Friday Night

* You will have to forgive a bit of political incorrectness, but I think it important. #### happens to be a beauty and enhances her fine looks with a careful attention to her grooming and clothes. What not to say in a letter of reference.

* Giving women in academia genuine equal opportunities.

* How Washington Could Make College Tuition Free (Without Spending a Penny More on Education).

* The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability.

* We reexamine prospects for constituency control in American politics with original data describing nearly 2,000 state legislative candidates’ perceptions of mass opinion in their districts and recent advances in public opinion estimation that allow us to determine actual district level opinion with precision. Actual district opinion explains only a modest share of the variation in politicians’ perceptions of their districts’ views. Moreover, there is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points, while liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points. A follow-up survey demonstrates that politicians appear to learn nothing from democratic campaigns or elections that leads them to correct these shortcomings. Electoral selection has a limited impact on whether the chosen representative is congruent with the majority of her constituents. These findings suggest a substantial conservative bias in American political representation and bleak prospects for constituency control of politicians when voters’ collective preferences are less than unambiguous. Via @chrislhayes.

* How many people do you know who have been shot?

* Why ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’ Is A Major Step Back For Witches and Women. The Sad, Century-Long History of Terrible ‘Wizard of Oz’ Movies.

* If you want to know why we need to educate men not to be sexually aggressive, look no further than what happened when Zerlina Maxwell went on television to say that we need to educate men how not to be sexually aggressive.

* Everything we write will be used against us. Every claim on or lament against society that we write will be received in the same way as accounts of rape — as lies. We don’t care anymore.

* At TNI: Here comes 56 Up.

* At n+1: Sadomodernism (The Work of Michael Haneke).

* The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble.

* Conservative Media Star James O’Keefe Pays $100,000 Settlement For ACORN Pimp Sting. ACORN reinstated and refunded, no harm done, right?

* How Did Gallup Blow the Election?

* And today in symbolism: John Brennan Sworn in as CIA Director Using Constitution Lacking Bill of Rights.

Wednesday Morning Links

* “Professor Furedi, how do you get around learning outcomes?” a young lecturer asks me in a breakout session. I have just spent 10 minutes explaining the corrosive influence of learning outcomes on education to my audience at the recent Think Festival in The Hague. Nevertheless, I am caught off guard by my blunt questioner. That is probably why my reply is a bit more candid than I had intended it to be. “I just make them up and ignore them,” I say.

* The good folks on the most-excellent BBC Radio/Open University statistical literacy programme More or Less decided to answer a year-old Reddit argument about how many Lego bricks can be vertically stacked before the bottom one collapses.

* Chris Hayes: ‘The Time For Choosing Sides On Climate Change Is Now.’ To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios.

* American Kafka: A former death row inmate with intellectual disabilities has languished in the Texas prison system for over 30 years despite having no valid criminal conviction.

* The Sublime Sci-Fi Buildings That Communism Built.

* Teaser trailer for Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.

* Dan Harmon vs. television.

* 49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

* And Bill O’Reilly explains how Christianity is not a religion. The War on Christmas is confusing, y’all.

Too Many Linkdumps Lately – 2

* Can you detect the subtle flaw in SEIU’s NC strategy?

* Another Detroit slideshow.

* Rachel Maddow spent twelve minutes debunking the ACORN hoax last night. Truly great television.

* Two profiles of WikiLeaks from the Independent and Mother Jones.

* Kumbwada, Nigeria, where an “ancient curse” is said to keep men off the throne. Via MeFi.

* Philly to decriminalize marijuana? California to legalize it?

* David Cross says probably no Arrested Development movie. This is quite literally the worst news I have ever heard.

* I’m amazed you were ever allowed to smoke on a submarine.

* The for-profit university: threat or menace?

* Are you absolutely, positively, and wholeheartedly ready to publish your novel?

* And confidential to Glenn Beck fans: Glenn Beck thinks you’re a sucker.

Saturday, Is It?

* Wearing a revealing prom dress? That’s a paddlin’.

* Do corporations have an obligation to increase shareholder value over all other considerations? Turns out the answer is “not really”—and corporate personhood is actually on the side of angels here:

Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the topic, so we conducted a systematic analysis of a century’s worth of legal theory and precedent. It turns out that the law provides a surprisingly clear answer: Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person…

More at MeFi.

* California Attorney General Jerry Brown has seen the unedited tapes of the James O’Keefe hoax that brought down ACORN and has determined they were dishonestly edited.

* Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit have been cleared (again) in the Climategate stolen email “scandal.”

* Slate has the four craziest lies about health care reform.

* Didn’t Joss say Dollhouse was over and that the story wouldn’t continue in any form? Now there’s talk of comics.

* Questions with too many answers: “Why America hates Duke basketball.”

