Grim Procrastination Wednesday Links!

* Nuclear war: It’s not all good news! “The White House, including the national-security team, was unaware President Trump was preparing to speak publicly about North Korea when he did so Tuesday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.” And from way back in January: Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?

“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops.” pic.twitter.com/ScUm6qyjCK

— Mαtt Thomαs (@mattthomas) August 8, 2017

* Forced Intimacy: An Ableist Norm.

* When Silicon Valley Took Over Journalism: The pursuit of digital readership broke the New Republic—and an entire industry.

* FBI conducted predawn raid of former Trump campaign chairman Manafort’s home.

* California Crops Rot as Immigration Crackdown Creates Farmworker Shortage. Justice Dept. Backs Ohio’s Effort to Purge Infrequent Voters From Rolls. The looming debt ceiling fight, explained.

* You’re not imagining it: the rich really are hoarding economic growth.

* Frozen on Broadway! Springsteen on Broadway!

* Wisconsin taxpayers would need until 2043 to recoup nearly $3 billion in Foxconn payments. Foxconn has a long history of lying about its plans to open plants and create jobs.

* They say our best years are behind us, but ‘Driverless’ Van in Virginia Is Driven by Man Dressed Like a Car Seat.

* Superman and branding.

* And on the pedestal these words appear.

Weekend Links! Tabs Bankruptcy! All Links Must Go!

* Podcast: What is Irish Science Fiction? I’d also recommend a few new podcasts, Off Book (weekly improvised musical) and What Trump Can Teach Us about Con Law.

* Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again.”

* Researchers Just Launched a Prototype of Humanity’s First ‘Interstellar Spacecraft.’

* ‘Make It So’: Star Trek and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism.

* Star Trek: Discovery is the first Trek TV series in over 15 years. Here’s everything we know.

* Republicans don’t trust higher ed. That’s a problem for liberal academics.

* Three years after Steven Salaita lost a promised tenured position in American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the tone of his anti-Israel tweets, he’s leaving academe.

* How a New Field Could Help Save the Humanities.

* Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color.

* They’re still fighting at Hypatia.

* “If There’s an Organized Outrage Machine, We Need an Organized Response.” Recovering academic freedom in an age of social media mobbing.

* Any parent could have told you this: Ravens plan better than four-year-olds.

* How to raise an optimistic human in a pessimistic world.

* Among the dead was a so-called Dreamer, a migrant who had been brought to the United States as a young child. Frank Guisseppe Fuentes, 20, spent much of his life in the U.S. and had crossed the border in an attempt to reunite with family members living in Maryland after he was deported to Guatemala City, Jose Barillas, the Guatemalan consul general in Houston, told Univision. The Mothers Being Deported by Trump. Slain girl’s father, sister denied visas, miss her funeral. A Veteran Agent Speaks Out.

* New Jersey raised its smoking age to 21. The change will likely save lives. Honestly, just ban them outright, and soda too.

* Wisconsin is paying as much as $1 million per job, which will carry an average salary of $54,000. I’ve thought about it, and I think I’d rather have the iPhone.

* The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills.

* Don’t let your employer microchip you! Ever!

* A 21st-century form of indentured servitude has already penetrated deep into the American heartland.

* Woman turns home into museum after getting sick of black women being ignored by the art world.

* When there was a Lyme disease vaccine.

* Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle.

* North Dakota’s Norway Experiment.

* Reverse Robin Hood: The Historical Scam of Global Development.

* Dungeons and Dragons in America’s dungeons. Dungeons and Dragons and the Left.

* Who invented the high five?

* Hemingway just got beat by four words.

* Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child.

* The Bleak Left.

* A new Uber-esque school model turns teachers like me into on-demand contractors for the children of the 1 percent.

* The Sinclair Revolution Will Be Televised. It’ll Just Have Low Production Values.

* 110/111.

* The next Matt Groening series isn’t just a Futurama-but-fantasy but a joke Futurama already did. But fine I’ll give it a chance.

* A definitive mapping of the decline of The Simpsons. It’s just math, folks.

* The attack on Poland’s judicial independence goes deeper than you may think. Here are 5 things to know. Dodged that bullet. Coming soon to a collapsing empire near you!

* On 500 episodes of Comedy Bang Bang.

* When Pokémon Go defeated Milwaukee County.

* Et tu, Roomba? I trusted you.

* The World May Have Less Time to Address Climate Change Than Scientists Thought.

* And yet there’s more dicks around than ever before.

* The knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.

* #NotAllTVIsDarkAndFullOfTerrors.

* And July 30 can’t come fast enough.

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And because Trump is a nightmare from which none of us will ever awake:

* We’re Approaching a Major Turning Point in Trump-Era Pop Culture.

* The Scariest Nuclear Threat Is Coming From Inside the White House.

After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

* The End of State.

* Turtles all the way down: Scott Pruitt wants to hijack the peer-review process to push bad climate science.

