Just Some Normal Friday Night Links on a Perfectly Normal Friday Night

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2020

• Discharges, Demographics and Discipline: Marquette is eyeing deep faculty cuts. An undergraduate says she was targeted for discipline because she questioned the administration.
• Corporate Consultants Set Their Targets on American Universities.
• What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education.
• The College Degree Is Dividing America.
• Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting.’ Trump’s campaign and family boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count. Study Considers a Link Between QAnon and Polling Errors. QAnon Is Winning. The president has told allies he’ll never concede. How Fox News Saved America. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
• 2020 is 2010 redux. The permanent GOP apartheid.
• Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races. Okay but after that it’s socialism, right
• Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
• Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy. What It’s Like for a Voting Rights Activist to Finally See Georgia in Play. The Canavan Plan for Georgia Supremacy.
• If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority. If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people.
• The Cretaceous, US election maps, and you.
• It’s not you, Nate. It’s us. (And maybe a little you.)
• Like so many political prodigies before her, @AOC is about to destroy her career by gripping the last third rail in American life.
• How Conservatism Failed Its Women.
• ‘It’s Just a Slaughter’: Montana Goes From Purple to Deep Red.
• Two Louisville high schoolers just took down the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police. Let that sink in.
• From the archives: The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
• The unemployment crisis hiding in plain sight. Help is not on the way.
• Marquette professor settles 144-year controversy on invention of the telephone.
• Mysterious Radio Signal Is Coming from Inside Our Own Galaxy, Scientists Announce.
• Not joking: Is this eligible for every Oscar?
• Great, more work.
• And scientists discover bizarre hell planet where it rains rocks and oceans are made of lava. It’s called Election Night 2020 am I right

pic.twitter.com/0eXnaIVYkF

— Daigle (@Daigle) October 31, 2020

Late Night Monday

* In a post-employment economy, many are working simply to earn the prospect of making money.

* John Scalzi: 

So when a publisher comes to you and says “We like your book, can we buy it?” do not treat them like they are magnanimously offering you a lifetime boon, which if you refuse will never pass your way again. Treat them like what they are: A company who wants to do business with you regarding one specific project. Their job is to try to get that project on the best terms that they can. Your job is to sell it on terms that are most advantageous to you.

* When People Write for Free, Who Pays?

* Kafka wept:

Oakland Police kept a man on its Most Wanted list for six months though he was not wanted for anything, the man claims in court.

And the most amazing part:

After “nearly a week of hiding in fear,” Van turned himself in on Feb. 13, “to resolve this devastating mistake,” the complaint states.

He was held for 72 hours, never charged with anything, then released, according to the complaint.

Yet on Feb. 14, the Oakland Police Department released a statement, “Most Wanted Turns Himself In,” which began: “One of Oakland’s four most wanted suspects has been taken off the streets. Last week, Oakland’s Police Chief Howard Jordan named Van Chau as one of the City’s four most wanted criminals. Today, the Oakland Police Department reports that Van Chau is off the streets of Oakland and is safely behind bars after turning himself in due to media pressure. Chief Howard Jordan said, ‘A week ago I stood with community members and asked the community to stand with me to fight crime and today we have one less criminal on our streets. Today a victim is one step closer to justice.'”

Via @zunguzungu.

* The State Department’s latest environmental assessment of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline makes no recommendation about whether President Obama should approve it. Here is ours. He should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem. Good conscience! Good conscience! Hilarious.

* The Inevitable 2014 Headline: ‘Global CO2 Level Reaches 400 PPM For First Time In Human Existence.’ The melting of Canada’s glaciers is irreversible.

* Arizona’s Law Banning Mexican-American Studies Curriculum Is Constitutional, Judge Rules.

*  “It’s not for everyone”: working as a slavery re-enactor at Colonial Williamsburg.

* Where banks really make money on IPOs. Via MeFi, which has more.

* Nation’s Millionaires Agree: We Must All Do More With Less.

* The world’s most useless governmental agency, the FEC, is still trying to figure out fines for crimes committed three elections ago.

* Anarchism: illegal in Oklahoma since 1919!

* Also from the Teens: Dateline 1912: The Salt Lake Tribune speculates about “vast thinking vegetable” on Mars.

* Teacher Accidentally Emails Students Secret School Document Revealing What Faculty Members Really Thought About Them.

* Marvel declares war on the local comic shop, offers unlimited access to their comics for $10.

* Charlotte Perkins Gilman was right: New Experiment Suggests Mammals Could Reproduce Entirely By Cloning.

* Does the loneliest whale really exist?

* The Senate is the worst, and the New York Times is ON IT. Meanwhile, really, the Senate is the absolute worst.

* Neil Gaiman remembers Douglas Adams.

* 11 More Weird & Wonderful Wikipedia Lists. Don’t miss the list of fictional ducks and the list of films considered the worst.

