A Few Friday Night Links

* Tarheel Summer? Roughly 600 people gathered outside the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Monday as part of a growing wave of protests called Moral Mondays, which have now led to 153 arrests over four weeks.

* DIA’s art collection could face sell-off to satisfy Detroit’s creditors.

* Harvard Professors Call for Greater Oversight of MOOCs.

* Immigration-related offenses are now the leading type of federal prosecution, constituting more than 40% of cases compared with 22% for drug crimes, according to federal crime data.

* Study: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Real Hard.

* And for his 72nd birthday, a map of every street, town, and city Dylan has ever sung about.

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.

Tuesday!

* Well, it was nice while it lasted: Guatemalan Court Overturns Genocide Conviction of Ex-Dictator.

* College sports as investment bubble? Reform or Retreat?

* MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used.

* One of 500. Come for the thoughtful and reflective essay, stay for the shit-stirring, dickish comments…

* How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists. The headline is a bit misleading; this is about word games prosecutors play.

* ‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His Two-Year Odyssey to Revive the Show.

* And over at Dear Television Lili Loofbourow has a good thing on the latest Mad Men episode, too.

Just a Few Monday Links

* Sarah Kendzior and Rebecca Schuman tee up for the grad-school-backlash-backlash-backlash-honestly-I’ve-lost-count. As always, I’m very glad people are talking about exploitation, but nonetheless the unvarnished, apocalyptic negativity of some of these pieces just doesn’t reflect my own experiences in the academy very well at all. Academia contains multitudes; that’s actually a huge part of the problem.

* CEO Pay 1,795-to-1 Multiple of Wages Skirts U.S. Law. Of course, the “law” being skirted is a toothless disclosure requirement, so don’t even sweat it.

* Brave director slams Disney’s sexy Merida makeover.

* Yglesias wept: Bangladesh to allow unions for garment workers.

* The Los Angeles Review of Books explains the Church of Scientology.

Wright proposes that the central document to understanding Hubbard’s psyche is his so-called “secret memoir,” composed around 1947, otherwise referred to as Hubbard’s “Affirmations” or “Admissions.” The document itself has an interesting history: it was found by a former archivist for the Church of Scientology, Gerald Armstrong, who had been tasked with organizing the founder’s personal papers. The more Armstrong read, the less he believed. Convinced that Hubbard was a huckster, Armstrong copied the documents that he discovered in the archives and delivered them to his lawyer. He was thereafter sued by the Church of Scientology. During the trial, Armstrong tried to get on record portions of Hubbard’s “Affirmations,” under the vehement protests of the Church’s lawyers. Since then, the document has leaked to the internet. Among Hubbard’s Affirmations:

“I can write.”

“My mind is still brilliant.”

“That masturbation was no sin or crime.”

“That I do not need to have ulcers any more.”

“That I believe in my gods and spiritual things.”

“That my magical work is powerful and effective.”

“That the numbers 7, 25, and 16 are not unlucky or evil for me.”

“That I am not bad to look upon.”

“That I am not susceptible to colds.”

“That these words and commands are like fire and will sear themselves into every corner of my being, making me happy and well and confident forever!”

Hubbard emerges, in Wright’s account, as a pitiable figure, driven by relentless ambition yet also stalked by an enduring fear of irrelevance. Flawed, prone to tyranny and abusive behavior, he sought to conquer his insecurities by achieving an outsized grandeur. “If one looks behind the Affirmations to the conditions they are meant to correct,” Wright concludes, “one sees a man who is ashamed of his tendency to fabricate personal stories, who is conflicted about his sexual needs, and who worries about his mortality. He has a predatory view of women but at the same time fears their power to humiliate him.”

* Austerity comes to CTU: the new 24 will only have twelve episodes.

* The first trailer for Joss Whedon’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to tease Luke Cage.

* And xkcd covers birds and dinosaurs.

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 Morning

* The wisdom of markets: hacked @AP Twitter account sends Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling 150 points in a few seconds.

* Handy charts reveal why you’ve never heard of most female SF authors.

* Florida approves online-only public university education.

* Graduate school and the peak-end heuristic. It’s a thing!

* The retirement scam.

* First lawsuits files in the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion.

