Sunday Morning Links!

As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…

* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.

* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.

* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.

* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.

* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.

* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.

* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.

* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.

* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.

* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.

* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.

* “Do something that will force reviewers compare this movie favorably to the ending of Man of Steelwhether they want to or not.”

* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.

* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?

* There is no f*cking way that you can hack a plane’s engines from the in-flight TVs. I won’t accept it.

* “He was released on $30,000 bond to home confinement after the agreement was made and faces between 0 and 5 years in federal prison, along with a possible fine of up to $250,000.”

* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.

* “DesJarlais, a former physician, voted for the ban despite allegedly pressuring his mistress and ex-wife to get abortions.”

* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?

* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.

* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.

* How a police department tried to save a failing Rust Belt town by luring all the local drug dealers to one party.

* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.

* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.

* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.

* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!

* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?

* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.

* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.

* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”

* Friends, they may call it a movement.

* And I’ll see you again in twenty-five days.

Tuesday Links!

* In case you missed it, I put up a short thing about The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt yesterday. It was an odd and sad day to have done so, in retrospect.

* And here’s everything we know about season 2 of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

* Some (more) thoughts on the Hugos. And some more.

* Science Fiction Film and Television 8.1 is now available. And don’t forget our call for papers on Star Trek at 50!

* If you want a vision of the future: University of Florida admits 3,000 students — then tells them it is only for online program.

* Visiting Africa: A Short Guide for Researchers.

* Rolling Stone has retracted their UVA story, as well as a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism detailing what went wrong. Reaction online has generally been that the Columbia report doesn’t go nearly far enough, and that RS is in total denial about the seriousness of what they did — though there’s speculation that RS‘s non-response is at least partially driven by the fact that the fraternity plans to sue.

* What happens when you build a town around a prison?

* What percentage of national Democrats have been placed there as sleeper agents specifically to disrupt literally any attempt at improvement, do you think? 90, 95%?

* The American West dries up. In a development that will surprise no one, California’s wealthy aren’t doing their part to save water. Water-rationing plan leaves corporate interests untouched. Nestlé called out for bottling, selling California water during drought. And the state has been fracking into their aquifers this whole time. We know what our problems are and we do nothing or make them worse.

* Report: Majority Of Earth’s Potable Water Trapped In Coca-Cola Products.

* Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds Of Secret Arctic Lairs.

* Man-made earthquakes in Oklahoma. Bonus points for a truly good headline pun: “Weather Underground.”

* First Gorgeous Look At Mark Z. Danielewski’s New Series, The Familiar!

* Finally, someone is responding to voter ID panic in the proper way.

* Can Marxist theory predict the end of Game of Thrones?

* A former Harvard associate professor is pursuing a federal Title IX lawsuit against the university, alleging she was discriminated against while trying to secure tenure there in 2013.

* NYC officials remove Edward Snowden statue secretly installed in Brooklyn park.

* “Recognizing that Native American art was made by individuals, not tribes, and labeling it accordingly, is a practice that is long overdue,” said Dan L. Monroe, executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., which has a large Indian collection and has made some attempts to identify individual artists since the mid-1990s.

* In short, ruin porn hides more than it shows. It creates the hyper-visibility of some elements of crisis, usually infrastructural damage and death, while simultaneously making others invisible, namely the social and political forces that engender uneven patterns–and origins–of damage and recovery.

* Helen Keller, socialist.

* I was arrested 75 times: how violent policing destroys mental health.

* Strange fashion choices of the 24th century.

* Inside Brown’s plan to make its faculty more diverse. I don’t see how “postdoctoral fellowships” is even part of this conversation. Postdocs aren’t faculty.

* Paul “Freaks & Geeks” Feig has a new show, outer space comedy Other Space.

* Lucille Ball statue terrorizes small town.

* And I’ll see you again in twenty-five years: The Twin Peaks revival is apparently going to happen without David Lynch.

Do They Even Know It’s Wednesday Links

* Great visit yesterday to STS at Riverside! Really enjoyed it.