* I Can Hold My Breath Forever.

Politics Thursday

* I’m shocked, shocked to find Mitt Romney caught being disingenuous about health care reform. Jonathan Chait has more lying liars on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, while Scott Lemieux explains another reason why even a radically activist Roberts court would be reluctant to declare the mandate unconstitutional:

But let’s say that Bush v. Gore vindicates the strongest form of legal realism and that we will soon see that Supreme Court justices are purely political actors. Would striking down the individual mandate ultimately advance conservative policy goals? Almost certainly not. On the one hand, it would be easy for Congress to get around the decision by simply structuring the tax differently and constitutionally, restoring the status quo. But what if Congress can’t? In some ways, this would be worse for conservatives — unless Congress was also willing to repeal very popular regulations (which even conservatives concede is a non-starter), the result will be the bankruptcy of insurance companies and a paved road to socialized insurance.

* Rachel Maddow had a pair of very striking pieces on right-wing incitements to violence last night.

* The health care reform reconciliation sidecar goes back to the House for technical reasons. It’s expected to be about a few hours delay. Incidentally, Steve Benen has issued marching orders on what we’re supposed to call the new program: ACA, the Affordable Care Act.

* The latest support for my theory that the GOP can’t hold its perma-No in the wake of Obama’s health care victory comes from Bob Corker (R-TN):

“This is so unlike the health care debate,” said Corker, noting that some of his Republican colleagues have made misjudgments on that point over the last month. “I don’t think people realize that this is an issue that almost every American wants to see passed. There’ll be a lot of pressure on every senator and every House member to pass financial regulation.”

* On the other hand, Republicans are apparently planning another Bunning-style freakout, this time starring Tom Coburn. In other Senate obstructionism news, the Republican objecting to any Senate committee business continuing past 2 PM was North Carolina’s own Richard Burr. Here’s still more on the breakdown of Senate procedure from Donkeylicious.

* How the Times‘ bias killed ACORN.

* And an amazing story from local alt-weekly Independent Weekly: N.C. eugenics survivors seek justice.

At 82 years old, Agnes is not sure she’ll live to see when or if the proposed compensation is paid. She appreciates the efforts being made in North Carolina to reconcile its eugenic past by acknowledging what she and thousands of others in our state went through. “It’s nice to know there are people out there that really care about your rights.”

Elaine, Agnes, Willis and Nial wonder why the American values of equal protection and individual liberty did not apply to them, and there are no simple answers to give them. They were caught within an ideological framework that said it’s acceptable to toss aside ethics and trample over the most basic of human rights if someone is perceived to not meet certain social expectations.

Now in her mid-50s, Elaine Riddick is one of the younger survivors of North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program. From her apartment on the 32nd floor of an Atlanta skyrise, she has a beautiful view of the entire city. She says she has been able to obtain some measure of peace, which she attributes to her faith in God and finally letting go of the self-blame that she carried for years. Her adult son, Tony Riddick, whom she describes as “brilliant,” still lives in Winfall and owns his own computer electronics company.

Elaine has a loving boyfriend who, she says, takes good care of her and has a positive relationship with her son and siblings. Still, sometimes the cruelties from her past come back to haunt her. “Sometimes I think, what is happiness? Am I really happy? I don’t think I will ever be happy, because of what they took from me.”

Elaine was sterilized without her consent (or even knowledge) after giving birth to a child at age 14. She had been raped.

Mostly Non-Health-Care Links

* ACORN will disband as a result of the O’Keefe hoax.

* Via Twitter I see NBC News is reporting (no link yet) that the Senate parliamentarian has rejected the GOP challenge to the health care sidecar. Tough luck guys.

* Arundhati Roy: When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other? Can’t let a link to Roy without a link to her fantastic piece on dams, “The Greater Common Good.”

* “I am chaotic and lazy”: an interview with Magnus Carlsen, the #1 chess player in the world and youngest-ever chess grandmaster. Via Kottke.

* Climate change may be killing the scent of flowers. Two thousand scientists sign letter to Senate demanding climate change action.

* Long profile of David Simon and Treme in The New York Times. Via Occasional Fish, a dissenting view.

* New College Graduates To Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves. It was a good idea when Philip K. Dick thought of it and it’s a good idea now!

* And at 81 years old, James Randi has come out of the closet.

Thurs. 2

* The median wealth for single black women aged 36 to 49 is $5. The comparable number for single white women ages 36-49 is $42,600. For single white men 36-49, it’s near $70,000. For married or cohabitating white women (18-64), it’s $167,500…

* What liberal media? Sex scandals only matter when they involve Democrats.

* What liberal media? For some inscrutable reason people are still taking ACORN fraud James O’Keefe seriously.

* A reminder that suburbia doesn’t “just happen.” It’s not the market; it’s deliberate policy. We can change it.

