Sunday Links for the Sunday Reader

* This president delivers compassion with a kind face and from a decorous and understated height. And that seems to be the role he prefers to play in the world too. It was doubtless the posture from which he would have liked to address the Arab Spring, and for that matter the civil war in Syria, if only Assad had obeyed when Obama said he must go. Obama has a larger-spirited wish to help people than any of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter; though caution bordering on timidity has kept him from speaking with Carter even once in the last five years. Obama roots for the good cause but often ends up endorsing the acceptable evil on which the political class or the satisfied classes in society have agreed. He watches the world as its most important spectator.

* Meanwhile: Obama Steps Up Efforts To Deport Unaccompanied Children Crossing The Border. And all at the low, low cost of just $2 billion!

* Local news:  Wisconsin second only to Alabama in cuts to education funding, study shows.

* On college debate, race, and the very idea of rules.

* You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

* …the only definitive statement I can make about Game of Thrones has less to do with what was happening on screen, and more with the popular and critical reaction to it, the fact that the fourth season was the one in which a critical mass of people suddenly noticed just how rapey this show is.

* The point is that Godzilla is not an external menace. Godzilla is built into the system. Godzilla is our way of life.

* Whoa if true.

* The secret world of oil.

* Academia and disability: Why Are Huge Numbers of Disabled Students Dropping Out of College?

* The New York Times has a followup Q&A on its controversial piece about student debt from last week.

* “Far from being complacent about higher education, America is the site of a perpetual crisis narrative about our colleges.”

* In November 2012, when Kamel’s lawyers showed the video evidence to the assistant district attorney handling his case, the prosecutor dropped the charges immediately, motioning for a dismissal. The case was built on police testimony that was clearly false. But though Perez’s untrue statement had forced Kamel to endure months of anxiety and trial preparation, and sent prosecutors most of the way towards trying him, the officer suffered no consequence for his actions. On police perjury.

* Arizona State Universities takes the side of a cop abusing one of its own professors on video. Arizona Professor Body Slammed By Police During Jaywalking Stop, Now Charged With Assaulting Officer.

* Today, the UCPD is, as the university told me in a statement, “a highly professional police force,” and one of the largest private security forces in the country. Hyde Park “remains one of the safest neighborhoods in the city,” according to the statement sent to me by the University, and, “All of the neighborhoods patrolled by the University of Chicago benefit from the extra service.”

* Three Ways (Two Good, One Bad) to Fight Campus Rape.

* It Took Studying 25,782,500 Kids To Begin To Undo The Damage Caused By 1 Doctor.

* An illustrated history of Westeros.

* Independent Weekly catches Counting Crows phoning it in in Raleigh.

* Poor whites and the left.

* Advocacy in the Age of Colorblindness.

* This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy: Hate Crimes Against The Homeless Jumped 24 Percent Last Year.

* U.S. Pledges To Stop Producing New Landmines. The dream of the 1990s is alive.

* Mexico tried giving poor people cash instead of food. It worked.

* How Sci Fi Visionary Octavia Butler Influenced This Detroit Revolutionary.

* Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City.

* When the Amish get rich.

* “Can anyone say no to this?”

* The Golden Gate Bridge will get suicide nets.

* Against the Fermi Paradox.

* Psychologists Find that Nice People Are More Likely to Hurt You. I knew those dicks were hiding something.

* On Facebook science: The real scandal, then, is what’s considered “ethical.”

* Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?

* Ripped from the pages of the Colbert Report: NC General Assembly Allows Possum Drop Exception.

* And Martin Freeman says no more new Sherlock until December 2015.

Weekend! Links!

*  Program for the 2014 MLA Subconference, January 8-9 at Columbia College Chicago.

* CFP for “Joss Whedon: A Celebration” at DePaul University this May.

* The New Yorker considers Kim Stanley Robinson: Our Greatest Political Novelist?

Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.

* It is an open question as to whether academics today, in their heart of hearts, still realize that the choice between the employability agenda or the death of universities actually means the death of universities through the employability agenda.

* Our football team here at Purdue went 1-11, losing the final ten games in a row by an average of almost 25 points and going 0-8 in Big Ten play, including a 20 point blowout to arch-rival Indiana. The lone victory on the season came through a nail-biting 20-14 performance against Indiana State… an FCS school… who themselves went 1-11. If beating the doormat team of the Missouri Valley Conference is the highlight of your season, it’s perhaps time for a reevaluation of priorities. After ranking 122nd in points scored a game and 114th in points against a game, making a legitimate case for being the worst team in FBS football, the campus is buzzing about how long a rebuild will require and whether first-year coach Darrell Hazzell is the man to lead it. With the season’s “One Brick Higher” slogan now seeming like a sad joke, my message to the Purdue community is simple: don’t rebuild. Retreat. The best path forward for Purdue University is to dismantle its football program altogether. 

* I also liked Freddie’s piece on how the permanent squabble between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty plays directly into the hands of administrators.

* This Thousand-Year Institution Could Really Learn Something from These Fly-By-Night Scams: Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge.