* For the black community in America, there has never been a “normal” baseline experience from which emergencies are exceptions: unfortunate but episodic deviations. Rather, it has been a rolling emergency, interrupted by brief windows of relative promise. And from this perspective, perhaps we can understand the enigmatic “real state of exception” that Benjamin calls for — because from the perspective of white power, those moments of promise are the true emergencies that must be shut down at all costs.

* Indicting A System Not A Man…. Indict the System, Not Just Darren Wilson. No more Missouri compromises.

* Apocalypse now: chocolate could disappear by 2020.

* Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?

* Just a short rumination on the greatness of comics from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

* Marquette in the… sigh. Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign.

* The potential benefit for higher-earning graduate students is “a policy accident,” says Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. “And who’s going to figure this out? Probably people with graduate degrees.”

* Ladies and gentlemen, your rising Democratic stars: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.

* New Project to Digitize 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines.

* Museum on slave trade planned for Episcopal cathedral in Providence.

* Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15. Here’s Marquette:

* Exciting untapped market in higher education: Colleges Encourage Graduates to Seek Second Bachelor’s Degrees.

* In recognition of the evening, Ms. Stamm’s husband, Arthur Stamm, made a gift of $100,000. At the time, it was the largest gift the college had received from a single donor in its 42-year history.

Since January alone, by contrast, Duke University, which educates 14,850 students on its 8,709-acre campus, has received gifts and pledges of $1 million or more on the average of every six or seven weeks. In those gifts alone, the university has already raised about $49 million this year. And yet, according to the latest ranking, its endowment of close to $6 billion in 2012 did not earn it a place among the country’s 10 richest schools, a list led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

* More scenes from the class struggle at elite universities.

* Karl Stefanovic’s sexism experiment: Today presenter wears same suit for a year.

* To remember Mandela is to remember Robben Island.

* Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.

* Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.

* Homelessness isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a brutal economic system and conscious state policy.

* What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism.

* No capital projects but the end of capital.

* The rich want everything. They even want to suffer most from inequality!

* To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.

* At This Rate, The World Will Have To Cease All Carbon Emissions In 2040 To Stay Under 2°C.

* Just another average November, nbd: Buffalo, N.Y., area in the midst of a truly insane lake effect snow storm.

* Mark Fisher has one of the better anti-identity-politics pieces I’ve seen on the left: Exiting the Vampires’ Castle.

If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.

* It’s Not Your Kids Holding Your Career Back. It’s Your Husband.

* Academia for women: short maternity leave, few part-time roles and lower pay.

* Marriage, y’all, I just don’t know.

* I woke up this morning still black, still a woman, and still bothered by the Jezebel piece. So I’m here using my voice to encourage us all to speak up.

* Generation Pharmakon.

* The Most Popular Drug in America Is an Antipsychotic and No One Really Knows How It Works.

* Necro-streaming: Notes on Watching a Dead Show.

* The Biggest Lies About Science in the U.S. Government’s “Wastebook.” Just pure ressentiment.

* Actually existing government waste! White House announces push for next generation of hi-tech weapons.

* Death by deadline.

* Twilight of the Indoor Mall.

* Yelp Prison Review Faxbot.

* Secret Origins of the Black Panther. Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.

* Five ways to pander to millennials in 2016.

* I wanted a bigger, better Bayside more than anybody: Company Halts Plan To Frack 3,000 Feet From Pennsylvania School.

* Bill Cosby Is An Alleged Serial Rapist. So, Now What?

* The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn’t just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.

* Gorbachev Tried To Get George Bush To Spoil Who Killed Laura Palmer.

* Has Uber Ubered an Uber too Uber this Uber?

* What’s most troubling about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is not the music per se but the way it insinuates itself — and “us” — into a story about “them” and yet can’t be bothered to get even the most basic facts right.

* The uncomfortable origins of “Afrofuturism.”

* I have an idea for a mature, adult, fantasy roleplaying game.

* In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist.

* Some days you just need http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com.

