal plants could be dirtier than the oil-soaked status quo, so the stimulus includes an unheard-of $3.4 billion for clean-coal projects aiming to sequester or reuse carbon. There are also lucrative loan guarantees for constructing the first American nuclear plants in three decades. And after the credit crunch froze financing for green energy, stimulus cash has fueled a comeback, putting the U.S. on track to exceed Obama’s goal of doubling renewable power by 2012. The wind industry added a record 10,000 megawatts in 2009. The stimulus is also supporting the nation’s largest photovoltaic solar plant, in Florida, and what will be the world’s two largest solar thermal plants, in Arizona and California, plus thousands of solar installations on homes and buildings.

Obama made headlines today (and garnered some well-deserved praise) with a call for an additional $50 billion in stimulus money for infrastructure spending. This is a strategy for November that could stem the bleeding, especially as the Republicans double-down on their strategy of deliberately tanking the economy. I just don’t know why we’re only reading about it now, in Time, two years after the fact. Why isn’t he touting this aspect of the stimulus? It’s the best and most important part.