Tuesday Links

* Local police involved in 400 killings per year.

* What I Did After Police Killed My Son: Ten years later, we in Wisconsin passed the nation’s first law calling for outside reviews.

* Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him. But cops agree: cops haven’t used excessive force in Ferguson. 40 FBI agents are in Ferguson to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown, and they already know who did it. ‘Let’s Be Cops,’ cop movies, and the shooting in Ferguson. Reparations for Ferguson. John Oliver: Let’s take their fucking toys back. A movement grows in Ferguson. Ferguson and white unflight. Michael Brown’s autopsy suggests he had his hands up. An upside flag indicates distress. More links from Crooked Timber.

* Man Dies After Bloody, 10-Minute Beating From LAPD Officers. Texas Incarcerates Mentally Disabled Man for 34 Years without Trial.

* Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem. The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson. For blacks, the “war on terror” hasn’t come home. It’s always been here. Mapping the Spread of the Military’s Surplus Gear. A Militarized Police, a Less Violent Public. Even the liberal Kevin Drum agrees: We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake. “By mistake.” So close.

* Meanwhile: Detroit police chief James Craig – nicknamed “Hollywood” for his years spent in the LAPD and his seeming love of being in front of the camera – has repeatedly called on “good” and “law-abiding” Detroiters to arm themselves against criminals in the city.

* Law professor Robert A. Ferguson’s critique of the U.S. prison system misses the point that its purpose is not rehabilitation but civic death.

* Poor, Non-Working Black and Latino Men Are Nearly Non-Existent.

* A quarter century later, the median white wealth had jumped to $265,000, while median black wealth was just $28,500. The racial wealth gap among working-age families, in other words, is a stunning $236,500, and there is every reason to believe that figure has widened in the five years since

* A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by leeching free content from real schools. Sounds legit!

* Change we can believe in? CBS, Produce a new Star Trek Series Featuring Wil Wheaton as the Lead role/Captain of a federation Vessel. Any true fan would know that Wesley quit Starfleet to pursue his destiny with the Traveler, but perhaps I’ve said too much.

* Coming soon to the Smithsonian Galleries: Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910.

* Yahoo really wants you to think Donald Glover is in the next season of Community. That “I am serious. I am Yahoo Serious.” tag is pretty gold, though.

* And while I’m on the subject: I know it’s not for everyone, but if you ask me this may have been the most quintessential Harmontown of all time: melancholy, silly, ranty, with some great improv D&D. Give it a listen if you like Dan Harmon.

* The twenty-first century gold rush: debt collection.

* No Child Left Behind achieves its destiny: virtually every school in the state of Washington is a “failing school.”

* All students at MPS now eligible for free meals.

* Teaching Is Not a Business.

* New Media: Time, Inc rates writers on how friendly they are to advertisers.

* Technocratic tweaks that will definitely solve everything: what if presidents only had one term? The icing on the cake is that if anything this would probably have the opposite effect.

* The problem with self-driving cars: they’re still cars.

* Paul Campos with the latest on the law school scam.

* This November, the organizing committee of the MLA Subconference comes to Milwaukee.

* The Post-Welfare State University.

* Students who graduated in 2008 earned more credits in the humanities than in STEM, the study found. Humanities credits accounted for 17 percent of total credits earned by the typical graduate. In contrast, STEM credits accounted for 13 percent.

* Not only are men more likely than women to earn tenure, but in computer science and sociology, they are significantly more likely to earn tenure than are women who have the same research productivity. In English men are slightly (but not in a statistically significant way) more likely than women to earn tenure.

* The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List.

* Top Legal Scholars Decry “Chilling” Effect of Salaita Dehiring.

* Huge asteroid set to wipe out life on Earth – in 2880. 865 years, that’s all we’ve got…

* Mining Spill Near U.S. Border Closes 88 Schools, Leaves Thousands Of Mexicans Without Water. Meet The First Pacific Island Town To Relocate Thanks To Climate Change. The Longest River In The U.S. Is Being Altered By Climate Change.

* The venture capitalist are now weaponizing kids. Of course, when you find out how much raising a kid costs, child labor starts to make a lot of sense. Plainly parenting is a market ripe for disruption.

* What is your greatest strength as an employee? Bonus SMBC: on internship as neologism.

* How air conditioning remade modern America.

* How to Hide a Nuclear Missile.

* The winners of the 2014 Hugos.

* The rumor is that Doctor Strange will be part of a new Marvel paradigm that rejects origin stories.

* Twitter’s management is very, very eager to ruin Twitter. Can Facebook catch up in time?

* Primary 2016 watch: Only Al Gore can save us now.

* And they’ve finally gone too far: Edible LEGO. Some lines man was just never meant to cross.

Change We Can Believe In

“Arrested Development” To Begin Filming In Four Weeks. Here’s a sneak peak at the writer’s room.

