Wednesday Links!

* After long neglect I’ve updated the “online articles” page on my Professional Website, if you’re interested.

* Studies show kindergarteners do better on standardized tests when chained to their desks in windowless white rooms for fifteen hours at a time, so.

* Jacobin‘s brief history of neoliberalism is quite good, though the claim that the Tea Party is irrelevant or that the GOP is on the ropes seems especially odd after last night’s wonderfully improbable defeat of Eric Cantor.

* You’d think at the “legacy project” point of his presidency Obama might want to avoid phrases like “misspent years” and “talking your way  through” things.

* Pizzeria Boss Fined $334K Because You Can’t Pay Workers In Pizza And Soda. Why not let the free market decide if pizza is currency?

* The Mental-Health Consequences of Unemployment. The jobs with the highest incidence of depression. Both cases seem like prime candidates for the left critique of the medicalization of depression, which is that sometimes you’re depressed because your circumstances are bad, not because your brain is misfiring.

* Headlines you don’t want to read about your new city: “Getting Milwaukee’s rivers to meet state water quality standards won’t be easy.”

* Peru Approves Genocide for Uncontacted Tribes.

* Why I’m sending 200 copies of Little Brother to a high-school in Pensacola, FL.

* Temp Nation: How Corporations Are Evading Accountability, at Workers’ Expense.

* Why a California judge just ruled that teacher tenure is bad for students.

* Another study confirms Fox News viewers are unusually misinformed even by American standards.

* Feedly and Evernote Go Down As Attackers Demand Ransom.

* Climate Change: SVU.

* Map: All the Countries John McCain Has Wanted to Attack. I have to believe this is a significant undercount.

* My “but it could actually be good” fantasy script for Batman vs. Superman get less and less likely by the day. Alas.

* And could we finally see another Star Trek TV series courtesy of Netflix? Only if you promise it’s not Captain Worf.

Three for Thursday

* Obama unforced errors watch: President Obama Has All The Legal Authority He Needs To Make Recess Appointments Right Now.

* Science fiction hegemony watch: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Invalidates Apple’s Design Patent On The iPad, Says Samsung.

* And the misery caucus is already looking to get out ahead of Hurricane Irene.

Debt Ceiling Alignment Chart

Earlier today @rortybomb asked for a D&D alignment chart on the debt ceiling fight. I thought this was a pretty great idea, and had some free time. Here goes:

Midday Tuesday

* Something light: The 10 Most Insane Jimmy Olsen Moments of All Time.

* Something dark: Checking in with the victims of the Stanford Prison Experiment, 40 years on.

* Lawyers for the coal industry have argued that it’s not their fault birth defects are linked to mountaintop-removal coal-mining; those people are just inbred.

* And Kevin Drum on how to understand Obama:

Just do this: whenever you think Obama has done something dumb or weakminded or inexplicable, remind yourself that he doesn’t necessarily have the same goals as you. He sincerely wants a deal that involves concessions from both sides, and once you understand that his actions will suddenly seem a lot less dumb, weakminded, and inexplicable. In fact, they’ll seem pretty obvious.

I’ve been here quite a while.

* Yglesias has an interesting post that flirts with putting a good, 11-dimensional-chess face on Obama’s debt-ceiling strategy:

We’re looking at an administration strategy to get a bipartisan deal over long-term fiscal balance. It’s a strategy whose purpose is to try to change the dynamic in which we alternate between Democrats-only balanced deficit reduction bills (like the 1993 Clinton budget) and GOP-led deficit increasing bills (like the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts). It’s the debt ceiling that’s a means to an end. And you can see that the key Democratic bargaining position here is to insist on revenue increases rather than to try to minimize spending cuts.

This is, certainly, a bold strategy. Rather than fighting the GOP’s effort to create a debt ceiling hostage crisis, Obama called their bluff. He’s willing to do huge amounts of deficit reduction, including giant spending cuts, but he’s not willing to resolve the crisis without some tax hikes. The victim has become the hostage taker. In an instrumental sense, it’s inspired, and of course has created the circumstances under which it might be possible for the administration to sell congressional Democrats on cuts they would otherwise never accept.

before rapidly turning out-and-out apocalyptic:

But on the merits, saying we can only raise the debt ceiling if we do several trillions of dollars worth of balanced austerity is only somewhat more reasonable than saying we can only raise the debt ceiling if we do several trillions of dollars worth of spending-only austerity. The world is currently grappling with a number of severe economic problems. There is, among other things, a continued “flight to quality” effect in which people want safe assets, and it’s concurrent with serious sovereign debt issues in southern europe. The fact that there’s apparently a bipartisan consensus in the United States that we ought to deliberately engineer a sovereign debt crisis right now as part of tactical bargaining over Medicare is pretty scary.

* On the bright side, even Eric Cantor can’t get his numbers to add up—so maybe it is all just for show…

Eric Cantor, Superliberal

Ezra Klein: The reality is that liberals should be sending Eric Cantor a fruit basket. It’s increasingly clear that he has not only saved them from a deal they’d hate, but also stopped Obama from giving up a fight they want to have later.

Now, I’m sure Obama will find some way to give up on taxes later. He’s no quitter.

Tuesday!

* Boogie Woogie Flu has 70 bootlegs and covers in honor of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday.

* My father sends along this 3-dimensional tour of Detroit’s crumbling Michigan Station.

* Duke is officially off coal.

* White people officially have no idea what racism is.

* The Rapture has been officially rescheduled.

* Eric Cantor is officially a monster.

* And speaking of monsters: Climate scientists still can’t get their calls returned in Washington. History will not be kind.

Thursday Night

* Eric Cantor’s report of a bullet fired at his Richmond office appears to have been significantly exaggerated. Infamous liberal David Frum has apparently been fired from the American Enterprise Institute for violating the 11th Commandment. White powder has been sent to the offices of Anthony Weiner. And Tea Party supporters are threatening the Senate parliamentarian, as well as planning a protest outside his residence.

* Is the anti-health-care lawsuit essentially frivolous?

* The verdict has come back in United States v. Russell Cletus Maricle et al., the first voting fraud case to involve electronic voting machines, with all defendants found guilty.

* Geoengineering: “A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come”?

* And it had to happen someday: George Michael vs. Ann Veal in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.