What Day Is It? Links

* Later today, at UC Davis: Environments & Societies: Gerry Canavan, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthroposcene.”

* Marquette Protest on Diversity, University Seal.

* The LAO and Permanent University Austerity.

* Proclaims British economist Noreena Hertz, who recently surveyed more than 1,000 teenage girls in the United States and England: “This generation is profoundly anxious.”

* Failing the entire class.

* Rebirth of the Research University.

* Our research indicates children learn 4% more efficiently when being slowly boiled alive.

* Natalia Cecire on resilience and unbreakability.

* The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore. The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray. Nonviolence as Compliance. Images of the Unrest in Baltimore. “I Blame The Department.” “Those Kids Were Set Up.” The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think. In Freddie Gray’s Baltimore neighborhood, half of the residents don’t have jobs. Why Baltimore Rebelled.

* How Often Do Officers Lie Under Oath?

* Police Cadet Turns in Cop for Turning Body Cam Off Just Before Pummeling his Victim.

* Sneaky crosswalk law in Los Angeles is a tax for the crime of being poor.

* How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color.

* The disturbing differences in what men want in their wives and their daughters.

* It was a group assignment for four of them, but one of them did any actual work.

* The Shining, Retold as an Atari 2600 Game.

* If a bug in a slot machine says you’ve won $41.8m, can you claim it? Not in the case of Pauline McKee, 90, denied the payout after Iowa’s supreme court sided with the house.

* I didn’t become a doctor for the money.

* Netflix’s numbers are much less impressive than you would have thought.

* I will burn this fucking place to the ground before I get rid of that mirror.

* The struggle is real: Zoo Keeper Helps Constipated Monkey Pass Peanut By Licking Its Butt For An Hour.

* Your Tumblr of the day: Samplerman.

* “Sucralose, better known as Splenda, and acesulfame potassium, which is often called Ace K”: parent, talk to your kids about drugs.

* Men Accused of Sexual Assault Face Long Odds When Suing Colleges for Gender Bias.

* Jane Goodall Says SeaWorld ‘Should Be Closed Down.’

* Wisconsin’s roads are the third-worst in the nation. That’s pretty grim: how could two different states possibly be worse?

* Sounds like Age of Ultron will disappoint you twice.

* Scenes from the class struggle in California.

* Who created Caitlin Snow on #TheFlash? According to @DCComics, nobody.

* And why not him? The Bernie Sanders Decade.

 

MLK Day Links!

* Do you have a Hugo nomination ballot? John Scalzi’s Author/Editor/Artist/Fan Awareness Page may be of use to you. You’ll note from the last comment that Green Planets is in fact eligible for a “Best Related Work” Hugo…

* What, To the Black American, Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day?

* The Evolution of Dr. King.

* What Taking My Daughter to a Comic Book Store Taught Me.

* The question is, can we afford not to send our basketball team on a $800,000 trip to the Bahamas, in these troubled times?

* There’s always money in the banana stand.

The state Board of Regents for Higher Education approved $761,181 in merit raises for presidents, vice presidents and top administrators in the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities, but not without questions raised on the wisdom of doing so in tough budget times.

* Four Ways Human Beings Are Endangering Life on Earth.

* “Marine Le Pen is president of the Front National party in France.” Wow, The New York Times.

* Is ‘SimCity’ Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?

“I have Community College and a University, plenty of police coverage, yet I still have a city with homeless ALL OVER….. so what the fix for this or do I just not worry about it?” asks a player on Simtropolis.

* The bizarre ESP experiments conducted on aboriginal children without parental consent.

* Mike Ditka: I Wouldn’t Want My Child To Play Football.

* Another BitCoin processor turns out to be a scam.

* Behind the scenes at TfL’s lost property office.

* Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found.

* The end of Apple.

Even while it leaps forward with features in its operating systems, Apple has a huge installed base it drags with it. And even if, for instance, iTunes has been a terrible mishmash for a decade, the fact that it continues to be one with a major new release in 2015 is beyond the pale: Apple should be learning, not starting over and re-inventing when it comes to stability and experience.

* 14th Dalai Lama announces he is also the 2nd Karl Marx.

* An Internet of Treacherous Things.

* Arkansas officer fired after learning police dept. allows sex acts with prostitutes before busting them.

* Old-School The Legend of Zelda art from Nintendo Power.

* Louie‘s Paula Adlon is getting an FX series.

* The theme-park chain where children pretend to be adults.

* And Everyone Has Imposter Syndrome, Except For You.