* Trump announces an unvetted transgender ban without telling either the White House press office or the Pentagon.

At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.

Were we ever so young?

* This guy is running communications now! Come on! COME ON!

* A Constitutional Crisis Is Inevitable. It’s not too early, or too nutty, to discuss grounds for impeachment. This presidency can’t be saved. A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly. Hot mic. 1 in 4. On the Brink of a Constitutional Crisis, the Nation Goes Numb.

* Psychiatry group tells members they can ignore ‘Goldwater rule’ and comment on Trump’s mental health.

* Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals. Sixteen years. We’ve long lost even the pretense that there is a rational reason for this.

* 64 years after Korean War, North still digging up bombs.

* William Regnery II, a man who inherited millions but struggled in business, tried for 15 years to ignite a racist political movement — and failed. Then an unforeseen phenomenon named Donald Trump gave legitimacy to what Regnery had seeded long before: the alt-right. Now, the press-shy white separatist breaks his silence.

* How Breitbart Media’s Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump.

* This is the tradition Ryan Alford sets himself against in Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law. It is from a position of deliberate disinterest in institutional personality, particularly presidential personality, that Alford builds his account of the lawlessness of US counterterrorism efforts since the 9/11 attacks and charts our country’s official passage across the “threshold between an imperial presidency and an elective dictatorship.”

* Is this fascism?

* What if Trump Ordered a Nuclear Strike on China? I’d Comply, Says Admiral. Not great, Bob!

* When you’ve lost the Boy Scouts.

* Who Is Killing American Women? Their Husbands And Boyfriends, CDC Confirms.

* Trump administration is sitting on tens of thousands of student debt forgiveness claims.

* Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated.

* RIP CBO.

* There’s nothing he can’t ruin.

* How to put Trump on Mount Rushmore, something he’s never even thought about.

* #Actually Stubbs’s tenure as mayor was deeply problematic.

* John McCain Just Proved He Is the Senate’s Biggest Fraud (Again). Your enemies are human too.

The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.

* Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.

* Understanding skinny repeal.

* Don’t forget: they win because the system is rigged in their favor. Not that they don’t get a lot of help.

* And yet! Sometimes they don’t. Good for Collins, Murkowski, McCain, and literally every Democrat in Congress, and remember that Trumpcare isn’t truly dead (no matter how many bullets you put in it) until Democrats get a veto point back…

Friday Morning Links

* Yesterday Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* Over 865,200 Gallons of Fracked Oil Spill in ND, Public In Dark For Days Due to Government Shutdown.

* The shutdown comes to Milwaukee too.

* He says his daughter might be alive if not for school-nurse cuts.

* You could save a lot of money abolishing the SAT and just testing directly for parents’ wealth. And in these tough times…

* We Are Teaching High School Students to Write Terribly.

* The Great Library at Alexandria was destroyed by budget cuts, not fire.

* Report: Foxconn using forced student labor to build Sony’s PS4.

* Disney Exec Says Women Are Hard to Animate Because of Emotions.

* Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is Coming to the Big Screen! Parents, better start your boundless weeping now just to get ahead of it.

* Minneapolis learns that publicly financed stadiums are all scams. Though I confess I’m heartened to see San Diego choosing a comics stadium boondoggle over a football stadium boondoggle.

* This is what a penny looks like after being on Mars for 411 days.

* This Man of Steel nonsense is the craziest casting rumor I’ve ever heard. I don’t care if it’s obviously made up!

* And rest in peace, Kumar Pallana. Another obituary.

Saturday Night Links

* Breaking: Right-wing Supreme Court Justices don’t take their jobs seriously. Supreme Court May Be Most Conservative in Modern History. Antonin Scalia, semi-retired crank.

* Jonathan Cohn, Scott Lemieux, and Richard Hansen and ponder the legitimacy of a Supreme Court that has actually gone the full monty and overturned the ACA.

* Of course they say the same thing about us. Judge Strikes Down Key Parts Of Walker’s Anti-Public Employee Union Law.

* Don’t check the date, just believe it: Google Maps QuestView for the NES.

* This collection of more-accurate Dr. Seuss titles is one of my favorite things on the entire Internet.

* James Cameron teases the Avatar sequels.

“The best inspiration I got for ‘Avatar’ 2 and 3 was dealing with the master navigator culture in Micronesia,” Cameron said by phone from Tokyo on Friday, where he attended the Japanese premiere of “Titanic 3D.”

The Micronesians, a seafaring culture who navigated the Pacific for centuries without the aid of compasses or charts, already have a lot in common with the blue Na’vi residents of Pandora — they’re an indigenous, matrilineal culture, colonized by outsiders. And the cerulean and aquamarine tones of “Avatar” and its inhabitants seem drawn from postcards from the watery Micronesian region.

* The New York Times has some fun with towards a quantum theory of Mitt Romney.

* 21st Century as Intergenerational War. More here and here.

* Why are colleges acting as volunteer loan collection agents for the banks?