* And, finally, MTV is ready to tell my story.

Wednesday Links!

* Cura personalis: Whereas Arnold hoped culture would replace religion, Deresiewicz, though not religious himself, wonders if religion might rescue culture: Students are no longer “equipped to address the larger questions of meaning and purpose … that come so inevitably in young adulthood. Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one’s ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.”

* Catholic Colleges Greet an Unchurched Generation.

* Alien vs. Predator: Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices.

Harvard could put out every academic journal in the country for free and wouldn’t notice the money was missing.

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014

“If we don’t work to cut costs now, in 200,000 years Harvard might be forced to make some cuts.” -Harvard trustee

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014

It is the year 3,000,000. All life on Earth is extinct. The only monument left to Homo sapiens is Harvard’s endowment, currently valued at

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2014

* Video Gamers Are Having A Bizarre Debate Over Whether Sending Death Threats To Women Is A Serious Issue Or Not. #Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group. The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate. Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a planned talk at Utah State University after university officials refused to secure the venue following a mass shooting threat. In which gamers yell at a dumb chat bot from 1966 that someone wired up to twitter, because they think it’s a woman.

* Another Obama triumph: Since 2008, the District’s homeless population has increased 73%.

* The Americas in 1491. 9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel. The Real Christopher Columbus. And it gets worse: The Sopranos only ever made one bad episode and it was all Christopher Columbus’s fault.

* It’s Columbus Day. Let’s talk about geography (and Ebola).

* Ebola threatens world chocolate supply.

* What if Columbus had sailed off the edge of the world? How would that have affected U.S. history and economic growth?

* White People Are Unironically Talking About the White Experience in New PBS Documentary.

* For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.

* Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants?

* Quick, everybody switch positions about civility and academic freedom.

* The Gates Foundation has a plan to save higher education through creating artificial enrollment crises exciting new efficiency metrics!

* The For-Profit College That’s Too Big to Fail.

* George Mason Grad Students Release Adjunct Study.

* The National Science Foundation has awarded grants of $4.8 million to several prominent research universities to advance the use of Big Data in the schools. Your dystopian term of art is “LearnSphere.”

* Uber Calls Woman’s 20-Mile Nightmare Abduction an “Inefficient Route.”

* What Do We Do With All These Empty Prisons? Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something.

* Cops Charge 10-Year-Old Boy as Adult in Slaying of 90-Year-Old Woman. Accused of Stealing a Backpack, High School Student Jailed for Nearly Three Years Without Trial. South Carolina Prosecutors Say Stand Your Ground Doesn’t Apply To Victims Of Domestic Violence. Why Are Police Using Military-Grade Weapons in High Schools?

* There’s always money for murder and torture, but we need to crowdfund Ebola research.

* Jimmy John’s has noncompete clauses. Jimmy John’s.

* Comic Books Are Still Made By Men, For Men And About Men.

* SF short of the night: Forever War.

* The Kids These Days Know More Than You Probably Think. The meat of the post is about a bogus “declining vocabulary” test that is used to fuel critics of schools.

* The nation’s largest union of flight attendants took the Federal Aviation Administration to court on Friday, arguing that the agency should have upheld a ban on the use of smartphones and tablets during takeoff and landing. Lawyers for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA argued that the devices distracted passengers from safety instructions and could fly out of their hands, becoming dangerous projectiles, the Wall Street Journal reports.

* Freddie de Boer against carceral feminism: The burden of expanding the police state’s power to prosecute sex crimes will fall on the poor and the black.

* Meanwhile, in utterly inexplicable results that will probably always be a mystery: Income is more predictive than race for early college success.

* We don’t even know which way solar panels should be facing.

* Naughty Marvel: It’s Tragic and Disappointing That Marvel Is Canceling Fantastic Four.

* Nice Marvel: And with Robert Downey Jr. signing on it sounds like Captain America 3 will be Civil War. I’d never have guessed that the Captain America movies would be the ones that really connected with me, but here we go…

* David Lynch’s Los Angeles.

* We are become old.

