End of 2013 Mega Link Dump – All Links Must Go!

* This gentleman violently inserted his finger into dozens of victims’ anuses. Sometimes his friends held guns to the victims’ heads to force them to comply. Why was he sentenced to just two years in prison? Because he was an officer with the Milwaukee police department! Officer who forced dozens of anal cavity searches for fun gets only 2 years in prison.

* I wonder if it worked: The Soviet Union spent $1 billion on mind-control program.

* Utah solving homelessness problem by giving the homeless places to live. Madness!

* Once you insist that lives that are worth respecting are the lives that are most devoted to pecuniary gain, you have reached a road that has no ending, and a particularly strange one for humanists to walk.

* Against fraternities.

* Rhetoric and Composition: Academic Capitalism and Cheap Teachers.

* The humanities are saved! Brain function ‘boosted for days after reading a novel.’

* Using detailed publication and citation data for over 50,000 articles from 30 major economics and finance journals, we investigate whether network proximity to an editor influences research productivity. During an editor’s tenure, his current university colleagues publish about 100% more papers in the editor’s journal, compared to years when he is not editor. In contrast to editorial nepotism, such “inside” articles have significantly higher ex post citation counts, even when same-journal and self-cites are excluded. Our results thus suggest that despite potential conflicts of interest faced by editors, personal associations are used to improve selection decisions.

* Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions are the still the only ones you need. More links below!

* Skeleton thought to be Etruscan prince is actually a princess. Prehistoric cave prints show most early artists were women.

* A Gender-Neutral Pronoun (Re)emerges in China.

* Academia is a war zone.

* Towards critical humility.

* We still don’t really know how bicycles work.

* But it’s a lie. Winning does not scale. We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.

* In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.”

* Gasp! California Attorney General: Legalizing Marijuana Would Save Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars A Year.

* Gasp! Benghazi was a nonsense story cynically hyped up by a flailing presidential candidate for cheap heat the whole time!

* Gasp! Some highly specialized, technical, non-outsourceable work is still well paid, and the New York Times is ON IT.

* Huffington Post blogger argues just straight-up ripping off your babysitter because, I don’t know, freedom or something.

* And then we robbed all the pensions also because freedom I guess.

* Cancel all the unemployment insurance because freedom! North Carolina Shows How to Crush the Unemployed.

* 10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe.

* The life of a fast food striker.

* If you thought Southern California mansions could hardly get more outlandish, consider the latest must-have feature: A moat encircling the property.

* One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy: My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl..

* It’s Kwanzaa everywhere but Paul Mulshine’s heart.

* Twee fascism. Cupcake fascism.

* I’m beginning to think some of these university presidents are not all that serious about defending academic freedom.

* Another scene from the war on education in Chicago. Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils: Math of Today’s Jammed Schools. Silicon Valley techno-wizards sending their kinds to a tech-free school.

* Worst people in the world watch: But over the past decade, the number of “hospice survivors” in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying, a Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.

* Just kidding, the worst person in the world is Andrea Peyser.

*  How Doctor Who Betrayed Matt Smith.

* The death of the alt-weekly.

* lolmythesis.

* Are dolphins intelligent? Well, they get high.

* Previewing World Cup 2022: The Qatar Chronicles.

* Having already inaugurated full communism, radical De Blasio turns his pitiless mayoral gaze to horse-drawn carriages.

* Looking for a New Year’s Read? Magical realism/surreal books by women.

* And only Vermont-style communism can save us now.

Disturbing the Graves of the Old Ones

Easter Island heads have bodies. Here’s one vote for putting them back the way we found them and never speaking of any of this again.

Tuesday!

* Grieving, From Asbury Park. Clarence Clemons and the History of the Rock Sideman. With Clarence Clemons, the notes that mattered most weren’t on the saxophone.

* Mysteries of Göbekli Tepe.

Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife. “I, my colleagues, we all thought, What? How?” Schmidt said. Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. The accomplishment was astonishing, but it was hard to understand how it had been done or what it meant. “In 10 or 15 years,” Schmidt predicts, “Göbekli Tepe will be more famous than Stonehenge. And for good reason.”

* Of course you had me at Barthelme in Space.

* Mother Jones and a brief history of the speedup.

Webster’s defines speedup as “an employer’s demand for accelerated output without increased pay,” and it used to be a household word. Bosses would speed up the line to fill a big order, to goose profits, or to punish a restive workforce. Workers recognized it, unions (remember those?) watched for and negotiated over it—and, if necessary, walked out over it.

But now we no longer even acknowledge it—not in blue-collar work, not in white-collar or pink-collar work, not in economics texts, and certainly not in the media (except when journalists gripe about the staff-compacted-job-expanded newsroom). Now the word we use is “productivity,” a term insidious in both its usage and creep. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don’t you want to be a productive member of society? Pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that US productivity (a.k.a. economic output per hour worked) consistently leads the world. Yes, year after year, Americans wring even more value out of each minute on the job than we did the year before. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Except what’s good for American business isn’t necessarily good for Americans. We’re not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory…

* UNC gets hit with a Notice of Allegations from the NCAA.

* And really, honestly: how much jewelry does Newt Gingrich buy?

Monday Night Links

* On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure. (Via R. Vu.)

* Science proves naps are great.

* Science proves 3-D movies hurt your brain.

* Should we clone Neanderthals? OBVIOUSLY. (Please don’t.)

* Time to renew my campaign to steal Duke’s copy of Action Comics #1. I just need to find ten to twelve other guys to help me do the job.

* Science proves economic growth no longer possible for rich countries.

* Mapping the mind of Tommy Westphall.

* BREAKING: Newsweek editors are surprisingly unprofessional in their private emails to each other.

* The public option is really popular! But you can never have it.

* Five Republican Senators put country over party. That list includes Scott Brown, socialist stooge.

* The Republican Party’s obituary has been written before, but demographics simply aren’t on their side.

* Turkish temple predates agricultural civilization. (Via Kottke.) There’s no doubt this thing was built by aliens:

Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities.

Wake up, sheeple!

* And some friends of mine have work forthcoming in Drawing Is a Way of Thinking: The Comics of Chris Ware, available now for pre-order from Amazon. Check it out.

So Many Post-Christmas Links

Sneaking in a quick linkdump between light posting due to Christmas and light posting due to MLA…

* The Senate bill has, as you undoubtedly already know, passed. Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, and even Jonathan Chait have this more or less right: winning ugly is still winning. There’ll be time to get started on demanding changes to the bill, but progressives shouldn’t forget the victory lap. Here’s Kevin:

So it doesn’t feel much like a victory yet. But it should. I’m 51 years old and this bill is, without question, the biggest progressive advance in my adult life. You have to go back to the great environmental acts of the early 70s to get close, and to the civil rights/Medicare era to beat it. That’s four decades, the last three of which have constituted an almost unbroken record of conservative ascendency. And now that ascendancy is just days away from being — finally, decisively — broken. Warts and all, we’re on the cusp of passing a bill that provides all of this:
• Insurers have to take all comers. They can’t turn you down for a preexisting condition or cut you off after you get sick.
• Community rating. Within a few broad classes, everyone gets charged the same amount for insurance.
• Individual mandate. (Remember how we all argued that this was a progressive feature back when John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were championing it during the primaries?)
• A significant expansion of Medicaid.
• Subsidies for low and middle income workers that keeps premium costs under 10% of income.
• Limits on ER charges to low-income uninsured emergency patients.
• Caps on out-of-pocket expenses.
• A broad range of cost-containment measures.
• A dedicated revenue stream to support all this.

* Likewise, from Al Giordano: “Health Care by the Numbers: What’s In It for You?”

* All the ways the Left has already destroyed America, prior to the health care victory.

* More change we can believe in: The Calm Act would direct the FCC to regulate TV commercial volume to be pegged to the volume of regular programming, so as not to be “excessively noisy or strident.”