Wednesday (Nothin’ But) Links

* If my Internets are any guide, the most-linked article of the day by a mile: Jose Antonio Vargas’s “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.”

* There is literally nothing you can say to me that will make me disbelieve the Post‘s Lady Gaga/Žižek scoop. Do not try! It’s definitely, definitely true.

* Somebody in the Democratic leadership has finally noticed Republicans are sabotaging the economy on purpose.

* Al Gore takes on Obama’s failure to lead on climate change in the latest Rolling Stone. Great piece.

* Also in Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi voyages into the heart of darkness Michele Bachmann.

* Also in change we can believe in: Obama will reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to the level they were at when he took office. Yes we can!

* More from the Mother Jones special report on work in America: Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans.

* The headline reads, “Ocean Life on the Brink of Mass Extinctions.”

* Of course you had me at Muppet Game of Thrones.

* Life imitates the Onion: Sarah Palin has quit her bus tour halfway through.

* Behold Randall Munroe’s terrible power, and despair: 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich.

* And Katy Perry comes out as a communist. It’s really no surprise; all her friends are red…

Change We Can Believe In

I heartily endorse the political project Toothpaste for Dinner outlines here.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (and Several More)

* Between the tax compromise and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, I think Obama did a tremendous amount to help his chances for reelection this week. Rachel Maddow rightly calls the DADT repeal the president’s victory:

Politically, the thing to not lose touch with here is that this is the President’s victory. This is something about which the President took a lot of criticism, a lot of abuse, a lot of skepticism from his otherwise most loyal supporters. He continually insisted that this was possible that it would get done.

Guilty as charged. I confess I also love the sweet sound of right-wing screams, especially when their own caucus collapsed in the face of this “generational change.” Even Richard Burr voted the right way!

* It looks like Harvard and Yale will return ROTC to their campuses in light of the repeal. Frankly I’d prefer to see the trend going the other way—we need tighter restrictions on military recruiting, not loosening of the few restrictions that already exist—but I suppose this was unavoidable.

* Seen on Facebook: Obama wants to let gays vote. That’s why I’m voting Tea Party.

* Watch out Texas: bad news coming.

* Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions…

* The message to Nicky Wishart and his generation is very clear: don’t get any fancy ideas about being an engaged citizen. Go back to your X-Box and X-Factor, and leave politics to the millionaires in charge. Via MeFi.

* And still more trouble for Britain: There are a growing number of grassroots organisations campaigning about the over-professionalisation of childhood football. Give Us Back Our Game launched four years ago. “The game has been taken away from children by over-competitive coaches and parents,” says founder Paul Cooper. It has several offshoots, including Football Football, an initiative to revive inner-city football. Then there’s the Children’s Football Alliance, which champions “mixed ability” football, and the Don’t X The Line campaign against over-the-top parental behaviour at children’s football matches. Also via MeFi.

* Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances.

* And Fringe announces its move to the Friday night death slot with style.

Change We Can Believe In

I’m so old I can remember when a vote for Obama was a vote against a third Clinton term.

At Last, Something We Can All Believe In

Facebook group of the day: Get Slavoj Žižek to Host Saturday Night Live.

Let’s Just Go Ahead and Call This One a Good Week for Obama

BBC: US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have agreed a new nuclear arms reduction treaty after months of negotiations. Of course it’s not total disarmament, but every one of these things we can get rid of is a step in the right direction.

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.

Looks Like I Owe My Dad a Coke

Obama: Guantánamo Won’t Close by January Deadline.

The First Nine Months

The Obameter takes the temperature of Obama’s first term a year after his election and finds 52 promises kept, 7 promises broken, 14 each compromised or stalled, 133 “in the works,” and, uh, 294 not yet rated.

The Potheads Have Taken Over the Asylum

As a general matter, pursuit of these priorities should not focus federal resources in your States on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana. For example, prosecution of individuals with cancer or other serious illnesses who use marijuana as part of a recommended treatment regimen consistent with applicable state law, or those caregivers in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state law who provide such individuals with marijuana, is unlikely to be an efficient use of limited federal resources.

The potheads have taken over the asylum: Attorney General Eric Holder has released new guidelines for federal prosecutors regarding medicinal marijuana. I admit I was initially lukewarm on Holder’s appointment, but he’s sure doing a lot of the heavy lifting on “change.”

Tactic, Trial Balloon, or White Flag

Tactic, trial balloon, or white flag, the Obama administration is signaling a willingness to dump the public option in favor of non-profit “co-operatives” of the sort that were in the failed ClintonCare plan of the 1990s. MetaFilter is rightfully aghast. But Ezra Klein wrote last month that the public option isn’t the ballgame.

UPDATE: Nate Silver also has medicine for progressives.

Change We Can Believe In

Change we can believe in: Cynical-C has your protest sign of the night.

plus ça change plus c’est la même

Change we can believe in! ‘Obama EPA approves another mountaintop removal mine.’ Not good. (via Yale 360)