* As every progressive blog has reported today—I’m assuming it was marching orders from Comrade Klein—support for health care reform is going back up.

* And another good sign: Bernie Sanders: I’m Prepared To Introduce Public Option Amendment.

I Assume the Media Apology Is On Its Way

A federal judge in New York City has ruled that the government improperly defunded ACORN. Good.

Spring Break Goes By Too Fast

* Colbert’s segment last Thursday on James O’Keefe, Sean Hannity, and the misleading ACORN tapes is must-see. Jon Stewart’s experiment with Chatroulette was pretty funny too.

* Important equations:

* How porn invented the future. Via MeFi.

* Mars, bitches? “Obama to unveil ‘ambitious plan’ for NASA.”

* Steve Benen updates your dictionary.

* Top 10 Jeff Bridges movie his Oscar tonight was really for.

* Via Ze Frank, here’s a PBS Frontline piece based on perennial nonfiction workshop favorite The Undertaking.

* And I second Yglesias’s recommendation of “a great graphic in today’s NYT summing up the past uses of the budget reconciliation process and making it clear that pretty much everything Republican Senators have said on the subject is a lie.”

(Not-Actually-) Thursday Night Linkdump

* People who write sonnets should be hung!

* Inside Philip K Dick’s FBI file.

* If I recall correctly, Jon and Hayden’s first screenplay was an American Pie rip-off called Gross, so it’s a little strange to see them now taking over the franchise. Congrats, guys!

* Democrats continue to stupidly chase voters they’ll never get.

* Pandagon has an update on the many lies of James O’Keefe. If accountability actually mattered to the mainstream press they’d have given ACORN’s exoneration the same press they gave the original, bogus story. I don’t think they’ve given it any.

* On filibuster reform, Chris Dodd is a bad guy and Evan Bayh is a good guy. Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

* Related: Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans.

* Meet The Tea Partiers: Male, Rich and College Educated.

* 80% of Americans hate the Citizens United. Of course, that’s still not enough consensus for Democrats to act.

* Yes, use reconciliation to bring back the public option. It’s good policy and people want it. (And then there were nine.)

* Maddow v. Beck.

* Black Man Puts His Feet On Desk, Wingnuts Furious.

* And Bill Simmon links to officially the best Super Bowl photo ever.

Tuesday Night Linkdump

* From the Onion: Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti’.

* In an opinion issued on Monday, a three-judge panel of the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals hexed a lawsuit challenging a ban on the game of Dungeons & Dragons by the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.

* Welcome to the future: ‘Movie made by chimpanzees to be broadcast on television.’

* SCOTUSblog has a Citizens United roundup with a ton of links. Here’s another legislative fix for Citizens United that targets any company doing business with the federal government.

* Bitter Laughter has your word of the day: chronesthesia.

* ‘The most likely scenario for using combat aircraft in a U.S. war is an alien invasion’: Another day, another chart about our insane national priorities.

* The Canavan Plan for health care sanity is now “the consensus” among Democrats on the Hill, says John Podesta. Clyburn says House Democrats are on board. The usual suspects are unhappy, but the nice thing about reconciliation is they don’t matter.

* Of course, when the elites think their money is at risk, 51 Senate votes is suddenly enough.

* James O’Keefe, the gonzo journalist whose deceptively edited tapes brought down ACORN, has been arrested with four others for allegedly attempting to illegally wiretap Mary Landrieu’s office. If convicted he could spend 10 years in jail. Fox, naturally, is devastated.

* Today’s stunning evidence that paywalls don’t work.

* And Oregon voted today on whether or not to eat the rich.

Saturday!

* io9’s 20 best science fiction books of the 2000s. I say any list missing The Years of Rice and Salt, Accelerando, *and* Cloud Atlas is pretty deeply suspect.

* A federal judge has halted implementation of the ban on funding for ACORN on the grounds that the law is a bill of attainder.

* “Those scores on the prestigious test are in the same range as would be expected from children who never attended school and simply guessed at the answers,” said Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager of Detroit Public Schools, during a press conference Tuesday.

* David Rakoff’s oral history of the Gore presidency. A nice idea whose execution is marred by some badly forced jokes and a total inability to write like Jon Stewart, Josh Marshall, or anybody else.

* And the Morning News has your photos of abandoned shopping malls.

Friday Night!

* A Canadian SF writer has come down with a tough case of good old-fashioned American justice. Stay safe, Peter.

* Is Sci-Fi Wire really right about this? How can a Romero zombie movie not get a distribution deal?

* Tim Fernholz fact-checks the Matt Taibbi piece I linked earlier and finds it somewhat wanting.

* “I found the Nobel speech disappointing … To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president’s characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete.”

* Joe Conason with some more details on those propagandized ACORN tapes.

