Posts Tagged ‘places to invade next’
Monday!
* ‘Democrats Gleeful at Prospect of Running Against Gingrich.’ That’s the first bit of Gingrich-related news that’s made me nervous.
* io9 has the trailer for Joss Whedon’s long-delayed The Cabin in the Woods.
* Duke University trustee Bruce Karsh and his wife Martha have donated $50 million to Duke for a permanent endowment to support need-based financial aid for undergraduate students from the United States and other countries, President Richard H. Brodhead announced Monday.
* Randy Balko vs. paramilitary creep.
* Aaron Bady on the Oakland Commune.
* Henry Aaron: So… here is my prediction. The Supreme Court will sustain the individual mandate, and it will do so not by the narrow 5 to 4 split that has become so familiar, but by a vote of 7 to 2. Or 8 to 1. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sottamayor, and Kagan are virtually certain to find the mandate constitutional. But also voting to sustain it, I believe, will be Justices Scalia and Kennedy, based on reasoning similar to that of Silberman and Sutton. Justices Roberts and Kennedy are in play and I am assuming that either or both will vote to affirm the mandate. Justice Thomas, who has staked out a far-reaching opposition to federal regulation in many currently accepted forms, will say that the mandate exceeds Congress’s constitutional authority.
* Apocalypse now: Radioactive water from Fukushima might have found its way into the Pacific ocean and experts believe it could contain strontium.
* And today from America’s finest news source: Global Warming May Be Irreversible by 2006.
* But it’s okay that we’ve ruined this planet; after all, there’s always Keppler 22b.
Wednesday Night Links
* Breaking Bad aficionados will enjoy Bryan Cranston’s recent appearances on the Nerdist and WTF with Marc Meron, the latter of which has the (new-to-me) tidbit that Jesse was slotted to be killed off in the first few episodes; he was saved from death by the awesomeness of Aaron Paul.
* Wisconsin wants to mess with the Electoral College, too. You’ll be shocked to learn the Koch brothers are involved.
* So the U.S. government doesn’t actually have “hard evidence” Iran tried to murder the Saudi ambassador. I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.
* TPM and @fivethirtyeight (1, 2, 3) have been talking today about the fact that Romney (while unquestionably “inevitable”) has clearly hit his support ceiling in the Republican primary. The Anti-Romney has shifted through several alternatives, but the support never settles on Romney; it just keeps casting about for some new savior, Bachmann, Perry, Christie, and currently Herman Cain. It’s just more fodder for my “Draft Jeb” conspiracy theory…
* Beka Economopolis on Occupy Wall Street: We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable. Yes, perhaps, split the support, lest we not be co-opted. This will be painful, internally, as it won’t always achieve comfortable consensus. But to hold this space and expand the realm of possibility, we have to go farther than others are ready to go.
* Matt Taibbi on Occupy Wall Street.
* The Big Picture blog on Occupy Everywhere.
* Kevin Drum and Paul Waldman on the GOP’s astounding Medicare reality distortion field.
1. Health care in general, and Medicare in particular, are bankrupting our country.
2. But government should never try to figure out which treatments are effective.
3. Medicare should pay for any treatment anyone wants, regardless of whether it works or what it costs.
4. If an insurance company refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s their right as actors in the free market; if Medicare refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s Washington bureaucrats trying to kill you.
5. We need to cut Medicare benefits, because don’t forget it’s bankrupting our country.
* The fiends! In an effort to promote healthful eating and, it has been suggested, to protect traditional Gallic cuisine, the French government has banned school and college cafeterias nationwide from offering ketchup with any food but — of all things — French fries.
* Australia has passed a carbon tax.
* Imagine there’s no peanut butter.
* And Polling Shows North Carolina Faces Uphill Battle To Defeat Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment. Honestly, how are we even still arguing about this?
Tuesday Night Links
* They’re Occupying Raleigh next Saturday.
* They’re recalling Scott Walker next year.
* DoJ seems to want us to invade Iran and Mexico simultaneously.
* Who are the 99%? Rortybomb looks at the data.
* Freddie de Boer has an important #OWS reality check.
If the message is “I went to college and I don’t have the job and the car and the lifestyle I was promised,” then none of this means anything. These complaints, I’m sorry to say, are ultimately a way of saying “I didn’t get mine.” That’s not a rejection of our failing order. It is an embrace of it in the most cynical terms.
