Posts Tagged ‘Eric Holder’
I Guess That’s Why They Call It Jet Lag Links
* “Fantastic Breasts and Where To Find Them.” NSFW, and probably deserves a trigger warning for imagery of sexual violence too.
* Academics, Public Work, And Labor.
* Kids Returned To Honduras, Killed.
* California drought: 17 communities could run out of water within 60 to 120 days, state says. More at MetaFilter.
* Recent Glacial Melt Mostly Caused By Man-Made Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Study Finds.
* Mr. Holder and top Justice Department officials were weighing whether to open a broader civil rights investigation to look at Ferguson’s police practices at large, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The issue came up after news reports revealed a 2009 case in which a man said that four police officers beat him, then charged him with damaging government property — by getting blood on their uniforms.
* Half of black men in the US have been arrested by age 23.
* Who is an “Outside Agitator”? Unethical journalism can make Ferguson more dangerous. Police in Ferguson Are Firing Tear Gas Canisters Manufactured During the Cold War Era. Tear Gas Is an Abortifacient. Why Won’t the Anti-Abortion Movement Oppose It? Why hasn’t Darren Wilson been arrested yet? Police are operating with total impunity in Ferguson. A local public defender on the deeply dysfunctional Ferguson court system.
* Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year.
* Saying the quiet part loud: Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.
* Another edition of Aaron Bady Movie Corner.
* I thought this @nerdist interview with Matthew Weiner was great.
* Trustees agree! Trustees need more power.
* Islamic militants execute journalist, MU grad James Foley. His letter to the alumni magazine from 2011.
* The Pressure to Breast-Feed Is Hurting New Moms With Postpartum Depression.
* It’s not all bad news: This Oxford professor thinks artificial intelligence will destroy us all.
* And the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin says we should prioritize road work based on what would create the most jobs. My gosh. It’s like an Adam Kotsko rant come to life.
Thursday Night Links
* Thank a Boomer: the North Pole is now a lake.
* Three-Quarters Of Young, Independent Voters Describe Deniers As ‘Ignorant, Out Of Touch Or Crazy.’
* Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought.
* MOOCs enter the “Sure, they’re a complete disaster, but what if they weren’t?” phase of the hype cycle.
* College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. Better hire some new assistant under-deans to tackle this problem.
* Why would CPS throw more money into recruiting recent college graduates with five weeks of training and no teaching certificates into the district when it lets go of highly-qualified, certified, veteran teachers? What’s the Difference Between Teach For America, and a Scab Temp Agency?
* What’s the Matter With North Carolina? Meanwhile, Eric Holder tries to reignite the preclearance provision of the VRA under Section 3.
* Scientists believe they have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse.
* Sleep is a standing affront to capitalism.
* There’s no such thing as black-on-black crime.
* Ally-phobia: On the Trayvon Martin Ruling, White Feminism, and the Worst of Best Intentions. White People Fatigue Syndrome.
* “Summer Vacation Is Evil”: the ultimate #slatepitch.
* Today in coffee-is-good-for-you news: Coffee drinking tied to lower risk of suicide.
* A unique defense: Lance Armstrong says it doesn’t count if everyone should have known you were lying.
* And tonight’s poem: “Rape Joke,” by Patricia Lockwood.
Thursday!
* First we must understand that though the humanities in general and literary studies in particular are poor and struggling, we are not naturally poor and struggling. We are not on a permanent austerity budget because we don’t have the intrinsic earning power of the science and engineering fields and aren’t fit enough to survive in the modern university. I suggest, on the basis of a case study, that the humanities fields are poor and struggling because they are being milked like cash cows by their university administrations. The money that departments generate through teaching enrollments that the humanists do not spend on their almost completely unfunded research is routinely skimmed and sent elsewhere in the university. As the current university funding model continues to unravel, the humanities’ survival as national fields will depend on changing it. Via MLA.
* No one could have predicted: Citing disappointing student outcomes, San Jose State pauses work with Udacity.
* Tomrorow’s outrageous acquittals today: Here’s Florida’s Next Trayvon Martin Case.