* While I’ve been away, everyone has been talking about reforming the filibuster.

* Obama: One-Eighth of a Presidency. 5 Myths about a President’s First Year.

* David Weigel: “Why I Don’t Write about Sarah Palin’s Facebook Posts.”

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.

More on Palin from NYRoB.

* Apparent attempted terrorist attack thwarted over Detroit.

* This week’s This American Life should be of interest to academics and abstainers alike: it describes a typical weekend in State College, Pennsylvania, at America’s #1 Party School.

* Science fiction masters of the decade.

* A Basel court acquitted on Monday afternoon a geologist accused of causing earthquakes there during prospecting for geothermal energy.

* Disturbing escalation in the Mexican drug trade: More than a dozen hit men carrying AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles burst into a house in eastern Mexico around midnight Monday, gunning down several relatives of 3rd Petty Officer Melquisedet Angulo, the 30-year-old who was hailed as a national hero last week after being killed in a battle that left drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva dead. This violates the usual rules of engagement between police and criminals (which I know all about from television) and suggests bad things could be in store for Mexico.

* Whole Foods activism gets a scalp? John Mackey stepping down as CEO.

* Eight classic archaeological hoaxes.

* Most commonly shoplifted books. Via MeFi.

* ‘Parent Mad 6-Year-Old Didn’t Like Peanuts Special.’

* A few days late, Sweden’s unusual Christmas tradition.

Kalle Anka, for short, has been airing without commercial interruption at the same time on Sweden’s main public-television channel, TV1, on Christmas Eve (when Swedes traditionally celebrate the holiday) since 1959. The show consists of Jiminy Cricket presenting about a dozen Disney cartoons from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, only a couple of which have anything to do with Christmas. There are “Silly Symphonies” shorts and clips from films like Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Jungle Book.The special is pretty much the same every year, except for the live introduction by a host (who plays the role of Walt Disney from the originalWalt Disney Presents series) and the annual addition of one new snippet from the latest Disney-produced movie, which TV1’s parent network, SVT, is contractually obligated by Disney to air.
Kalle Anka is typically one of the three most popular television events of the year, with between 40 and 50 percent of the country tuning in to watch. In 2008, the show had its lowest ratings in more than 15 years but was still taken in by 36 percent of the viewing public, some 3,213,000 people. Lines of dialogue from the cartoons have entered common Swedish parlance. Stockholm’s Nordic Museum has a display in honor of the show in an exhibit titled “Traditions.” Each time the network has attempted to cancel or alter the show, public backlash has been swift and fierce…

* And behold: the future. Via MeFi.

Top Tens

Top tens.

* Ten best books of the year.

* Ten best archeology finds of 2008.

* Ten sci-fi films that should never be remade, and five that probably should be.

* National Geographic‘s top ten most viewed photos of 2008.

‘The Stoned Ape Theory’: Confirmed!

Jim Rugg’s “Stoned Ape Theory” from Backwards City #1 seemingly confirmed by archeologists working in the Caribbean.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell, where the banshees live and they do live well. Stonehenge! Where a man is a man and the children dance to the pipes of Pan…

Fools. Bureaucratic fools. They don’t know what they’ve got there.

Researcher Tudor Parfitt thinks he has traced the Ark of the Covenant to the bottom shelf of a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.

There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole (“As if it had been used like a cannon,” Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. “I felt a shiver go down my spine,” he writes.

The ngoma is an artifact of the Lemba—who according to genetic markers appear to be correct in their belief that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel—and is said to have been built out of the ruins of the original Ark.

Top Ten Archeological Discoveries of 2007

The top ten archeological discoveries in 2007, including one that will undoubtedly be of crucial importance for culturemonkey in the new year: chimpanzee use of tools is several thousand years old and may predate the human species entirely. Also via MetaFilter.

(Don’t forget, culturemonkey returns with a new mission statement and a new blogger on Jan. 2…)