Weekend Links

* My proposed Coursera course will ask students to discover for themselves how and why John Doerr, and your other Venture Capitalists, are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than is the State of California, which clearly has the means to spend much more than it has cost your company to reach a worldwide enrollment in the millions. As the course progresses, my more diligent students will come to see, however, that reducing income gaps through education is not the main problem that Coursera and other Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers are trying to solve in their pitch to investors. That problem is, rather, how and when to price the content that you are now giving away in your current (pre-public offering) phase of development.

* Mike Konczal on a universal basic income.

* “We are the people who live in the rivers where you want to build dams. We are the Munduruku, Juruna, Kayapó, Xipaya, Kuruaya, Asurini, Parakanã, Arara, fishermen and peoples who live in riverine communities. We are Amazonian peoples and we want the forest to stand. We are Brazilians. The river and the forest are our supermarket. Our ancestors are older than Jesus Christ.”

* Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide Against Mayan Group.

* Brezhnev-style capitalism.

Neoliberalism was a political system in which the world was put to the test in some way, it was simply that the tests employed were those which privileged price and entrepreneurial energy. I don’t want to defend this form of testing, which is often cynical, bullying and depressingly unsympathetic to other valuation systems. But there was often some consistency about it and the capacity for an unexpected outcome (for instance, that local economic diversity might be revealed to be more fiscally efficient). Look at Westfield today, however, and you see an economic culture being repeated, without any sincere sense that this represents ‘choice’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘regeneration’, nor any sense that things might have turned out differently even if this had been known. The point becomes to name this as ‘efficient’ and that (e.g. Peckham Rye Lane) as ‘inefficient’, and try and avoid or suppress evidence to the contrary. The fear arises that provable efficiency might involve abandoning one set of power structures in favour of another. And so economics becomes a naming ceremony, not a test.

* “Why do we have all this money to go after man-made terrorist attacks, and then we let our bridges fall down?” Flynn wonders.

* The New York Times covers the catastrophic failure of leadership at Cooper Union.

* Everything you want in the worst possible way: Not-Quite-Community renewed for a fifth season.

* Aaron Swartz Was Right.

* The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.” This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well.

* Law would stop Tesla electric car sales in NC.

* Morale crisis in Americans nuclear forces?

* Flying car crashes near school in Vernon, B.C.

* Julian Assange explains the coming super-surveillance state.

* Nearly 800 children under 14 were killed in gun accidents from 1999 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly one in five injury-related deaths in children and adolescents involve firearms.

* The New York Times profiles Dr. David A. Patterson.

His American name is David A. Patterson, his Cherokee name Adelv unegv Waya, or Silver Wolf. He is a tenure-track assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. His groundbreaking research on the pitfalls facing Native Americans is both informed and inspired by his own story of deliverance.

* And the L.A. Times profiles Elizabeth Warren.

Tuesday Links

* David Graeber teaches my superheroes module in one long go at the New Inquiry.

* Affirmative action and the fantasy of “merit” comes to the Supreme Court. Buckle up.

* The wisdom of markets: Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week.

* The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy — not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.

* Annals of Canadian crime: Canada cheese-smuggling ring busted – policeman charged.  Maple syrup seized in N.B. may have been stolen in Quebec.

* Illiteracy and Star Wars.

* Obama makes a strong pitch for my particular demographic.

* Are drones illegal? Well, we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, so…

* Let six-year-olds vote: Afghan war enters twelfth year. And onward! And onward!

* The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21… You know what? Let me stop you right there.

* “Man who defaced Tate Modern’s Rothko canvas says he’s added value.” And he’s probably right!

* Community not coming back on schedule is/is not a catastrophe. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they need more time to bring Dan Harmon back.

* Louie on hiatus until 2014.

* Why do Venezulans keep reelecting Hugo Chávez?

To understand why Chávez’s electoral victory would be apparent beforehand, consider that from 1980 to 1998, Venezuela’s per capita GDP declined by 14%, whereas since 2004, after the Chávez administration gained control over the nation’s oil revenues, the country’s GDP growth per person has averaged 2.5% each year.

At the same time, income inequality was reduced to the lowest in Latin America, and a combination of widely shared growth and government programs cut poverty in half and reduced absolute poverty by 70%—and that’s before accounting for vastly expanded access to health, education, and housing.

Oh.

* The Rise and Fall of the Cincinnati Boner King.

* Admitting that scientists demonstrate gender bias shouldn’t make us forget that other kinds of bias exist, or that people other than scientists exhibit them. In a couple of papers (one, two), Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh have investigated how faculty members responded to email requests from prospective students asking for a meeting. The names of the students were randomly shuffled, and chosen to give some implication that the students were male or female, and also whether they were Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese.

* Campus officer kills naked freshman at University of South Alabama.

* The Ohio Statue University marching band pays tribute to video games.

* Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown. / Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound. / Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go. / Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home. On “The Promise.”