* Reports trickling out about police interviews with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

* And the ricin case gets weirder and weirder.

* Bad news, Game of Thrones fans: You are mispronouncing Daenerys’s honorific, Khaleesi.

Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from the University of California–San Diego and founded the Language Creation Society, spent twelve to fourteen hours a day, every day, for two months working on the proposal that landed him the Thrones job. When he was finished, he had more than 300 pages of vocabulary and notes detailing how the Dothraki language would sound and function. “The application process favored those of us who were unemployed at the time, which I was,” Peterson laughed.

* Cooper Union Trustees Vote to Impose $19,000 Tuition.

* Chicago Sun-Times begs students not to participate in standardized-testing boycott.

* A Conversation with a Single Mom Living on $40,000 a Year.

* School Principal Discouraged Teen Girl from Reporting Sexual Assault Because It Would Ruin Attacker’s Basketball Career. I mean really.

* And a little something for the whatthefuckaricans out there: Marc Maron…IN SPACE.

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?

* Bad news, everyone.

* 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.

* Graeber vs. austerity.

* 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!

Some Thoughts on Miranda

You know you have the "academic" gene when your reaction to widespread jubilation is a desire to deconstruct the idea of a "fair trial."—
Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

I wound up indulging my academic gene after all with a long conversation on Twitter this morning about Miranda rights (Storified here). Distilling this to just a few key points:

* The Miranda warning is a fairly idiosyncratic (and relatively recent) feature of American jurisprudence. It is not by itself determinative of the absolute fairness or unfairness of a criminal proceeding.

* The Miranda warning concerns only the suspect’s post-arrest utterances, which by all accounts the prosecutors in this case would not need to secure a conviction. They claim, after all, to have photographic evidence of the bombs being planted.

* A brief “public safety” exemption to the Miranda warning is a lawful and long-standing procedure that is rationally applied to the circumstances of this case. It should be over (very) soon, but it’s not by itself illegitimate.

* The Miranda warning, in general, is a good thing, but not as good as it sounds; the primary effect of the Miranda warning is to legitimate police attempts to get you to surrender these rights through coercion or deceit. As I was putting it on Twitter earlier:

Mirandization exists not to guarantee the right to remain silent but to facilitate its abrogation.—
Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

Once you've been Mirandized properly, your right against self-incrimination can be safely violated.—
Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

* Most crucially, there is a zero percent chance that a guilty Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would somehow escape punishment on the basis of a legal technicality. No court — much less the Supreme Court — would ever allow that outcome. What would happen instead is that a sufficiently large exemption to Miranda would be discovered to allow a conviction to stand. Again, as I was putting it on Twitter:

Where I disagree with @ggreenwald and Dershowitz – I don't think there's any scenario in which Tsarnaev could "successfully argue" anything.—
Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

They'd never allow someone like this to get off on a technicality; they'd just argue it away. Law is power, not independent of power.—
Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

To say that another away: the risk of not Mirandizing him is weakening Miranda, not putting this prosecution at risk.—
Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

That’s why from my perspective the big issue is not Miranda, it’s presentment. Right now Tsaraev is still within the scope of the normal criminal justice system, as he should be. The bad outcome here is not his being denied a Miranda warning; it’s him not being allowed any trial at all.

More (not always agreeing with the above) from Orin Kerr, Scott Lemieux, Emily Bazelon, Freddie deBoer, and Glenn Greenwald.

Guantánamo Today, Guantánamo Tomorrow, Guantánamo Forever

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

Lots of Monday Links But In My Defense They Are All Fascinating

* Margaret Thatcher dies. Glenn Greenwald on speaking ill of the dead. We’re still living in Thatcher’s world. We Are All Thatcherites Now. “If I reported to you what Mrs. Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.” Thatcher on the climate. Obama on Thatcher.

* Will Democrats destroy the planet? And pretty gleefully, too, it looks like.

* I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that not a single one of our major institutions, within government or without, is capable of confronting this problem. And if we can’t, that’s rather the ballgame, isn’t it?

* The Methane Beneath Our Feet.

* ExxonMobil, FAA, Arkansas cops establish flight restriction zone, threaten reporters who try to document Mayflower, AR spill.