* In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.

* The lottery lie: The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).

* The education reform lie: it’s impossible to talk about primary and secondary education in America in any meaningful way if you won’t allow yourself to discuss class.

* Hunger Games commentary watch: Understanding Katniss.

* If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Yours sincerely, Kurt Vonnegut.

* Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly.

But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.

* Slate continues to pioneer bold new horizons in fantasy capitalism.

* 3 New Studies Link Bee Decline to Bayer Pesticide. No one could have predicted the widespread implementation of insecticides would kill so many insects!

* The government has put the chances of a magnitude 7.3 quake centered in the north of Tokyo Bay at 70 percent over the next three decades, and has estimated there would be about 11,000 casualties and 850,000 buildings destroyed.

* Cancer research: it’s worse than you think.

* “Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement.”

* Orwell and March Madness.

* And Canada will stop issuing pennies. Honestly, they’re decades ahead of us. Could be centuries.

Monday Lunchtime Links

* You’ve got to wonder how much New Jersey kicked to the Center for Public Integrity to get this surprise least-corrupt accolade.

* Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board.

* As we face the certain extinction of all life on earth, the question on everyone’s mind is: How will this affect the 2012 presidential race?

* Facts are stupid things: Growth In Government Spending Under President Obama Slower Than During Bush, Reagan Administrations. But don’t worry! The White House’s generous offer for even more cuts is still on the table.

* Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military?

“For decades the military has been using video-game technology,” says Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using retooled video games to train their personnel.”

Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending. The prototype for the first home video games console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates, a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date back to at least the second world war.

Later, the games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994, look uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.

“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”

* Daniel Engber at Slate has your Apple apologetics.

But Daisey’s version wasn’t even substantially true. It was substantially false. The version of the story that aired on the radio gave listeners a clear and false impression of the abuses at Foxconn. It inflated the prevalence and massaged the data. How much deeper could the lies have gone?

…

Apple employees are being mistreated in China, but perhaps not so much or so often that it really matters to most people, harsh as that may sound.

Related: zunguzungu on The McNulty Gambit.

* In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that corporate donations to campaign Super PACs were legal because there was no reason to think they led to “corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This was a remarkably specious argument in the first place, but now we’re apparently going to test it to destruction.

* More on the SCOTUS beat: If you believe that the Court’s conservative majority is itching to strike down Obamacare, then the task is to launder this decision of partisan motivation. The Paul Clement court.

* Still more: Obamacare on Trial: Case of the Century?

* If the hole in the ozone layer were discovered today, we’d let the planet burn.

* A Critical Look at the Future of Zoos.

* Fresh from arguing that the female orgasm doesn’t exist, science now concludes women can have orgasms from exercising. Make up your mind, science!

Friday Night Links

* This American Life retracts their Apple documentary. More here.

* Greetings from Milwaukee: Selections from the Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert Postcard Collection.

* Rortybomb with three ways of looking at the student debt crisis.

* China Miéville previews his new comic series Dial H for Hero.

* Inhofe on climate change: “‘I Thought It Must Be True Until I Found Out What It Cost.” Sure, that’s how facts work.

* Wisconsin GOP loses state Senate majority after surprise resignation.

* The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos. Via MeFi.

* Rick Perlstein argues the problem isn’t that conservatives are crazier than they were fifty years ago; the problem is they’re exactly as crazy as they were fifty years ago. Via LGM.

* After less than three full days of deliberations, the five men and seven women of the jury found Dharun Ravi, 20 years old, guilty of invading the privacy of his 18-year-old roommate, Tyler Clementi, and his dorm-room date. 

* So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

* I miss Linsanity. Those were simpler times.

* Americans used public transformation twice as much in 1940. That’s per capita. That’s nuts.

* Louis C.K. Withdraws as Host of Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. Who invited him in the first place? What a terrible choice for the gig.

* Obama comes out against Amendment One. Hey, me too!

* Al Gore endorses filibuster reform. Hey, me too!

* And today in Settlers of Catan news: A Dutch public broadcasting network last month offered its viewers a board game featuring Israeli settlers who use “Jewish stinginess” and “the Anne Frank card” to colonize the West Bank. Hours of fun for the entire family!

FNL

* My students last summer insisted Mass Effect was important science fiction. Now io9 is telling me the same thing.

* American University’s adjunct faculty have voted to unionize.

* How to design a movie poster.

* You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. What could possibly go wrong?

* Gay marriage passes in New Jersey, only to be vetoed by Chris Christie. Meanwhile marriage equality looks likely to pass the Maryland state legislature. Meanwhile Obama announces it won’t defend laws that ban same-sex couples from receiving military benefits.

* WTFEverywhere: Sweden is only one of 17 countries that require transgender people to undergo sterilization.

* Apple still trying to find some way to make the Foxconn scandal go away.

* And Springsteen explains Wrecking Ball.

“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community … In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid – he’s imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.”