* ‘What Was Popular Mechanics Thinking?’ Via MeFi.

Lots of Tuesday Links

* Steve Benen has another post with more details on the new health care compromise. There’s also more health care coverage from Atul Gawande in the New Yorker this week.

* TPM uncovers something rather interesting in its reporting on the independent investigation stemming from those ACORN videos:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding.

I certainly hope more specific information on this follows; just how drastic were these voiceover replacements? My bullshitometer must be completely on the fritz; even granting the videos were plainly disingenuous, I never really considered the possibility they could be out-and-out frauds.

* Science finally explains why I’m such a terrible sibling/husband/colleague/person: It’s all my younger brother’s fault.

* James Fallows compares Climategate coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post and discovers the Post is terrible. Weird to see Time of all places getting the story basically right:

According to PSU’s Mann, that statistical “trick” that Jones refers to in one e-mail — which has been trumpeted by skeptics — simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It’s an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade — hardly the stuff of conspiracy.

As for Mann and Jones’ apparent effort to punish the journal Climate Research, the paper that ignited his indignation is a 2003 study that turned out to be underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute. Eventually half the editorial board of the journal quit in protest. And even if CRU’s climate data turns out to have some holes, the group is only one of four major agencies, including NASA, that contribute temperature data to major climate models — and CRU’s data largely matches up with the others’.

It’s true that the e-mails reveal CRU climate scientists were dismissive of skeptics, often in harsh terms, but that’s not unusual for scientists. Science is a rough arena, as anyone who has ever survived a doctoral examination knows, and scientists aren’t shy about attacking ideas they believe are wrong — especially in private communication. Still, Jones et al. could have been more open and accepting of their critics, and if it turns out that e-mails were deleted in response to the Freedom of Information request for data, heads should roll. (Jones maintains that no e-mails or documents were deleted.)

Ultimately, though, we need to place Climategate/Swifthack in its proper context: amidst a decades-long effort by the fossil-fuel industry and other climate skeptics to undercut global-warming research — often by means that are far more nefarious than anything that appears in the CRU e-mails.

* [Many] More Americans Believe in Angels than Global Warming. Both climate change and evolution edge out ghosts and UFOs by only a few percent.

* But don’t worry: ‘Forget Earth – let’s move to Mars!’ Ecological crisis solved.

* Ecology as ideology: How China uses environmental rhetoric to justify displacing minority groups.

* History as the nightmare from which we are trying to awake: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Barack Obama, slavery, and white guilt.

* Film School Rejects considers the culturally significant films of the decade. New York Magazine says the ’00s is when TV became art. More lists from Fimoculous’s annual list of lists. Kottke’s doing one too.

* How the Apocalypse Would Happen if Heaven Were a Small Non-Profit.

* LRB pans Woody Allen’s two most recent films, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Whatever Works, which we watched this week and about which I concur entirely (though Larry David almost rescues Whatever Works.)

* Whiskey Fire reviews Stanley Fish’s review of Going Rogue.

* Another 100 Greatest Quotes from The Wire.

* And Twitter is ablaze with news that Mystery Science Theater is now on Hulu.

More!

* Ireland wants a rematch against France, but FIFA says it won’t happen. More here.

* Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home as a POW, 1944.

* The headline reads, “IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat.”

* Eric Barker calls this New York Times article on DNA testing and parental rights “thought-provoking”, and I suppose it is—but mostly I was completely aghast at the idea that a father would desert his child after a decade just because the child turned out to be “not really his,” “someone else’s kid.” Speaking off the cuff, it seems to me the best solution here would probably just be to change the law to allow children to have more than two legal parents—but regardless of the legal question there’s a clear ethical imperative to remain a parent the child you have raised and claim to love, whatever the mother might have done or said in the past. In some sense this actually seems to me to be beyond ethics, or rather before; it seems to me you’d want to stay the child’s father, that you’d be desperate to, in whatever way you could.

* Autocomplete Me is a blog devoted to revealing the weirdest gems in Google’s autocomplete feature. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* The Board of Regents for the University of California system has voted to raise tuition 32% over 2008. How the University Works declares California is burning.

* Troubled times in Casino City. Via Atrios.

* Stopping ACTA. Via Boing Boing.

* Dump Geithner: A growing consensus?

* Good and bad polling news: Even Fox News viewers overwhelmingly think the bow was appropriate (good news), but 52% of Republicans think ACORN stole 9.5 million votes in the 2008 election to put Obama in the White House (bad news). Naturally, ACORN stole NY-23 as well.

* Meanwhile, 52% of Americans are shockingly misinformed about whether an army of gorillas could beat an army of bears.

* And the news story that launched a thousand 2010 puns: there could be fishlike life on Europa. All these puns are yours, except Europa. Attempt no punning there.