Midday Monday Links!

* ICYMI from earlier this morning: SFFTV is once again looking for reviewers of DVDs and TV series. And of course I posted about a million links yesterday too.

* Scandal as performance of Julius Caesar depicts sitting president.

* Senate Intelligence Committee Post-Show Discussion of Hamlet.

* Binghampton mayoral candidate pulls out of race citing death threats.

* It’s terrible when actors read reviews and pitch their performance to the critics.

* Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland say they will sue President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.

* The Spy Who Funded Me: Revisiting the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

* The physics of bullets vs. Wonder Woman’s bracelets. Given what is depicted in the film we must be dealing with some sort of magnetic attraction as well, and possibly a forcefield. #teachthecontroversy

* Mysteries of the war on terror: A neo-Nazi with explosives and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh is not a threat, judge rules.

* 51 stars? Puerto Rico overwhelmingly votes for statehood.

* The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning.

* Obamacare is probably dead. Here’s what will probably happen.

* Nevada, with little fanfare or notice, is inching toward a massive health insurance expansion — one that would give the state’s 2.8 million residents access to a public health insurance option.

* Seen in this light, the tax cut is not simply a billionaire giveaway. It is part of an evangelical campaign for the restoration of a conditional, paternal philanthropy that runs contrary to the principle of unqualified access to health care that is represented by the ACA’s inclusion of people with “pre-existing conditions” in the insurance markets it regulated. Unqualified access means spreading the cost and risks of ill health and therefore sharing the benefits of maintaining good health. For those evangelicals who view health and disease through the lens of a moral economy, spreading the costs of health care is tantamount to facilitating moral hazard, or encouraging sinful behavior and usurping God’s judgment.

* Questions James Comey Should Be Asked About the FBI While He’s Under Oath.

* 41-year-old adoptee deported after 37 years in the U.S.

* All The Wrong People Are Asking All The Wrong Questions About Fidget Spinners.

* The glorious release of iOS 11 will restart human history, transform the Arctic into a tropical paradise, turn the seas to lemonade.

* The case for prescription heroin.

* It was Hulu actually.

* And from the archives! The Periodic Table of Nonsense.

It’s Week One of Year Zero and I’m Declaring Total Tab Bankruptcy

* CFP: SFRA 2017. CFP: 14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference. CFP: Toxic Fans. CFP: Whiteness and the American Superhero. CFP: The Gibson Critics Don’t See. Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships. CFP for MLA 2018: Creative Economies of Science Fiction. And also at MLA 18, the science fiction panel I’ll be chairing: Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.

* This thread on Gene Roddenberry and Grace Lee Whitney makes some flat assertions that are actually just well-supported speculations, but is nonetheless is a shocking and dispiriting revisionist history of Trek that’s well worth considering.

* The part I was born to play.

* Race and Zootopia.

* Rick & Morty and theodicy.

* Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.

* The novel in the age of Obama.

* The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering in a Post-Apocalyptic World.

* Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries.

* From my colleague Rebecca Nowacek: Don’t Retreat. Teach Citizenship.

* Student evaluations: still bad.

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Alternative.

* I’m not normally one to defend college admin, but: Trade school fires president after he let homeless student stay in library during sub-zero weather.

* Without communism, there’s something missing from dystopian stories.

* Junot Diaz remembers Octavia Butler.

* Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and universities. Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s ‘Un-American.’

* The university as asylum. The university and the class system.

* The Changing English Major. The collapse of history as a discipline. A liberal arts college without English majors? Massive cuts at the University of Alberta.

* MLA Rejects Israel Boycott. MLA by the numbers (from the right).

* When a school hires adjuncts, where does the money go?

* UBI already exists for the 1%.

* 26, 171.

* Shockingly enough, legalizing murder means more murders.

* Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?

* Somali refugee in Milwaukee publishes book.

* When the homeless die, it’s up to forensic investigators to find their families.

* The End of the Rural Hospital.

* Secrets of my success: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent.

* The FBI has been using the Geek Squad as all-purpose informants.

