Tuesday Links!

* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.

* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.

* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.

* An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.

* The Church of Science Fiction.

* Heinlein and the Right.

* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just  nightmarish.

* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.

* Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.

* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.

* We’re not giving moms credit when we pose them as the decisive factor in a child’s development, we’re sticking them with the bill.

* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.

* Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.

* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.

* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.

* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.

* Towards a theory of jerks.

* The case against sharing.

* How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.

* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.

* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.

* Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.

* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”

* The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.

* The rise of the noncompete clause.

* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”

* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.

* If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.

* Review getting picked up: five stars.

* And 4°C only sounds like no big deal.

Friday Morning Links

* Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 has a cover and a description.

The year is 2313. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

I know just a little bit about this and I’m really looking forward to it.

* Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in a drone attack. Is the war over yet?

* The headline reads, “Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf.”

* The Many Successes of Occupy Wall Street.

* The plan is working! First Vermont, now Montana: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) announced yesterday that he will be seeking a waiver to set up his own universal health care system in his state modeled after the single payer Canadian health care system that began in the province of Saskatchewan.

* Krugman on the obsessive search for some reason not to fight mass unemployment:

Just to reiterate a point I’ve made before, none of this reflects actual economic theory. Throughout this crisis, people like Adam Posen and yours truly have been basing our arguments on standard textbook macroeconomics, whereas the Very Serious People have been making up stories on the fly to justify their calls for pain. As Wolf, who really seems to have eaten his Wheetabix, puts it,

The waste is more than unnecessary; it is cruel. Sadists seem to revel in that cruelty. Sane people should reject it. It is wrong, intellectually and morally.

And this cruelty rules our world.

* And the New York Times games Obama 2012, saying the new threshold states are not Ohio and Florida but Colorado and Virginia.

Welcome to Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ!

Personally I like it when Fox shouts the things it was only supposed to whisper. It’s clarifying.

Friday Fridays On

* Man arrested after threats to Rep. McDermott. Man arrested after threats to Sen. Bennet. Hedge fund manager arrested after threats to 47 government officials. And then there’s this. It’s been a tough week.

* I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack. I bet you’re wrong!

* Climate change makes the sun rise earlier in Greenland. It’s either totally true, or someone trolling the climate debate really effectively.

* Speaking of really effective trolls: Ladies and gentlemen, the Washington Times.

* The Assange hook is weird, but the overall point is right. Two spaces after a period: just don’t do it.

* Everyone is talking about the Joseph Conrad / Ford Maddox Ford science fiction novel I’ve had sitting on my shelf all semester. It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg.

* In nuclear silos, death wears a snuggie.

* Writing as an act of faith. Via Steve.

* Flowchart of the day: Should I work for free?

* Tweet of the day, by a mile.

Take out the vowels in Reince Priebus’ name and you get “RNC PR BS.”

It’s the only thing that makes losing Michael Steele any easier.

* If you’re ask sick of people talking about astrology as I am, you might enjoy Adorno’s “Theses against Occultism.” Via Vu.

* And I think I’ve done this one before, but what the hell: alternate universe movie posters.

The Denialists

A handful of US scientists have made names for themselves by casting doubt on global warming research. In the past, the same people have also downplayed the dangers of passive smoking, acid rain and the ozone hole. In all cases, the tactics are the same:

Tuesday!

* Today David Simon is a certified genius.

* More Obama v. Palin in the pages of Archie. Related: When the Tea Party takes over the comics page.

* Surprising no one, Pew has found that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people.

* The “Kill Whitey” trolley problem. Via MetaFilter.

* With Fox News fully embracing anti-vaccine paranoia, will UFOs be the next conspiracy theory to go mainstream? CNN reports, you decide.

* Ben and Jerry have been lying to us. Could it be that their delicious ice cream is hardly healthy at all?

* And Jim DeMint has triggered the Senate’s doomsday device. The greatest democracy in the history of the world! The system works!

Fox News as Radio Rwanda

Taibbi makes the provocative but sadly compelling comparison here.