* Milwaukee’s incredible shrinking art scene.

* Karen Russell on the greatness of The Martian Chronicles.

[Stephanie Palumbo]: How does Bradbury use human activity on Mars as a metaphor?

KR: He’s writing against patriotism during the Cold War. Humans land on Mars and then destroy it. Not much time elapses between landfall on Mars and the annihilation of all Martians.

SP: There’s a haunting image in one story, where a little boy is playing with a white xylophone that turns out to be a Martian ribcage.

KR: The planet is basically wiped clean of its indigenous people. I was shocked by the descriptions of these ancient, bone-white cities on Mars, and it took me an embarrassing length of time to recollect that people can visit ruins anywhere on our planet, too. It’s a case where sci-fi holds up a funhouse mirror to our own history. In case we have amnesia about the horror of the frontier, here we see another frontier and xenophobia, paranoia, aggression, madness. But we see people be really good to each other too. Bradbury seemed to be such a humanist at the same time that he is calling us out on our most despicable qualities.

* And being the indispensable shining city on the hill is confusing. If you ask me we should just let the biker gangs handle this.

Wednesday Links

* Marquette English’s medievalist search closes today! Get your applications in!

* Advice for academics: how to write a research statement.

* The digital humanities and the MLA JIL.

* Junot Diaz on academic freedom and Palestine.

* The Plot Against Public Education.

* Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance.

* Yet another roundup on the death of the faculty.

* Holy picket lines, Batman! Marxism and superheroes, part two: the struggle.

* Same-sex marriage crossed the 50% threshold yesterday, as it became legal as many as 30 states due to SCOTUS inaction.

* The right to die: Terminally Ill 29-Year-Old Woman: Why I’m Choosing to Die on My Own Terms.

* Is Rick & Morty the best cartoon since The Simpsons season four? Probably! You Need to Be Watching Rick and Morty. Seriously.

* Google Glass and facial recognition.

* American Empire, by the numbers.

* An open access book: Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene.

* Understanding reparations.

4. The people making the claim eventually die. At that point the claim is acknowledged as having been credible.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014

5. But because the claimants are dead, it is said that nothing can be done. Society shrugs, moves on, because, uhm, black on black crime.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014

* War is a racket, Prophet Samuel edition.

* Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion.

* The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past. Yet at least since the 1970s, most professional historians – that is, most historians holding doctorates in the field and teaching in universities or colleges – conducted most of their research on timescales of between five and 50 years.

* We’re probably teaching math wrong.

* Daria Morgendorffer’s Reading List.

* Hey, you, get your damn hands off her.

* Venus Green, who was 87 when she was handcuffed, roughed up and injured by police, will receive $95,000 as part of a settlement with Baltimore City. The quote doesn’t even reflect the most bananas part: Woman, 90, locked officer in basement, settles with police.

* Ga. Cops Who Blew Off Toddler’s Face With Grenade Won’t Be Charged.

* Did I do this one already? Infinite Jest, as it was meant to be read.

* Stay informed: Nicolet National Forest is Milwaukee’s “zombie safe zone.”

* National Adjunct Walkout Day Planned.

* The gum you like is going to come back in style.

* And that gum you like is going to come back in style.

* Startups Did Not Get Last Month’s Memo To Stop Burning All Their Money.

* MIT researchers are developing a “second skin” space suit lined with tiny coils that contract when switched on, tightening the garment around the body. The coils (image below) in the “BioSuit” are made from shape-memory alloy that “remembers” its shape when bent and returns to its original form if heated.

* Marvel will finally try to make some money off the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

* Boston Review on vulture capitalism.

* MetaFilter mega-post on sex work and consent.

* The United States and alcoholism. Some anti-big-data-journalism pushback.

* And now at last we see the violence inherent in the system.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/8LS8TRMkAo

— congress-edits (@congressedits) October 7, 2014

The Super Bowl

…as directed by Tarantino, Lynch, Anderson, Godard and Herzog.