* Trump Promised to Resign From His Companies — But There’s No Record He’s Done So. Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue. Mark Hamill, National Treasure. Searching for Time-Travelers on the Eve of the Trump Inauguration. Donald Trump, David Foster Wallace, and the hobbling of shame. A mere 34. It would be crazy not to impeach him. Keep America Great. Oh, you think? The DeVos Democrats. That’ll solve it. Here’s What You Can Do to Beat Trump. Preventing 2017 America from becoming like 1934 Germany: A watchlist. Philip K. Dick vs the Time of Trump. Here’s what Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Fascism. Stop making sense, or, writing in the age of Trump. The stories coming out of this White House are bananas. Watch this story. And this one! How jokes won the election. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. UPDATE: This is fine.

* Seems legit.

* This one too.

* But this one takes the cake.

* Meanwhile, the 2020 Dem frontrunner…

* But Jeet Heer thinks we can do even worse.

* Democrats in the Wilderness. Oh, they’ve got this.

* The Electoral College Is Even Worse Than You Think. But it can always be worse.

* What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After North Korea Nuked the United States?

* The Obama speeches. A politics that surrenders every level of government to its opposition cannot win the future. It has already lost the present. But this was good.

* Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (But Their Schools Probably Won’t).

* Teachers who drink and drinkers who teach.

* Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered.

* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.

* You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke.

* Thousands of Skittles end up on an icy road. But that’s not the surprising part.

* Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say. The people behind the AI curtain.

* Ha ha ha, he’s the sheriff of my county, what a character, this is not frightening at all.

* Lessons from Octavia Butler: Surviving Trump.

* I still think every adult who let this get to trial should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice. There’s no hyperbole in that declaration.

* Sherlock‘s bizarrely self-aware problem with women.

* About that biometric password you’re born with and will never be able to change.

* Women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies.

* Most primate species are now threatened with extinction.

* Neanderthals were people too.

* When a Video-Game World Ends.

* Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.

* Twilight of the cruelty factory circus.

* “We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone.”

* “Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram.”

* Disability and as-seen-on-TV.

* Wolf-Sized Otters Prowled the World Six Million Years Ago.

* Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.

* I still believe in Arrested Development Season Five.

* Your blast from the past: Prodigy Online’s MadMaze.

* Superheroes and the kids today.

* Episode 8 has a name.

* Autism causes vaccines.

* And RIP, Mark Fisher. A memorial fund for his wife and son. His piece on depression.

Wednesday 2!

* “If banks wrote down all underwater mortgages to market value and refinanced the homeowners into 30-year, fixed-rate loans at current market interest rates, that would pump $71 billion into the national economy”—and create one million jobs. But the banks won’t do it.

* NPR has scientifically determined the top 100 SF and fantasy books of all time. Don’t get me wrong: I’m very fond of Lord of the Rings, and I love Hitchhiker’s Guide, but they’re really not the very best the genre has to offer…

* Cyclops as Magneto, Wolverine as Professor X? That really doesn’t seem right. Via TNC.

* Why does Obama keep making these terrible jokes about his wife? It’s embarrassing, and about three decades out of date to boot.

* Redefining pedophila as a sexual orientation? I find it’s very hard to have any sort of open mind on this.

* Another reality TV suicide.

* And I admit I didn’t see this coming: Bachmann Staffer Arrested for Terrorism in Uganda in 2006.

Monday Links

* Manned space flight after the space shuttle.

* Fascinating user revolt at HuffPo in the comments of their icon design contest.

* Bachmann, Perry, and Christian Dominionism.

* Inconceivable! 23 straight polls say people want to raise taxes to pay off the debt.

* And if liberals say the world is warming, it must really be cooling: Rick Perry’s daft climate change conspiracy theory. 2012 is going to be a long year.

Monday

* A Joint Terrorism Task Force raided a Christian dominionist militia group in three states last night, allegedly for threats made against Islamic organizations.

* At least 37 people are dead in a Moscow subway attack.