* Invisible Rituals: Pre-Graduate School Programs and Developing Diversity.

* Rise of the Lady Adjuncts.

* “If you haven’t been in a hen plant, you don’t know what hell is”: Animal rights activists vs. the agribusiness industry in Rolling Stone.

* Liberalism is a game the rich play with themselves. They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen: Liberalism in the tank.

* Aaron Bady considers Mandela, all of him.

If you’re a president, it probably feels good to think about this, about how a revolutionary came to defend the stability of the society he once threatened to overturn. It probably also feels good to think of him as historical, as past: like Nkrumah or Lumumba, he is no longer our problem, no longer our responsibility. Instead of a defiant refusal to stop short of victory and a refusal to compromise or negotiate on principles, he can represent the passing away of that very thing.

* Want the best person for the job? Don’t interview.

* Why Don’t Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?

* Jackson’s Hobbit II so little resembles the book, it may as well be called Some Further Adventures in Middle-earth. The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction.

* Here’s Every Time Paul Rudd Has Shown the Same Movie Clip on Conan.

* Jaws retold as Peanuts comic.

* Everything in the oceans is dying.

* The Economy Looks Good Because The Data Has Been So Bad For So Long.

* No Civilian Leadership for NSA After All.

* Ph.D.s With and Without Jobs.

* Please excuse Davontaye, he suffers from povertenza.

* Belgium took a big step on Thursday to becoming the first country to allow euthanasia for incurably ill children, after the upper house of Parliament voted by a large majority to extend to minors a 2002 law legalizing the practice for adults.

* A national study being released today in book form found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely than those with just average or below average looks to go on to earn a four-year college degree.

* Take that, conventional wisdom! Study: Long Distance Relationships Can Work.

* Whether you agree with the ASA’s boycott of Israeli state institutions or not, I think we can all agree that to boycott Larry Summers.

* The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.

* America, 2013: No charges after man pulls gun on ‘b*tch’ with disabled kid over Walmart parking delay.

* Your odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million. As of Oct. 22, those odds changed to 1 in 259 million. The Lottery Is a Predator and You Are Its Math-Illiterate Prey.

* Space Race back on! China lands on the Moon!

* Hollywood finally goes too far.

* And Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation. Overflow Error: Abort, Retry, Fail….

Wednesday!

* Duke’s Jebediah Purdy has the solution to the problem of animal-rights muckrakers I blogged about yesterday: 

Fairness and safety are real issues. So is transparency, and that is why we should require confined-feeding operations and slaughterhouses to install webcams at key stages of their operations. List the URL’s to the video on the packaging. There would be no need for human intrusion into dangerous sites. No tricky angles or scary edits by activists. Just the visual facts. If the operators felt their work misrepresented, they could add cameras to give an even fuller picture.

On what grounds could the slaughterhouse industry possibly object to that? Via DotEarth’s post on the personhood of non-humans.

* All told, over the last five fiscal years, the Education Department has generated $101.8 billion in profit from student borrowers, thanks to low borrowing costs for the government and fixed interest rates for students, budget documents show.

* Student loan interest rates are scheduled to double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Congress extended the lower rate on federal student loans for a year in an effort to control the nation’s formidable student debt crisis, but will now have to decide whether or not to cancel the interest rate hike once again. Interests Diverge on Interest Rates.

* Every meaningful resistance to neoliberalism must be a feminism.

* Kitchen Sink Socialism.

* Now, however, the City College of San Francisco might pay a heavy price for its faculty-oriented ethos: being shut down.

* Parasitic on the prestige of the academy, while doing precious little to contribute to it, the MOOC is starting to look a lot more like a mooch.

* The L.A. Times pans the New University of California.

* Millions of Americans have grown up with a defining family immigration story. But while our families may have endured hardship coming to America, the simple fact is that most of our immigration stories would not be possible at all under today’s immigration laws. Great idea for a site.

* The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won’t linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed “gone.” It’s a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.

* Scenes from the class struggle in the future: Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium.

* Animated Renderings of America After 25 Feet of Sea Level Rise.

* They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.

* Trends in Instructional Staff Employment Status, 1975-2011.

* Moonrise over LA.

* And xkcd considers the mise-en-Adobe.

The Wire: The Animated Series (and Several More)

* Krugman on how the Obama administration came to make its disastrous pivot to the deficit.

* Mad science experiment of the day: Harry Harlow’s (no joke) pit of despair. I wish it were a joke.

* Right-wing lies are printed above the fold on page one; the corrections turn up six months later on page 13 of section F, if they get ever printed at all. Today’s example: the Post’s anti-union snowplow hoax from last winter, thoroughly debunked today to absolute crickets from the media. In their defense, they did manage to catch that one guy lying about his wang.

* Example two: The stats on climate denialism in the media. The denialists outnumber climate realists on the teevee by more than 3-1.

 * Coming soon—The Wire: The Animated Series. There’s more here, but nothing else lives up to this magic of this one.

* And this one is for all my Hoosiers: please, don’t be afraid of the space rays.