Monday Jr. Links!

* Who knew my politics has a name?

the best minor faction of the Russian Revolution is the dissident interplanetary left pic.twitter.com/7MdsrXDFjP

— Mark J. Nelson (@mjntendency) July 16, 2017

* How Bosses Are Dictators.

* Not Just Being Right, But Getting Free: Reflections on Class, Race, and Marxism. The incredible lost history of how “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.” What Was Postraciality?

* Detroit’s Underground Economy: Where Capitalism Fails, Alternatives Take Root.

* What coastal elites don’t get about heartland nihilism.

* Trump’s tax cuts would give the poor $40 each and the ultrarich $940,000.

* Jeff Sessions wants police to take more cash from American citizens.

* The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr.

* I don’t think there’s even a single human being who thinks Andrew Cuomo should be the Democratic nominee in 2020, and yet somehow he’s already the frontrunner.

* #NotAllFacultyHallways.

* The secret life of USC med school dean.

* Housing prices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego have jumped as much as 75 percent over the past five years.

* The Horror Novel You’ll Never Have to Live is getting its dark, gritty reboot.

* Winter is coming going.

* An Oral History of The Simpsons’ Classic Planet of the Apes Musical.

* In Heaven, there is no pain.

* This podcast interview with Zeynep Tufecki on persuasion and control is pretty chilling, especially about the dystopian possibilities of microtargeted algorithmic messaging.

* George Lucas finally made a change to Star Wars I approve of.

* Weird Radio Signals Detected from Nearby Red Dwarf Star.

But if you’re getting the urge to invoke E.T., temper it: “In case you are wondering, the recurrent aliens hypothesis is at the bottom of many other better explanations,” Mendez wrote.

Get lost, buzzkill! This is happening.

All the Midweek Links

* Both In Focus and The Big Picture visit the 2012 Paralympics.

* Michelle Obama did great last night, but the story of a sick little girl named Zoey whose ability to live was saved by the ACA hits a bit closer to home.

* Who’s going to be the lesser evil in 2012 2008 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 1980 1976 1972 1968?

* On reporting poverty. Related: Melissa Harris-Perry talks poverty on MSNBC.

* Mitch Hurwitz Talks to Vulture About Reviving Arrested Development.

* The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.” These results have since been confirmed.

* The real affirmative action: Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.

* How many people have died because Walter White got cancer? And a Breaking Bad Fermi problem: What is a good approximation of how much money Skyler had in the storage unit when she showed Walt how she stopped counting it?

* A portrait of David Foster Wallace as a midwestern author. And more. Words David Foster Wallace’s Mom Invented.

* Report: Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Recovery. Are you interested in student debt now, old people?

* In North Carolina, Obama’s 2008 Victory Was Ahead of Schedule.

* Getting spicy: Hacker Group Claims to Have Romney’s Tax Returns.

* BREAKING: Rachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans.

* BREAKING: Social Security Administration to arm illegal immigrants with hollow-point bullets to murder taxpayers. Wake up, sheeple! The truth is out there.

* Erin DiMeglio is a third-string high-school quarterback.

* And for the kids: How We Got to Mars. The lives of the cosmonauts. HTML5 Map of the Firefly ‘Verse. And a lost interview with Ray Bradbury:

Cleveland vs. the Recession

Across America, recession-fueled foreclosures and plummeting home values have left countless properties abandoned and vulnerable to looting. As Scott Pelley reports, the problem has gotten so bad in Cleveland, Ohio, that county officials have demolished more than 1,000 homes this year – and plan to demolish 20,000 more – rather than let the blight spread and render nearby homes worthless.

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.

Tuesday Night Links

* The way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations: Tara Reid Says She’s Going To Be Filming The Big Lebowski 2 Later This Year.

* It is snowing everywhere and it will never stop. PS: Tell your winger relatives extreme winter storms are perfectly consistent with rising global temperatures. Trust me; they don’t already know.

* Building a tunnel under the Hudson just can’t be done, and honoring contractual obligations to public-sector workers would of course be socialism, but at least New Jersey still has plenty of cash to blow on casinos.

* waxy.org has a huge list of metagames, proceeding from the abusive to the downright bizarre.

* These days Superman wouldn’t even qualify for in-state tuition.

* Great Recession watch: 11% of American homes are vacant.

* Nemesis watch: James Franco will be teaching a course about James Franco.

* When hippies ruined all the books. Why, hippies, why?

* And clowns are getting women pregnant. Stay safe out there ladies.

‘The Great Housing Swindle’

Yes, the banks ripped the country off. Yes, they’re still doing it. Yes, no one’s ever going to do anything about it.

Surprisingly Busy Today

Surprisingly busy today, but I do have some links:

* As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince delayed until July.

* The market for sport utility vehicles is starting to look a lot like the housing market, spreading pain to consumers, automakers and dealers.

* …but SUVphiles should take comfort that it’s not yet looking like the housing market in Detroit:

The fact that a home on the city’s east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America’s poorest big cities.

And it still took 19 days to find a buyer.

* Out: the carbon crisis. In: the oxygen crisis.

* Good news on the solar front: two large solar projects are being announced in California, which when completed “will produce as much energy as a small nuclear reactor or a large coal plant.”

* And yet another airline not to fly: American.

Federal regulators announced Thursday they will seek fines totaling $7.1 million against American Airlines over maintenance issues and problems with its drug- and alcohol-testing programs.