Posts Tagged ‘places to invade next’
Wednesday Night Links
* Gingrich’s support is plateauing just when he finally won my heart. Who will bomb Cuba now?
* With all this insane cash it’s making, you’d almost think Apple doesn’t actually need to use slave labor.
* Now you can see global warming at work in your very own garden.
* Actually existing media bias: Sunday Morning Talk Shows Featured Twice As Many Republicans As Dems Last Year.
* Little known fact about Sweden, that supposed bastion of liberal idealism: If a Swedish transgender person wants to legally update their gender on official ID papers, a 1972 law requires them to get both divorced and sterilized first.
* Worst idea ever? NBC plans to spin Dwight off The Office.
* The Daily Show really let Mitt Romney have it last night. This Colbert interview with Maurice “Where the Wild Things Are” Sendak is great too.
* More Romney tax follies: If you count things that aren’t taxes as if they were taxes, his tax rate is actually much higher. And his kids got $100 million tax-free.
* Kottke: President John Tyler’s grandsons are still alive!!
* And all I can say is: What took so long?
‘Planet Habitability Index’
This Ezra Klein post has everything: a link to news of Newt Gingrinch’s upcoming “visionary” speech on the U.S. space program and a ranking of the planets, moons, and exoplanets by habitability. Watch out, Gliese 581gians! We’re coming for you.
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 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.