A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues — where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn’t explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we’re seeing.

In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:

* On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. “They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it.” He also said that “we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, ‘Kill all white babies.'”

* CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: “Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls.”

* On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that “top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy,” marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. “The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” Adams wrote. “During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected.”

* July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “protect and represent” the New Black Panther party.

* July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an “invasion”: “I guess the judge is saying it’s not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don’t know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.” That same day, Rush says this: “Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they’re from. You cannot even act like we know where they’re from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them.”

* July 29: The Washington Times asks “Should Arizona Secede?” and says the Supreme Court “is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy” with the aim of creating a “socialist superstate.” The paper writes: “The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution.”

* July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, “If the feds won’t protect the people and Governor Brewer can’t protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?”

There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

I hate to quote so much of the post, but his idea of targeted micro-boycotts against Fox advertisers seems like a very good one:

I’m beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven’t been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic “Love” slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the fuck? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I’d like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn’t that at least the first move here? It’s beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.

To a limited extent this is already happening, although almost exclusively around Glenn Beck.

Apparently You Shouldn’t Sign Anything BP Hands You

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana has stopped BP from forcing fisherman volunteering to help with oil spill clean-up efforts from signing away their right to free speech, from holding BP harmless for any accidents that might occur, and requiring them to give the oil giant a month’s notice before filing any legal claims.

Tuesday Night

* Today in science: Australian scientists are describing “fat” as a taste. Those more sensitive to fat consume less and have a lower BMI.

* Today in science 2: Doctors are gross, not washing hands.

* Support for health-care reform growing as Obama gets more publicly involved? Quick, somebody please tell Congressional Democrats.

* Urban farming in Detroit and mall farming in Cleveland.

* Ana Marie Cox explains Washington as the Venn intersection of science fiction geeks, politicians, indie rock fans, and gay people.

* In short, this entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama’s speeches will start “connecting” and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become. Via Matt Yglesias.

* South Park Reenacts Actual Thing Blackwater Did.

* Winning fifteen-year-old arguments: Clintons cleared in FBI Filegate.

While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs’ allegations that their privacy had been violated–and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act–after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode–about which they do have cause to complain–was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.

* Continental Will Cancel Flights To Avoid Fines For Late Takeoffs. I’m sure their customers will understand.

* The 10,000th Glenn-Beck-related outrage of the day: The Census Is The Government’s Attempt To ‘Increase Slavery.’

BECK: Why were they asking the race question, you said when, in 1790? … Right, they want to know, do you count as three-fifths? Do you count at all? So, you have to know how many slaves did you have? People find that offensive today because the idea was, if we’re going to count, we want to know how many are here for services etc. etc. and slaves would get less. Well that’s not right. One. One. ‘I’m not three-fifths, I’m one. Whites are not worth than me.’ Now reverse it, why are they asking this question today?

CO-HOST: Because minorities are worth more than whites.

BECK: Exactly right. So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a monitory. Well there is no difference. The reason you don’t answer the race question is because one, everyone counts as one. All men are created equal. If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery and that everyone should count the same, do not answer the race question. How dare you. How dare you. At least in 1790, they were doing it to slow the South down on slavery. To try to stop it as much as they can. Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery. Your dependence on the master in Washington. No way, don’t answer that question.

* How America tortures.

* “Wash. Post accuses White House of demonizing insurance industry by accurately portraying industry’s actions.”

* “I Tickled Aide, but That Was All, Massa Says.”

* And Jim Halpert is and is not your Captain America.

Worst Persons in the World

What happens when the two worst people in the world get together for a chat? I imagine it’d go a little something like this.

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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

Moment of Zen – Coulter Sells More Books

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

O’Reilly v. Hertzberg

O’Reilly v. Hertzberg. An intriguing behind-the-scenes look either at a just crusade for fair treatment of Newt Gingrich or else at what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Bill O’Reilly smearjob, depending on whether or not you know the meaning of the word “fascism.” (Thanks, td!)