Tuesday Morning Links

* From the archives: The university is no longer primarily a site of production (of a national labor force or national culture) as it was in the 1970s and 80s, but has become primarily a site of capital investment and accumulation. The historical process through which this transformation was implemented is long and complicated, and we cannot give a detailed account of it here. Instead, we want to describe the general shape of this new model and the consequences it might have for political action in a university setting. We take as paradigmatic the case of the University of Michigan, where this model has been worked out in its most developed form and from which it is spreading across the United States, as university administrators across the country look to and emulate what they glowingly call the “Michigan model.” In this new university, instruction is secondary to ensuring the free flow of capital. Bodies in classrooms are important only to the extent that money continues to flow through the system. It is a university that in a global sense has ceased to be a university—its primary purpose is no longer education but circulation. This is the new logic of the university. If we want to fight it, we have to understand it.

* Merit, Diversity and Grad Admissions.

* Big Data and Graduation Rates.

* Teaching the controversy in California, Holocaust edition.

* Another absolutely botched college investigation of a sexual assault.

* Violent Abuse of the Mentally Ill Is Routine, Widespread at Rikers Island.

* Bullshitting about Gaza.

* Malcolm Harris on redheads and playacting racist.

* Why it’s time we talked about the sex lives of humanitarians.

* Shouting About Diving, but Shrugging About Concussions. How to stop FIFA from being such a parasite. Could the World Cup Champion Beat the Best Club Team in the World? Stadiums and/as prisons. Another World Cup Is Possible.

* That’s… ominous. Parts of Yellowstone National Park closed after massive supervolcano beneath it melts roads.

* Buzzfeed has a longread about the behavior of a long-term predator in an elite California private school.

* Meanwhile, Pope Francis’s back-of-the-envelope calculation of the number of predators in the clergy is utterly horrifying.

* Demolition unearths legacy of toxic pollution at Milwaukee plant.

* Is Milwaukee the No. 1 city for tech? Not so fast.

* The July effect is real: new doctors really do make hospitals more dangerous.

* Joss Whedon has written more Buffy the Vampire Slayer. True fact!

* Behind-The-Scenes Footage Of Buffy Stunts Is the Ultimate Time Suck.

* On the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons.

* Against natural gas as a “transition fuel.”

* If you pretend precedent is meaningful and the rule of law is an operative concept in America, and squint real hard, here’s a way Hobby Lobby could be good news for liberals.

* There is, Steve estimates, room enough on the ark for 23 people to live comfortably. And Australians are welcome. Singles, couples, families, believers. All that’s required is a $300 one way ticket from Brisbane to Luganville and a commitment that means forever.

* A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Two Fruitland Park, Fla. cops have lost their jobs after an FBI source named the two as members of the Ku Klux Klan.

* Uber and rape: Seattle Police Clear Uber Driver of Rape Charge, But Not Sexual Assault.

* When Park Middle School cheated on a high-stakes test.

* The goal of ethics is to maximize human flourishing.

* And the new Doctor Who trailer fills me with a little bit of sadness: I was really hoping the Capaldi era would be more swashbuckling than brooding. I guess I’m looking forward to Moffat moving on.

Some Thoughts on Miranda

You know you have the "academic" gene when your reaction to widespread jubilation is a desire to deconstruct the idea of a "fair trial."

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

I wound up indulging my academic gene after all with a long conversation on Twitter this morning about Miranda rights (Storified here). Distilling this to just a few key points:

* The Miranda warning is a fairly idiosyncratic (and relatively recent) feature of American jurisprudence. It is not by itself determinative of the absolute fairness or unfairness of a criminal proceeding.

* The Miranda warning concerns only the suspect’s post-arrest utterances, which by all accounts the prosecutors in this case would not need to secure a conviction. They claim, after all, to have photographic evidence of the bombs being planted.

* A brief “public safety” exemption to the Miranda warning is a lawful and long-standing procedure that is rationally applied to the circumstances of this case. It should be over (very) soon, but it’s not by itself illegitimate.