* It’s Art Pope’s nightmare, North Carolinians just live in it.

* Imagine for a moment if a loved one found themselves in legal jeopardy in some foreign country that had a 99% conviction rate.  You might ask what kind of illegitimate system are they up against.  You would likely conclude that any system where conviction is nearly-assured is stacked against the accused.  Yet this is exactly what the situation is in federal courts in the United States, the alleged bastion of liberty that does not hesitate to hold itself out as a beacon of freedom and poses as the benchmark of fairness that other nations are encouraged to follow.

* Pornokitsch considers one of my childhood favorites, Dragonlance Chronicles.

* Searching for Bill Watterson.

* How to make $1,000,000 at Rutgers. Rutgers Practices Were Not a Hostile Work Environment.

* Average Faculty Salaries, 2012–13. The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2012-13. Colleges Begin to Reward Professors for Doing Work That Actually Matters to Them.

* And with stretched budgets and public pressure to keep costs down, many colleges and universities are cutting back on tenure and tenure-track jobs. According to the report, such positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.

* The dark side of open access.

* Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessey, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.

* ‘Social Entrepreneurs’ Bring New Ideas, New Conflicts to Colleges.

* Coursera Takes a Nuanced View of MOOC Dropout Rates.

* Steinberg’s bill will undermine public education by entrenching private capital; Block’s overestimates the educational effectiveness of online for its target population and therefore helps foreclose more imaginative uses of the digital and the allocation of necessary resources to the CCC and the CSU.

* How the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy.

* So imagine my surprise — and envy — upon learning that these networkers moonlight in a profitable little business using Shakespeare to teach leadership, strategy and management to businesses and organizations. For $28,000 a day!

* The relentless drive for efficiency at U.S. companies has created a new harshness in the workplace. In their zeal to make sure that not a minute of time is wasted, companies are imposing rigorous performance quotas, forcing many people to put in extra hours, paid or not. Video cameras and software keep tabs on worker performance, tracking their computer keystrokes and the time spent on each customer service call.

* The Problem with Nonprofits.

* A brief history of public goods.

* New York Is Shelving Prison Law Libraries.

* An editor rejects The Left Hand of Darkness.

* Game of Thrones as subway map.

* Dear Television premieres at TNR with a review of the Mad Men premiere.

* Bill Cosby will speak at the 2013 Marquette commencement.

* And your single-serving-site of the day: How far away is Mars?

Tuesday Night Links

* Welcome to My Massive Open Online Cult!

Welcome to my MOOC—Massive Open Online Cult—a 10-week course based on the revolutionary educational models of Coursera and edX. Due to the “massive” nature of this course, I am unable to interact with prospective cult members individually. Though I am acutely aware that the most fulfilling cult leader/acolyte relationship arises from months of sustained and deeply personal psychological manipulation, this is simply not an option with the MOOC format. However, I will do my best to break down your resistance mechanisms throughout the taped lectures.

* Alex Kudera considers adjunct misery. Treating graduate students as people, not just scholars in training, will make them better professionals. Our Dirty Little Secret.

Now that three-quarters of college teachers are contingent faculty members like Duffleman, the depiction of professors as tweedy, pipe-smoking dons or turtlenecked, bearded radicals with actual authority is inherently reactionary. It paints all faculty members as a pampered elite, disconnected from the “real world,” ignoring the reality that most of them have more in common with Wal-Mart employees than they do with the one-percenters who preside over Kudera’s urban academic hellscape of poverty, terrorism, outsourcing, deskilling, externalization of costs, and privatization of profits.

* Hollis surveyed administrators in higher education, with the somewhat startling result that “close to 62% of respondents . . . confirmed that they had been bullied or witnessed bullying in their higher education positions in the last 18 months” (36). And while “African Americans, women, and members of the LGBT community experience proportionally higher levels of bullying,” Hollis found that men in higher education still reported rates of bullying higher than the national rate (41, 42). Hollis argues that these differential rates demonstrate that there is considerable intersection between bullying and harassment, which may expose colleges and universities to legal jeopardy.

* University of California – Diploma Mill.

(1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.

* As the debate about the drone and the war on terror in America emerges, these are the voices that are not heard—those of the victims and the targeted communities.