* ‘Obama Recess Appointments Could Help Grad Unions.’

* Burying the lede: this article is nominally about Michael Steele’s attempts to buy himself a plane with RNC money, but check out this body paragraph: Once on the ground, FEC filings suggest, Steele travels in style. A February RNC trip to California, for example, included a $9,099 stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $6,596 dropped at the nearby Four Seasons, and $1,620.71 spent [update: the amount is actually $1,946.25] at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.

* Reuters reports on junk food addiction.

They also bought healthy foods and devised a diet plan for three groups of rats.

One group ate a balanced healthy diet. Another group received healthy food, but had access to high-calorie food for one hour a day. Rats in the third group were fed healthy meals and given unlimited access to high-calorie foods.

The rats in the third group developed a preference for the high-calorie food, munched on it all day and quickly became obese, Kenny said.

The rats in the experiment had also been trained to expect a minor shock when exposed to a light. But when the rats that had unlimited access to high-calorie food were shown the light, they did not respond to the potential danger, Kenny said. Instead, they continued to eat their snacks.

* And today’s mandatory link: screenwriter apologizes for Battlefield Earth.

Saturday!

Saturday!

* The first of the last three Pushing Daisies is on tonight. Bryan Fuller’s not satisfied, and not done with the story yet.

* Alien prequel on the way.

* More on the sci-fi future that failed from CNN.

* Related: Star Trek as religion.

* Scenes from trailers that aren’t in the finished film. I suspect I would have liked Terminator Salvation a lot more if the “This isn’t the future my mother warned me about” scenes had been retained.

* Wondermark has a good riff take on Terminator-style action franchises: 1, 2, 3.

* Tales of the New Frontier: a web comic set in a mythical alt-history Kennedy administration.

* ‘Jesus Killed Mohammed’: Christian dominionism and the U.S. military.

* Brace yourselves for Toy Story 3.

* Weekend games: Heavy Weapons, Panic Breakout, Fail-Safe, and Redstar Fall Pro.

* And this just in: Delaware still sucks.

Wednesday, Wednesday

Obviously posting took a backseat to real-life nonsense today. But I did look at the Internets. Here’s what I looked at.

* The House Next Door and SF Signal try to figure out whether this season of Heroes is back on track.

* Gang of 100? Via Lenin’s Tomb, Columbia president Lee Bollinger receives a “statement of concern” from over 100 faculty members partly in response to his poor behavior during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit.

* Nicholas Guyatt reviews Chris Hedges’s American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America for London Review of Books. I linked to Hedges a bit on the old blog earlier in the year, when this book was getting a lot of hype—I’m curious why this review comes so late. I’m also surprised to see Guyatt take such a skeptical attitude towards Hedges’s thesis. I haven’t read American Fascists, but my impression has been that the book is about the (very real) dominionist movement within American evangelicism, not an assertion that all evangelicals are dominionists. And what to make of this:

It would be a mistake to imagine that the religious right has controlled American politics for the past quarter-century. Despite the present spate of books decrying a fundamentalist takeover of the Republican Party, there has been plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have made real strides and the wall between church and state remains largely intact in American classrooms. Frank suggested that legislators had pulled off a confidence trick in their courting of evangelicals.

The truth is precisely this: the religious right has controlled American politics for the past quarter-century without actually getting any of the things they want. What happens when they finally realize they’ve been hoodwinked? Hedges has this right; the business wing of the Republican Party is locked into an alliance with powerful and dangerous forces it will not necessarily be able to control forever.

* NYU students would trade their right to vote for an iPod. Can you blame them? In a country so completely gerrymandered on both a macro (Electoral College) and micro (Congressional district) scale, voting is more or less a fraud across the board. The vote of someone living in New York City isn’t even worth an iPod; the vote of someone in Florida or Ohio, maybe, but only just.

* Train passengers face routine airline-style bag checks and body searches as part of a new counter-terror crackdown announced by Gordon Brown. Next up, strip searches. Freedom isn’t free.