* The Miranda warning, in general, is a good thing, but not as good as it sounds; the primary effect of the Miranda warning is to legitimate police attempts to get you to surrender these rights through coercion or deceit. As I was putting it on Twitter earlier:

Mirandization exists not to guarantee the right to remain silent but to facilitate its abrogation.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

Once you've been Mirandized properly, your right against self-incrimination can be safely violated.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

* Most crucially, there is a zero percent chance that a guilty Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would somehow escape punishment on the basis of a legal technicality. No court — much less the Supreme Court — would ever allow that outcome. What would happen instead is that a sufficiently large exemption to Miranda would be discovered to allow a conviction to stand. Again, as I was putting it on Twitter:

Where I disagree with @ggreenwald and Dershowitz – I don't think there's any scenario in which Tsarnaev could "successfully argue" anything.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

They'd never allow someone like this to get off on a technicality; they'd just argue it away. Law is power, not independent of power.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

To say that another away: the risk of not Mirandizing him is weakening Miranda, not putting this prosecution at risk.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 20, 2013

That’s why from my perspective the big issue is not Miranda, it’s presentment. Right now Tsaraev is still within the scope of the normal criminal justice system, as he should be. The bad outcome here is not his being denied a Miranda warning; it’s him not being allowed any trial at all.

More (not always agreeing with the above) from Orin Kerr, Scott Lemieux, Emily Bazelon, Freddie deBoer, and Glenn Greenwald.

‘If Someone Like Scalia Can … Decide That Wickard Isn’t a Binding Precedent, Then the Idea of Binding Precedent Is Essentially Empty’

Nineteen of twenty-one Constitutional scholars think the mandate is Constitutional, but only eight are confident SCOTUS will uphold the law. Paul Campos gets his denunciation of Scalia in early:

Justice Scalia spent his career as a lawyer, law professor and judge in that legal world – a world in which Wickard was no more eligible for serious reconsideration than Brown v. Board of Education or Marbury v. Madison are today. It ought to be obvious that if someone like Scalia can, at this point in a half-century-long career, decide that Wickard isn’t a binding precedent, then the idea of binding precedent is essentially empty, which in turn highlights the inevitable emptiness of the idea of any useful distinction between law and politics.

But this is not obvious, least of all to Justice Scalia, who I have no real doubt actually believes the things he says and writes, no matter how many times his public acts contradict his avowed beliefs. Scalia believes in a version of the rule of law whose existence is refuted by nothing so well as his own career. And that ultimately is more disturbing than a career dedicated to the most self-consciously manipulative Machiavellianism.

More ACA

Ezra Klein, fresh from arguing that political leaders’ utterances don’t matter, explains how political leaders’ utterances moved anti-mandate legal arguments from the fringe to the mainstream. Meanwhile, here’s Kevin Drum:

If the court does overturn the mandate, it’s going to be hard to know how to react. It’s been more than 75 years since the Supreme Court overturned a piece of legislation as big as ACA, and I can’t think of any example of the court overturning landmark legislation this big based on a principle as flimsy and manufactured as activity vs. inactivity. When the court overturned the NRA in 1935, it was a shock — but it was also a unanimous decision and, despite FDR’s pique, not really a surprising ruling given existing precedent. Overturning ACA would be a whole different kind of game changer. It would mean that the Supreme Court had officially entered an era where they were frankly willing to overturn liberal legislation just because they don’t like it. Pile that on top of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United and you have a Supreme Court that’s pretty explicitly chosen up sides in American electoral politics. This would be, in no uncertain terms, no longer business as usual.

Thursday Night

* Alison Bechdel gets a Guggenheim (along with a bunch of other people).

* Duke students are in the news, and it isn’t even for something horrible.

* The Atlantic profiles Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid.

* The evidence is in. Humans have failed. It’s time to give forests back to the robots.

* Upcoming energy collapse got you down? The Army is ready.

* Wisconsin’s Marathon Campaign Season Takes Toll.

* Inside the mind of the octopus.

* We are all legal realists now.

* Undeniably bizarre winter weather generates minuscule bump in acceptance of climate science consensus.

* The end of 35mm.

* And Republicans and Democrats finally agree! Gallup: Mitt Romney least popular Republican nominee in modern history within own party.

Tuesday Night

* Following up on today’s diappointing Supreme Court news: Obamacare’s Supreme Court Disaster. Well, That Could Have Gone Better. Brian Beutler says it wasn’t as bad as it looked. So does Ian Millhiser. The battle over a limiting principle. Medicaid as sleeper issue. Kennedy, Roberts Likely To Determine Fate Of Mandate. Lyle Denniston says it’s all Kennedy. Klein reads Roberts. Kerr reads Kennedy. Even more at MeFi.

* Rachel Maddow: 4,000 days of war in Afghanistan?

* An interview with the creator of You Can’t Do That on Television. Via MeFi.

* The headline reads, “Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible.”

* Look on the bright side: The speaker of the North Carolina House says the state’s coming anti-gay Amendment One will probably be struck down in a mere twenty years.

* More Scott Pilgrim? Maybe someday.

* Life in the Retreat at Twin Lakes after the Trayvon Martin shooting.

* And are these the rules of Roadrunner and Coyote? I choose to believe.

