Monday Monday

* The cushy administrative salaries and bonuses add up to an indictment of the Brodhead administration for allowing the burden of the fiscal crisis to fall unevenly: bonuses for the brass, a direct hit for cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, housekeepers, clerks and underpaid adjunct faculty who lost their jobs. Via literally every single person I know at Duke.

* Libertopia watch: The Lake County sheriff has stopped providing police protection for a northwestern Indiana town after it missed a deadline he set for it to pay the county $100,000. Via MetaFilter.

* How the climate bill went south. Via Shankar in the comments from a post from last week, where we’ve been talking about whether or not I’ve been fair to Obama. On the climate story, ThinkProgress highlights Lindsey Graham’s terror that Fox would find out what he was up to.

* Hope for the Democrats this November? More false hope here.

* George Lucas’s Theory of the Novel.

* The ACLU vs. the future.

Stanley’s 2002 paper tries to do just that. In it, he carefully imagines what could happen when human reproductive cloning is perfected — “what enforcement action would be taken when, say, a sixth-grader is discovered to be an unauthorized clone of Jennifer Lopez?” Could genetic enhancement inspire a kind of neo-eugenicist society where social classes are determined by access to the kind of wealth one needs to take advantage of such technologies? If humans succeeded in splicing their own DNA with that of animals, where would the line of “personhood” be drawn? Citing a scenario out of the 1997 movie Gattaca, Stanley expresses concern that the growing ability to remove genetic defects prior to childbirth might lead to employers collecting hair or skin cells from prospective employees. (On this last point his concern was prescient: In 2008, Congress outlawed genetic discrimination nearly unanimously. In the House, Ron Paul was the only dissenting vote.)

Via Matt Yglesias.

* The Social Network vs. women. (UPDATE: Forgot to mention that Colbert asked Sorkin about this last Thursday on his show, and Sorkin didn’t respond very well at all.)

* John Scalzi vs. Ayn Rand. Via SEK.

* And the Obama/Emanuel hug has sent the wrong message to our enemies. Please, not in front of the Klingons!

Libertopia

Firefighters in Obion County, Tennessee, watched as Gene Cranick’s house burned to the ground because Cranick wasn’t current on his $75 “subscription” fee.