Tuesday Night Links
* In light of increased pressure on President Obama to order a military strike on Syria, leading historians and military experts on Tuesday simply pointed to the United States’ longstanding and absolutely impeccable record of successful bombing campaigns over the past 60 years.
* How to Treat the Freshmen, 1495.
“Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen. Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.”
Leipzig University Statute (1495)
* Slavery should be seen not as a sure sign of economic backwardness, but as a technically refined system for coordinating abstract knowledge and bodily violence: intelligence and torture, free trade and imperial war, financial data and brutal physical toil—all adding up to booming world trade, accumulating wealth, and ecological degradation. In this picture, the Cotton Kingdom looks like nothing less than the homeland of neoliberalism, and master and slave, the origin story of contemporary America.
* Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning.
* Family Sues NCAA After Concussion-Related Football Death.
* Jerry Brown proposes $315 million to lease private prison cells rather than release inmates.
* When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland.
* And Dean Norris spoils the end of Breaking Bad. Shocking.
Gerry Canavan 
A neoliberal would destroy cash crops or governments. Destroying money is nothing.
Alex Greenberg
August 28, 2013 at 3:54 am
That seems overly narrow — neoliberals have destroyed a ton of wealth too! But the comparison I was making was to people with “all the money in the world” destroying it rather than giving it to people who need it, and the lunacy of “I’ve got a reason to destroy it!” in that context.
gerrycanavan
August 28, 2013 at 9:49 am
Money is not wealth.
Alex Greenberg
August 28, 2013 at 1:42 pm
Destroying money means nothing. Hoarding or destroying commodities means something.
Alex Greenberg
August 28, 2013 at 1:43 pm
Also, the picture that Jello Biafra painted of Jerry Brown a few decades ago – one that he subsequently retracted – is suddenly starting to look more and more apt: hippy fascist hypocrite.
Alex Greenberg
August 28, 2013 at 3:57 am
Jerry Brown is the worst.
gerrycanavan
August 28, 2013 at 9:49 am