* Salesmen in the Surgical Suite.

* SCOTUSblog menu of today’s coverage of the Proposition 8 argument. Emblazoned in red, same-sex marriage dominates social media.

At this blog, Lyle Denniston observes that, with the Justices so clearly split along ideological lines, focusing on Justice Kennedy to predict an outcome was an “even more reliable approach this time” than usual, and Justice Kennedy appeared strongly tempted to conclude that the case was improvidently granted. Thus, as Amy Howe observes in her review of the arguments “in Plain English,” “the real question before the Court is not whether it would strike down Proposition 8, or what the broader effect of such a decision might be, but whether it is going to reach the merits of the case at all.” Tom Goldsteinexplains that if these indications hold true, the Court’s ruling will take one of two forms: Either the Court could conclude that the proponents of Proposition 8 lacked standing to bring the claim, in which case it would “vacate the Ninth Circuit opinion but leave in place the distinct court decision invalidating Proposition 8,” or “the Court may dismiss the case because of an inability to reach a majority. . . . The upshot of either scenario is a modest step forward for gay rights advocates, but not a dramatic one.”

* Atheism as the next civil right issue? We shall overcome…

* Robots Have Taken All the Good Jobs, Report Economists.

* Aaron Bady vs. magical realism. Aaron vs. the Great American Novel.

* Google Objects To Existence Of New Swedish Word.

* Planetary gets an omnibus.

* John Brunner accurately predicted 2013.

* Rand Paul continues his hard pitch at the readers of this blog: Sen. Paul: Obama, Bush ‘lucky’ they weren’t arrested for smoking pot as kids.

“Look, the last two presidents could conceivably have been put in jail for their drug use,” Paul said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Look what would have happened. It would have ruined their lives. They got lucky. But a lot of poor kids, particularly in the inner city, don’t get lucky. They don’t have good attorneys. They go to jail for these things. And I think it’s a big mistake.”

* And another great what if: With today’s technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I?

So Many Sunday Night Links

* In 1988 the Los Angeles Times predicted we’d have robots by now.

* Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, according to a new analysis of every high school student who took the SAT in a recent year. But what’s the story on the headline? “Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor.”

* The struggle of adjuncts against Obamacare.

* Meanwhile, China is spending $250 billion a year on education.

* Here’s a wild fact. At a Women in Science edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian led by Stierch, new articles about women scientists were nominated for deletion even as they were being posted.

* Bruno Latour wins the 2013 Holberg Prize.

* What else could the British government spend £100 billion on, if not nuclear weapons?

* Half of people shot by police are mentally ill, investigation finds.

* On Saturday, March 9, New York City police officers shot and killed 16-year-old Kimani Gray in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. After those seven bullets hit him, he lay on the ground and cried out, “Please don’t let me die.”

* Right to Lawyer Can Be Empty Promise for Poor.

* A Brief History of How We Lost the Commons.

* Graft and graffiti abatement.

* Facebook finally admits to tracking non-users.

* Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites. And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant. Welcome to the Internet without privacy.

* Search engines and the law.

* “Yours truly, The Colored People of Concordia Parish.”

Nearly five decades later, the Justice Department has written back — not directly to the family of Mr. Morris or to the black community of Concordia Parish, but to dozens of other families who lost loved ones during this country’s tumultuous and violent civil rights era.

Several years ago, the F.B.I. began reopening cold cases from that era — 112 at last count — raising hopes among some for justice. In all but about 20, though, the families of the long dead have received letters, often hand-delivered by F.B.I. agents, that say their cases have been closed, there is nothing more to be done — and please accept our condolences.

* 2 Ohio football players found guilty of rape, to be jailed at least 1 year; case roiled town. CNN Reports On The ‘Promising Future’ of the Steubenville Rapists, Who Are ‘Very Good Students.’ Same story at Raw Story. Reactions from all the worst people in the universe. What Steubenville’s Rape Trial Reminds Us About Consent.

* Why is the European Central Bank trying to cause a depression? I mean really. I mean really.

* “We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move.”

* Famous Seattle Ceramicist Exposed as Holocaust Denier. Wow.

* User-Renters in SimCity.