* CLEAR Project Issues Report on Impact of NYPD Surveillance on American Muslims.

* And let freedom ring: Judge strikes down NYC ban on supersized sodas.

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.

Still Unhappy About It

Douglas Adams died ten years ago today.

Let Us Think the Unthinkable, Let Us Do the Undoable, Let Us Prepare to Grapple with the Ineffable Itself and See If We May Not Eff It After All

Hitchhikers, be glad: The BBC has announced a Dirk Gently TV show.

UPDATE: Hitchhikers be doubly glad; I’ve fixed the link.

Sunday Night in Brussels

* We’re in Brussels tonight, which as I mentioned on Twitter is my kind of town: obsessed with french fries, chocolate, and comic books. We’ve really been enjoying the comics murals walking tours and I’m hoping to snag all 38 by the time we leave. We should have time, because unbeknownst to the person who planned our trip the entire country of Belgium shuts down on Mondays. Somebody really Belgiumed this thing up big time.

* Stay in the same expensive hotels. Don’t live close to the people. Produce lots of stories and make money. Pull up in your rented SUV to a camp of people who lost their homes, still living under the wind and rain. Step out into the mud with your waterproof boots. Fresh notepad in hand. That ragged-looking woman is yelling at you that she needs help, not another foreigner taking her photo. Her 3-year-old boy is standing there, clinging to her leg. Her arms are raised, mouth agape, and you can’t understand her because you don’t speak Haitian Creole. How to write about Haiti, via MetaFilter.

* It’s rare to see Malthusian arithmetic drawn out so explicitly. How many of the world’s poor do we need, really?

* Somebody finally let the New York Times know that the Roberts court is ultraconservative. Via OpenLeft.

* Ph.D. Comics is visiting Comic-Con (1, 2). Part 3 will be posted tomorrow, I think.

* And thirty-forty-five years ago today, Bob Dylan betrayed us all. See also. Via Neil.

Friday!

* Presenting the best Ask MetaFilter thread of all time.

* Marginal Revolution had my favorite comment on the Craig Venter artificial life story: The Slartibartfast Principle.

…the evidence for intelligent design ought to be readily available in the graffiti of DNA. “Slartibartfast was here,” or perhaps “3.14159265,” or given what we know of economics, “All rights reserved, MegaCorp. Call for a free estimate.”

The fact that, as of yet, we don’t see this kind of signature in the data is evidence against intelligent design.

* Fellow HTC Hero users may be interested to know that we can finally download Android 2.1.

* Laughter shall be penalized by the deduction of one point per episode of frivolity. Laughter after the conclusion of the game will be met with retroactive penalizations and may alter the game’s outcome. Rules and Regulations for Benehmen!, the German Board Game of Discipline.

* Krugman threatens us with a lost decade. If we vote in Gingrich we get two.

* Rand Paul on Deepwater Horizon: “Accidents happen.” Rand Paul on the Massey coal mine collapse: “Accidents happen.”

* Undercover at the Apple factory. Via Vu.

* Happy birthday, Pac-Man. Happy birthday, Empire Strikes Back. (A little surprised the one and not the other scored the Google doodle.)

* And last but not least: Lost: The Radio Drama. (Thanks Kate!)

A Few Missing Links

A few links I’ve missed over the last few days.

* xkcd discovers the secret origins of the Kindle.

* RIP, Philip Jose Farmer. More here, especially about Venus on the Half-Shell, the book he published under the name Kilgore Trout. It’s not half-bad.

* ‘Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights.’

* Spider-Man is taking a job at McDonald’s in these tough economic times.

* And Joss Whedon explains why DC Comics movies don’t work. He’s right and wrong about this; there’s something to be said for the “pain” thesis, but mostly it’s a failure of writing and directorial ambition, compounded by corporate cowardice…

Increasingly Inaccurately Named

Douglas Adams’s widow has asked Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series of children’s books, to write a sixth Hitchhiker’s novel. Allow me to officially state my opposition to this sort of thing, for the record, here and now—and I say this as a person who still vividly and mournfully remembers the best dream of my life, a dream about discovering a sixth Hitchhiker’s novel called Oh No, Not Again in the back shelves of a library and reading it all in one go before waking up.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Your Astronomy Picture of the Day is this big map of the Milky Way.

It’s been six years, but man, I still wish Douglas wasn’t dead.

All four parts of a three-part 1979 interview with Douglas Adams are up at Darker Matter.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Take heart, recent MFAs!

‘I left Cambridge and got in with the Pythons and everyone said “God, he’s doing terribly well.” Then everything fell down, desperately hard, and I thought “Here I am, aged 24, and I’m totally washed up. This is it.”

‘At that stage, I felt the last two years or so had been a total waste of time. I hadn’t got anywhere and nothing had happened. I thought: “I’m not a writer. I can’t survive in this business.”‘

Via MetaFilter.