Just Another Friday Night in Jersey

Since we got back I’ve been pretty busy playing catchup, and the blog as usual has suffered—but here are a few links for Friday night.

* Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results.

* Possible Futures #2: When David Lynch Turned Down Return of the Jedi.

* “Higher education is an interest group like any other, and what it wants is a lot of money from the taxpayer and no oversight of how that money is spent,” said Kevin Carey of the think tank Education Sector. “And they’ve been very successful getting it for a long time.”

* An Open Letter to New Graduate Students.

* Howard Dean wants to explain why he backs a mosque “compromise.” When you’re in a hole…

* Superpatriotic Blackwater founder Erik Prince “needs a break from America”—in a nonextradition country.

* Ten Questions Nobody Ever Asked About George W. Bush.

* Sarah Silverman on her life as a chronic bedwetter.

* Jason Sanford thinks the next trend in science fiction is SciFi Strange. Via io9.

* io9 celebrates the postal stamps of progress.

* His heartbroken parents were told he would only live six weeks. But Liam Derbyshire has defied all the odds to make it to 11—despite stopping breathing every time he falls asleep.

* “Jazz” is the best word to use in Hangman. Or it was. Via MetaFilter.

* And you had me at “the CIA’s obsession with LSD in the water supply.”

Friday!

* 211 student activists in California have been arrested in the last 23 days. (via Facebook)

* When David Lynch turned down Return of the Jedi.

* Confessions of an NBA scorekeeper.

* 52% of Americans currently support cap and trade. Sounds like the doubt industry may need to pick up the pace.

* Glenn Greenwald on the Nobel speech and the Obama Doctrine.

But that’s the real danger. Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices. Just as George Bush’s Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama’s complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same. To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on “just war” doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance. When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.

Kafka Makes You Smarter

Reading Kafka makes you smarter, says a headline at Science Daily. Does this mean English departments matter again?

Links

Links.

* 60,000-piece LEGO diorama of the Battle of Hoth. Outstanding.

* David Lynch Twitters.

* Top green moments from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, at HuffPo.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proudly told the nation in 2004 that he joined the Republican Party because of his deep and abiding respect for Richard Nixon, apparently thought about bolting the party last year.

* And MetaFilter has your updates on quick fixes for global warming.

‘David Lynch and psychosis’

Paranoia comes with an inherent sense of personal threat and concomitant fear. Inland Empire’s dark and chilling world is produced in part by David Lynch’s use of story. While fear is generated with genuinely unsettling imagery and dark shadowy lighting, it also comes from the carefully managed attrition of any recognisable storyline. The audience, who have been led through the early stages of the plot with some of the conventional devices of storytelling (coherent dialogue, linear chronology) are suddenly thrown into a world of unfamiliar film cuts, unexplained locations and wordless acting. We are forced to jump to our own conclusions and build what narrative we will from scant concrete evidence as to events. Our sense of sense itself forces us to put something together and, given the presence of ominous emotions and apparent malice, what we put together is a paranoid and terrifying vision of the intentions of the characters in the film and even the world we inhabit.

In short, Lynch uses our natural epistemological impulsivity against us to generate fear: in this case the human proclivity to build story from elements that may or may not actually be bound as a conventional narrative.

Psychosis in the works of David Lynch. Via Boing Boing.

At McSweeney’s, David Lynch’s Tips for a Great Prom.

Being Named Prom King and Queen

If you are named prom king and queen, which you almost certainly will be, because it’s your destiny, walk confidently to the podium. Lose yourself in the klieg lights. Don’t allow your date to clean up her face after her tears of joy cause her mascara to run. In fact, use a dropper to make sure it streaks all the way down her cheeks. This is now the time to embrace her. Hold back not at all. Tear at her dress. Pet heavily. From the corner of your eye, note Mr. Rohrbauch attacking several students, many of whom are now wearing featureless plaster masks. Continue necking furiously with your date despite the principal’s attempts to stop you. Also, don’t be alarmed when your date, for a second there, turns into another woman you’ve never seen before. This is normal.