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic.
4. No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
11. The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.

A Political Objection Becomes a Legal One When It Gets Five Votes

Looks like a tough day on the strip for Obamacare.

Wednesday Night!

* Duke Lit is now advertising for a one-year postdoc in Marxist theory.

* Jim Henson, 1969: How to Make a Muppet. Also on Muppetwatch: A 1979 profile of Henson in anticipation of The Muppet Movie.

* The secret history of “Mahna Mahna”: “How a ditty from a soft-core Italian movie became the Muppets’ catchiest tune.”

* “Ninety-Nine Weeks”: an Occupy Wall Street fairy tale from Ursula K. Le Guin. Here’s another.

* More on the extraordinary syllabi of David Foster Wallace.

* Almost literally the least they could do: Davis Will Drop Charges Against, Pay Medical Bills of Pepper Spray Students.

* I’ve seen this movie: The Air Force “has asked industry to develop a new heat and motion sensor capable of detecting enemy gunfire from 25,000 feet over the battlefield — and then swiftly directing a bomb or missile onto the shooter.” I believe Terminator suggests the name HKs…

* The full congregation of Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist Church voted Sunday to prohibit the church pastor from legally marrying anyone until she can legally marry same-sex couples under North Carolina law.

* Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman say their poli-sci model shows the Affordable Care Act will be upheld. Scott Lemieux says there’s no reason to think they’ll confine themselves to precedent and that it still all comes down to what Anthony Kennedy has for breakfast.

* Mother Jones reads Newt Gingrich’s dissertation.

* Google greets Thanksgiving (outside the US) with the mother of all interactive doodles.

* Massachusetts becomes 16th state to protect transgender people from discrimination. Google benefits now include transgender employees.

* Honestly, anyone who invested a dime in Groupon should have their investing license taken away. This thing was barely ever a company.

* And speaking of obvious scams: Is a Law Degree a Good Investment Today?

Everything Is Terrible Tuesday Links

* The Department of Defense has finally admitted it lost enough money in Iraq to fund 6 EPAs. Who could have predicted packing $100 bills into untracked pallets would turn out badly?

* Lots of climate change news today. The 1981-2000 January temperature average is officially a full degree warmer than the 1971-2000 average. The media won’t connect wildfires to rising temperatures. The twenty-first century as a century of disasters.

* More good news: here comes water scarcity.

* It looks like a CIA agent will take the fall for higher-ups be indicted for war crimes related to torture at Abu Ghraib.

* And right-wingers on the Wisconsin Supreme Court steal another one for the plutocrats in ruling that the state’s Open Meetings Law doesn’t apply to the legislature. Of course it doesn’t.

Tuesday Night!

* Hard to say which is more shocking: that a male worker born in 1973 retiring at age 70 can expect to live a full year less than the expected length of retirement for a worker born in 1912, or that Richard Shelby apparently has evidence that by 2025 “America will be burned … and a lot of us will be dead.”

* Catholic Church approves iPhone confession app. Not an Onion hotline…

* Paul Campos tries to read Laurence Tribe’s mind.

* The Tea Party Movement has driven out Colorado state party chairman Dick Wadhams. Because I am an adult, I will leave the man’s absurd name out of this, and just bid him adieu…

* Behold the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.

* Wolverine or 2 Batmen: a duckrabbit for our time.

* Academic Cliche Watch: “I want to argue that . . .”

* Fox News draws ever closer to its Fort Sumter moment.

* HuffPo’s Achilles Heel: Search engine optimization won’t work forever.

* Provocative claim of the day: …I find myself slightly gratified that one consequence of the now-dying post-Thatcher free-market consensus is that it made nuclear power development in the Anglosphere more or less economically impossible.

* And a quick note on how beer commercials work.

Beer commercials are designed around certain dominant themes, but the people who sell the beer would prefer that the dominant themes be misunderstood. What are beer commercials about? The two central premises are these: 

1. Beer—cheap, common, domestic beer—is a rare commodity that drives men mad with the desire to have it, at any cost.

2. Women are the great obstacle between men and the fulfillment of this desire.

Taken literally, this is baffling. Beer is cheap and easy to find. The only cost should be $6.99 for a six pack, at any convenience store. And rather than hiding from women to drink their beer, many single adult heterosexual men seek out female company when they’re drinking. “Drink our beer and avoid contact with women!”—who could possibly be the target for that pitch?

But it makes perfect sense if the target audience is—and it is—16-year-olds.

The girls aren’t really girls; they’re Mom. And Mom is the first hurdle in the thrilling obstacle course that makes up the world of the teenage beer drinker.