* digby imagines what would happen if we tried to ban lead today.

* Like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi, Ridley Scott ends his career a hero.

* Behind the Scenes of the Planet of the Apes.

* And get ready for competing Moby Dick projects! Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?

Tuesday Links – 2

* Nate Silver sets out to quantify the electoral impact of killing bin Laden.

* Ezra Klein with the latest on health care reform and the courts.

* Krugman: So, let’s get this right: the adults are the people who, bad manners aside, don’t know the first thing about the programs they’re so eager to dismantle. And we’re supposed to take their advice because they’re wise men, don’t you know.

* Elitot Spitzer on the Republican war against the weak.

* And Roger Ebert weighs in on the class war.

If it is “socialist” to believe in a more equal distribution of income, what is the word for the system we now live under? A system under which the very rich have doubled their share of the nation’s income in 25 years? I believe in a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. Isn’t that an American credo? How did it get twisted around into an obscene wage for shameless plunder?

The People’s Republic of Vermont

Single payer for Vermont?

No One Cares What We Think

I long ago had to come to terms with a political era and a political machine that is not my own and never likely to please me. I do wonder what a critique like this one might accomplish, were it to penetrate the greater bloggy consciousness. It would take someone with publicity and access to bring it into the conversation, and as I’ve said, very, very few of genuinely left-wing socialist policy preferences are ever allowed into the Club. Even if it got there– even if, somehow, a critique like this one could puncture the carefully constructed bubble of blogospheric consciousness, the one which limits debate and sets the boundaries of “acceptable” discourse so narrowly– I can predict a sad response. Many would set out to deny the possibility that political blogs contain anything less than the full panoply of human political opinion, and would do so with exactly the mechanism I’m describing here: the existence of a nominal left-wing that represents merely a slightly different flavor of neoliberal doctrine would provide cover for those not even nominally left-wing. The Matt Yglesiases, the Ezra Kleins, the Jon Chaits, the Kevin Drums– they would likely support the neoliberal orthodoxy that has captured the debate by denying that any such dynamic could exist. That would give an out to the conservatives and libertarians to say “see, even the Liberal Ezra Klein says….” Every time there is agreement between, say, Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Will Wilkinson, this is taken as a sign that of a lack of disagreement to their position, rather than as an indicator of the narrow confines of blogger opinion. Once again, the idea that there is some sort of genuine ideological disagreement within the space would paper over the fact that little such disagreement exists.

Freddie deBoer has a must-read post on neoliberalism and the progressive blogosphere. Of course, when people happily take up the criticism as a badge of honor, there’s just not much left to say…

UPDATE: Contrary to my own pronouncements, I had a little bit more to say about all this on HASTAC.

But I Haven’t Left Yet

* Lebron has hurt everyone, but especially the weak heart of my beloved Cleveland. Nate Silver tries to put a number on the damage he’s done to his reputation playing Hamlet.

* A federal judge has unexpectedly struck down the parts of the Defense of Marriage Act that define marriage as being between a man and a woman. There’s more at MeFi, including a link to a post from Jack Balkin that suggests this could actually be a kind of right-wing Trojan Horse designed to undermine the juridical basis for New Deal government.

* Worst lemon-to-lemonade analogy ever.

* Science proves I was right all along when I said my high school started too early in the morning.

* Žižek blogs about BP. You know what’s coming.

The lesson is simply that, while market mechanisms may work up to a certain level to contain ecological damage, serious large-scale ecological catastrophies are simply out of their reach – any pseudo-scientific statistic talk about “sustainable risks” is ridiculous here. More than two decades ago, a paparazzo caught Senator Ted Kennedy (well known for his opposition to the off-shore drilling in search of oil) in the midst of the sexual act on a lone boat off Louisiana shore; during a Senate debate a couple of days later, a Republican Senator dryly remarked: “It seems that Senator Kennedy now changed his position on off-shore drilling…” So maybe, we should return to Senator Kennedy’s position: the only acceptable off-shore drilling is the one he was engaged in.

More Žižek here.

* Of all sad words of mouth or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been”: 55% Of Likely Voters Think Obama’s A Socialist.

Busy Summer Links

* Do kids make you unhappy? Science says yes. But parenting’s not so bad in social democracies with a proper safety net. Reserve your freezer space now.

* In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day. Steve Benen does the math: “If my math is right*, that means BP’s skimming and removal efforts are operating at less than 0.2% of the promised capacity. The oil giant only exaggerated its abilities by a factor of 500.”

* Why democracy doesn’t work: incumbents get a bump when the local college football team wins.

* Daily Kos still hasn’t given up hope for Democratic Senate gains in November.

* When I grow up, I want to go to Glenn Beck University.