* Possible Homeland Security pick tainted by racial profiling accusations. It would be terrible if racial politics were somehow allowed to corrupt the mission of Homeland Security.
* Eric Holder: I Had To Tell My Son How To Protect Himself From The Police Because He Is Black.
* Wyoming is a place with two escalators; it probably shouldn’t get two senators.
* As western water leaders converged on Las Vegas in December 2001, Southern California’s inability to contain its voracious appetite seemed finally to be bumping up against reality – there is only so much water in the Colorado River.
* My friend Fran McDonald has a piece in the Atlantic about laughter without humor.
The glitch aesthetic of the GIF emphasizes the uncanny quality of laughter. At each moment of re-looping, Portman performs a miniature convulsion that registers as an inhuman twitch. If humor makes us human — an assumed correlation that is so deeply written into our culture that the two share a basic etymological root — then laughter without humor appears to render us mechanical, terrifying, monstrous. It is not a coincidence that laughter without humor has become the great cinematic signifier of madness: think of Colin Clive’s maniacal “it’s alive!” hysterics in the famous 1931 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the crazed cackle of The Joker in the Batman comics.
* Today, surrogacies in the U.S. are managed by profitable “voluntary” clinic-agencies speaking the language of the “gift.” The labor (no pun intended) that commercial surrogates perform in the U.S. is not legally recognized as work but as volunteerism, though surrogacies cost at least four times the 1986 sum—whether they be traditional, in which the surrogate is impregnated with a client’s sperm, or, as is increasingly the case, gestational, in which an in-vitro-fertilized embryo is transferred to the surrogate’s womb. Strict means-testing is used to assess a surrogate’s independent wealth, purporting to check for authentic “voluntariness.” This effectively bars working-class American women from entering surrogacy agreements. The U.S. surrogacy industry prefers to cast surrogacy as akin to basket-weaving or amateur pottery, not assembly-line factory work.
In India, the reverse is true. There are upwards of 3,500 so-called womb farms in the country, in which conscripted women offer the vital force of black flesh considered untouchable at home to incubate white children destined to be shipped back to Denmark, Israel, or the U.S. It’s a “purely economic arrangement” with a “mere vessel,” explains Dominic and Octavia Orchard of Oxfordshire, UK, a commissioning couple featured in the Daily Mail in 2012. To couples like these, surrogates are presented as transnational reproductive-service workers, their job description posted online and accompanied by detailed terms of service.
* And a Dan Harmon profile with more information on his firing and rehiring and plans for season five, for anyone who still hasn’t lost patience with either the series or him personally…
All the Wednesday Links
* The headline reads, “Student Loan Debt Delinquency Is Much Worse Than We Thought.”
We find that 27 percent of the borrowers have past due balances, while the adjusted proportion of outstanding student loan balances that is delinquent is 21 percent-much higher than the unadjusted rates of 14.4 percent and 10 percent, respectively
Meanwhile, college costs have sextupled since 1985.
* The Supreme Court looks prepared to rule that international law doesn’t apply internationally. Well done, sirs.
* Attorney General Eric Holder concludes no due process is a kind of due process. This whole “rule of law” thing is going great.
* Paul Pillar: We can live with a nuclear Iran. Of course we can.
The simple argument is that Iranian leaders supposedly don’t think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred. On the campaign trail Rick Santorum has been among the most vocal in propounding this notion, asserting that Iran is ruled by the “equivalent of al-Qaeda,” that its “theology teaches” that its objective is to “create a calamity,” that it believes “the afterlife is better than this life,” and that its “principal virtue” is martyrdom. Newt Gingrich speaks in a similar vein about how Iranian leaders are suicidal jihadists, and says “it’s impossible to deter them.”
The trouble with this image of Iran is that it does not reflect actual Iranian behavior. More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one. They are no more likely to let theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behavior than other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife. Iranian rulers may have a history of valorizing martyrdom—as they did when sending young militiamen to their deaths in near-hopeless attacks during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s—but they have never given any indication of wanting to become martyrs themselves. In fact, the Islamic Republic’s conduct beyond its borders has been characterized by caution. Even the most seemingly ruthless Iranian behavior has been motivated by specific, immediate concerns of regime survival. The government assassinated exiled Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s, for example, because it saw them as a counterrevolutionary threat. The assassinations ended when they started inflicting too much damage on Iran’s relations with European governments. Iran’s rulers are constantly balancing a very worldly set of strategic interests. The principles of deterrence are not invalid just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.