* The headline reads, “3,000 More Dead Pigs Won’t Make the Huangpu River Any Worse.”

* I’ve seen it a few times now, but I can’t believe any headline reads “Winnie Mandela Shocked at Possible Murder Charge.”

* Catholicism without Popes? The Pope Is Not the Church. Pope Francis sets casual style. Is Pope Francis a fraud?

* The Smartest Guy in the Room.

* And just because Marquette’s a three seed: March Madness raw seedings, before the bracket. And the bracket itself.

Thursday Night Links

* I saw this movie: Brains of rats connected allowing them to share information via internet.

* It bears repeating: The candidate’s adviser sent us a letter on which both “department of history” and “faculty of arts and sciences” were misspelled.

* Advice From Tenure-Track Faculty To Those Entering The Profession.

* Beyond the MOOC: While other universities move quickly to offer courses online for free, Carnegie Mellon University is instead starting for-profit efforts designed to capture segments of the education market. I’ll promote this a bit more as the date gets closer, but I’ll be speaking at a “What’s the Matter with MOOCs?” event at UWM in mid-March.

* Boots on Campus: Yale Flap Highlights Militarization of Academia.

* Student Debt Nearly Tripled In 8 Years, New York Federal Reserve Reports.

* The Dan Harmon backlash, at the AV Club and TNR (of all things).

* Justice, American style: The city’s complaint in federal court claims that if Ms. Truong is entitled to damages for the nearly three years she spent in jail awaiting trial, then Mr. Ryan is as much to blame as the city because he took too long to get the coerced confession tossed out of court by the judge.

* What is happening with Bob Woodward? Seriously, WTF Is Up With Bob Woodward?

* Will a Republican friend-of-the-court brief tip the Supreme Court in favor of gay marriage? I’m pretty sure it’ll have more luck than Obama’s.

* These numbers are unprecedented: by 2014 President Obama will have deported over 2 million people – more in six years than all people deported before 1997. That “before 1997″ actually means since 1892.

* AFL-CIO Executive Council Endorses Comprehensive Doomsday Policy for Working Families.

“We need union jobs today, not tomorrow,” said Rich Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO.  “The resolution balances our desire to protect the fragile ecosystem of the earth, while acknowledging the economic benefits of a high-road strategy to develop the doomsday technologies of the future.”

* Never forget: The entire staff of the West Wing died on Voyager.

* How Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the EmpireTurned Star Wars into Science Fiction.

* Women Work Harder Than Men, Study Says.

* The Turn against Nabokov.

* When the White House was completely gutted.

The social events of the 1948 holiday season had to be canceled. And with good reason: Experts called the third floor of the White House “an outstanding example of a firetrap.” The result of a federally commissioned report found the mansion’s plumbing “makeshift and unsanitary,” while “the structural deterioration [was] in ‘appalling degree,’ and threatening complete collapse.” The congressional commission on the matter was considering the option of abandoning the structure altogether in favor of a built-from-scratch mansion, but President Truman lobbied for the restoration.

* When Martin Luther King played pool.

* “Preserved” plushies in jars.

* Help wanted: must be infallible.

* They’re making a movie out of The Drowned World.

* Shale Gas Fracking Will Be Around For a Long, Long Time.

* And American history, Breitbart style: Journalists on the campaign trail saw Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. We all saw it!

In Which Antonin Scalia Sets Out to Completely Break My Spirit, and Succeeds

Today’s hearing on the Voting Rights Act featured some of Scalia’s most breathtaking anti-textualist and ad-hoc reasoning ever. The argument is literally that the Supreme Court is tasked to strike down popular laws because otherwise they’ll be continually reauthorized in perpetuity because people want them. Like the Founders intended!

Just astounding.

More here and here. My sole consolation here is @studentactivism’s shocking discovery that Scalia’s entire term on the Supreme Court is null and void by the well-known Constitutional principle that it doesn’t count if it was unanimous. Article 1. Look it up.

Wong Kim Ark

At the heart of the coming battle over the constitutional right to U.S. citizenship for everyone born in this country is how the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, is interpreted. And at the heart of that interpretation is a 112-year-old Supreme Court decision, based on a lawsuit filed by a young man from San Francisco named Wong Kim Ark.