* Yes, Virginia, Republicans are deliberately tanking the economy.
* And I wouldn’t exactly recommend listening to the whole thing, but the first few minutes of the Ira Glass Sex Tape TAL parody are really something. Spot on.
Tuesday Morning
* 10 Films You Should See at the Raindance Film Festival 2011. My cousin Chris’s brilliant Afghanistan documentary Where My Heart Beats clocks in at #9.
* Europocalpyse now: Greek Default Almost Assured. More here.
* And speaking of money: David Graeber vs. the Austrians.
* In these two books, we have two versions of school reform. One is devised by Wall Street financiers and politicians who believe in rigidly defined numerical goals and return on investment; they blame lazy teachers and self-interested unions when test scores are low. The other draws on the deep experience of a compassionate teacher who finds fault not with teachers, unions, or students, but with a society that refuses to take responsibility for the conditions in which its children live and learn—and who has demonstrated through her own efforts how one dedicated teacher has improved the education of poor young people.
* Bringing the number of planets discovered outside our solar system to 645, the 50-planet haul includes 16 super-Earths (planets with a mass between one and ten times that of Earth), including one that orbits at the edge of the habitable zone of its star). Sounds like it’s time to bring freedom to the HD85512bians.
* And North Carolina really is going to try to ban gay marriage. Again.
State law already bans same-sex marriage, and opponents of a constitutional amendment contend that it is unnecessary. North Carolina is the only state in the Southeast without such a provision in its constitution.
We cannot allow a discrimination gap. Rally in Raleigh this afternoon. Unfortunately I have a commitment on campus at noon or I’d go myself.
On Libya
Allow me to suggest that the most predictable failure in modern American military policy may in fact be the belief that these events represent “failures” at all. For the governmental and corporate institutions that rely on outsized military spending for their survival and growth, the inevitability of death, destruction, and destabilization in these regions and the continuing necessity of prolonged, open-ended commitment at greater and greater cost in money and lives is a feature, not a bug. The popular notion that the United States constantly propels itself into these “humanitarian interventions” with only the best of intentions, only to be undone time and time again by a tragic lack of foresight, is a self-protective fantasy calculated to short-circuit any real debate about the nation’s hundred-plus-year history of global empire. The narratives are always the same, from Spanish atrocities in Cuba to Vietnam to our twenty-first century parade of Hitlers-of-the-moment; only the details change.
The stated goals for these interventions are never achieved because they were not the true goals; the missions creep and swell because they are intended to. In this sense the persistence of these “failures” only represents the smooth operation of the machine.
See you in Iran—or Syria, or Bahrain, or the northern states of Mexico, or…—in 2013.
This Was Monday
* All these worlds are yours, except Kepler 10-b. Attempt no landings there.
* Autonomous organization: In urban N.J. areas, few residents disrespect unwritten rule of reserving snow-cleared parking spots.
* Matt Taibbi gets introspective.
For my part, as a member of the political media, and a vitriol-spewing one at that, the Tucson shooting immediately made me ask myself the question: do I personally do anything to add to this obvious problem of a hypercharged, rhetorically overheated political atmosphere? And the unfortunate answer I came up with was, maybe. I’ve always told myself that what I do is different from what someone like Rush does, because I don’t target classes of people and try not to exempt anyone (even myself) from criticism, or favor either party.
I’ve also counted on the belief that anyone who’s willing to devote the mental energy to even follow whatever wild rhetoric I’m using is probably also smart enough to tell the difference between reality and hyperbole. I also hope that anyone reading my articles will get the underlying message that I’m pretty sure — I hope I’m sure, anyway — I’m conveying at all times, i.e. that violence is irresponsible, that we should use our brains instead of baseball bats to solve problems, etc.
But while I tell myself all these things, I also know that I would never talk to my wife or my mother the way I talk to Lloyd Blankfein. Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner.
To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.
* The University of California Student Association responds to news of an additional half-billion dollars in cuts to education in California.
* Short film of the night: “Three Minutes.”
* Infographic of the night: Dexter’s victims.
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.
* 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.
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.
Can We Trust the Titanians? (LINK FIXED)
NASA has discovered evidence that points to the existence of methane-based life on Saturn’s moon Titan.