On the other side, of course, we have the not-at-all-fascistic-sounding slogan “peace through strength.” Occupy Everywhere? What could possibly go wrong?
* Football: It’s worse than you think! Via MetaFilter, with more from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Matt Zoller Seitz on what makes Mad Men great.
* When Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Akira Kurosawa.
Marquez: Thank you very much. All things considered, I think that if I were Japanese I would be as unyielding as you on [the subject of the bomb]. And at any rate I understand you. No war is good for anybody.
Kurosawa: That is so. The trouble is that when the shooting starts, even Christ and the angels turn into military chiefs of staff.
* How Goldman Sachs does it: they’re on every side of every deal.
* Archie Comics continues to insist on its own relevance: now they’re giving Cheryl Blossom breast cancer.
* I give Colbert the edge over Stewart re: Rush.
* And exactly how long ago was a long time ago in a galaxy far away? io9 is there.
Great Unknown, Han and Chewbacca are forced to make a jump to hyperspace to flee Imperial attackers. (OK yes, we know it’s non-canonical, but this is a thought experiment so just bear with us.) The Millennium Falcon crash lands on Earth, where Han and Chewbacca are attacked by Native Americans. Han receives several arrow wounds in the process, and Chewbacca holds his partner as the last bit of life flees from him. The second half of the story leaps 126 years into the future, with Indiana Jones and Short Round searching for Sasquatch in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, only to find Chewbacca and the bones of Han Solo.
Blaspheme!
Unhappy Monday Links
I have it on good authority that my friend Traxus was totally making fun of someone else in this post on blogging styles. That said, some unhappy Monday links.
* As you’ve probably already heard, Michael Jackson’s death has now been ruled a homicide. Let the feeding frenzy resume.
* Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named a veteran federal prosecutor on Monday to examine abuse of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency, after the Justice Department released a long-secret report showing interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee’s children. A good day for America (and for the rule of law). Hopefully this is the beginning and not the end.
* NJ-Gov: Christie’s lead has all but disappeared in the face of weeks of bad press. More from TPM.
* Elsewhere in New Jersey news UPDATE: from 1970: Foster parents denied right to adopt because the father is an atheist.
In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes’ “high moral and ethical standards,” he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that “no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” Despite Eleanor Katherine’s tender years, he continued, “the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being.”
People who love to tell New Atheists to sit down and shut up, take note.
* ‘How to Kill a City’: from an episode of Mad Men yesterday to the pages of the New York Times today. Via @mrtalbot.
* The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition.
* 12 Greenest Colleges and Universities, at Sustainablog. Vermont once again takes high honors.
* ‘Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox.’ (Via Ze.) This is actually an important plot point (with some nice twists) in a novel I’ve touted a few times here, Accelerando.
* And Fimoculous has your Curb Your Enthusiasm preview.
Sunday Links 2
Sunday links 2.
* For all you IJers out there, Infinite Summer has your David Foster Wallace humor minute.
* Hate crime protection for the homeless? Hate crimes are, in general, a very thorny legal issue, but in light of so much violence directed specifically at the homeless it makes sense to see them as a class in need of additional protection.
* Terminator 4 was so good they’re going to make Terminator 5.
* Polling headline of the week: ‘GOP’s Rating with Latinos Falls to Margin of Error.’
* Rachel Maddow on the success of astroturfed right-wing protests since the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000. Via Cyn-C.
* And Eric Holder is still inching towards prosecution of the Bush administration, though in terms of scale and scope the proposed investigation remains far too cautious.
Hope Yet for Justice
Newsweek: Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. “You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation’s laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort,” Holder says. “But the reality of being A.G. is that I’m also part of the president’s team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values.”
These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”
There’s some discussion of this claim and what it means at MetaFilter and Greenwald, as well as reports tonight that Cheney ordered the CIA to lie to Congress.
Gerry Canavan 