* And Glenn Greenwald wants to repeal Godwin’s Law.

Actually Existing Socialism

Vermont to Design Single Payer Health Care System.

At issue, Senate Bill 88 (PDF), creates a commission to design and create an implementation plan for three different health care systems. One of the options that the commission will design is a single payer health care system and one will be a health care system that includes the choice of a state-run public option along side private health insurance.

…There is no guarantee that Vermont will implement either the single payer plan or the system with a public option, but it is a small step toward making that happen.

Monday Morning Miscellany

* In case you missed it last night, a joint statement from students in the Program in Literature and the Polygraph Editorial Collective on the closing of the Philosophy program at Middlesex University is up at Polygraph‘s website, as well as down the page.

* Media Matters fact-checks the Kagan nomination. My favorite is the one about her college thesis, which will fuel a thousand wails of SOCIALISM! from the right. Meanwhile, “elena kagan husband” and “elena kagan personal life” are #2 and #6 on Google’s trending searches right now; someone in the White House is undoubtedly freaking out.

* His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in anger, if only they knew the truth. Oh, surely.

* This Google Maps app compares the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill to your local metropolitan area.

* …so far, the state has lost between $6 million and $10 million in projected business revenue, with 23 group hotel bookings–from small meetings to large conventions–having been canceled in protest since the stroke of Brewer’s pen, according to the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association.

* Fantasy Soccer ’09-’10 has ended and I have once again been denied my rightful crown: I came in first place in MetaFilter’s league and in our head-to-head league but silver-medaled in the elite Blue Devils United division. The good news is we’ll be doing a Fantasy World Cup next month; details sometime in the next few weeks.

* This Wired piece seems to be ground zero for the Facebook backlash. Judging from my newsfeed the Facebook backlash backlash is already beginning in earnest; I’m planning on spearheading the backlash backlash backlash.

* Science proves “babies know the difference between good and evil at six months.” So now we can try babies as adults.

* Trailer for my cousin’s upcoming documentary about Afghanistan, Where My Heart Beats.

* And the single most difficult surgery ever performed.

Milwaukee Has Certainly Had Its Share of Visitors

Wayne Campbell: So, do you come to Milwaukee often?
Alice Cooper: Well, I’m a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.
Pete: Hey, isn’t “Milwaukee” an Indian name?
Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact, it’s pronounced “mill-e-wah-que,” which is Algonquin for “the good land.”
Wayne Campbell: I was not aware of that.
Alice Cooper: I think one of the most interesting things about Milwaukee is that it’s the only American city to elect three Socialist mayors.
Wayne Campbell: [to the camera] Does this guy know how to party or what?

I’m off to Mill-e-wah-que for a conference at the Center for 21st Century Studies on Debt; my paper is “Debt, Theft, Permaculture: Justice and Ecological Scale.” Blogging will be very light. I’ll be back blogging at better-than-full-strength on Monday.

Superman, Socialist

Superman, socialist. As the link notes, he’s an illegal immigrant, too.

Friday Night!

Friday night! Let’s linkdump.

* If you sent a letter to Whole Foods about the John Mackey Wall Street Journal editorial, you probably got a response tonight. I’d post what I received, but the small print at the bottom instructs me I cannot:

This email contains proprietary and confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others without the permission of the sender is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of the message.

I certainly appreciate their crafting a non-apology apology for my sole use. I don’t know how Daily Kos got a hold of it.

* NJ-GOV blogging: TPM, TPM, FiveThirtyEight.com.

* Also in Jersey news: Bob Dylan hassled by local NJ cop.

* NC-SEN blogging: Everyone hates Richard Burr.

* Airlock Alpha speaks the truth: it’s obviously too early for another Battlestar Galactica reboot.

* ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’: Huxley vs. Orwell.

* From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit.

* SF on HBO?

* Joe Siegel’s heirs have won rights to a few more early Superman stories.

* Whitney Phillips at Confessions of an Aca/Fan tracks down the provenance of the recent Obama/Joker/SOCIALISM graffiti. Of course, it was 4chan.

* Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?

Sunday (?)

Mostly non-apocalyptic Sunday links. (UPDATE: Yes, I know it’s Saturday.)

* J.G. Ballard’s last story, in the Guardian.

* The governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela have issued a statement in response to the 5th Summit of the Americas that declares, in part, that capitalism is destroying the planet. Why do the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela hate America / Jesus / puppies?

* See also: An anti-environmentalist lobbying coalition for industry has been caught, cigarette-lobby-like, ignoring its own experts.

* See also: this cartoon.

* Myths about the National Popular Vote Bill. This page actually answered a few of my objections, mostly about the likelihood of post-election pact-breakage.

* Crimes committed by Ferris Bueller during his day off.