Monday Morning Links!

* You’ve been waiting for it: the inevitable “Too Many Cooks” followup, “Unedited Footage of a Bear.” Here’s your instant criticism on the Adult Swim infomercial phenomenon.

* I got hooked on this after a Facebook recommendation, so why shouldn’t you? Papers, Please.

* No one could have predicted: Cuban Oil May Prove A Boon For U.S. Companies.

* NYT: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses.
* Andrew Liptak at Kirkus has your brief history of the Culture.

* UW-Superior to suspend 5 academic programs.

* Your guide to academic interviewing from The Professor Is In: The Question Is Not the Question. It’s a little hard for me to believe how absolutely clueless I was about all this back when, but this lesson was by far the most helpful thing I learned from my mock interview. Absolutely do a mock interview if you have the option.

* M.F.A.s: An Increasingly Popular, Increasingly Bad Financial Decision.

* Dissent on the invention of jaywalking.

* Tragedy in Brooklyn as two police officers are assassinated. Aside from how horrible this event is in itself, I’ve been stunned how immediately and how viciously this has been politicized, not just by known bad actors like Giuliani but even by middle-of-the-road empty suits like Pataki.

* NYPD Officer Repeatedly Punches 12-Year-Old Black Boy As Colleagues Subdue Him, And A Lawyer Sees The Whole Thing. Prosecutor Says He Knew Some Witnesses Were Lying To The Ferguson Grand Jury. Meet the Pro-Slavery Fairview Park Auxiliary Cop. Family of toddler critically injured by SWAT team facing $1 million in medical bills. Woman Tries To Trademark ‘I Can’t Breathe’ To Sell Merchandise. “I Can Breathe,” and the Occasional Fear of Covering Protests.

* High incarceration may be more harmful than high crime.

* Appeals Court Rules People Institutionalized for Mental Illness Still Have Right to Guns.

* If Apple Were A Worker Cooperative, Each Employee Would Earn At Least $403K.

* In Defense of Economic Disobedience.

* Justine Sacco Is Good at Her Job, and How I Came To Peace With Her.

* #realtalk: Serial Sucked And Wasted Everyone’s Time. I’ll allow it, SNL.

* How the NFL leaves players broken — and broke.

* Incognito mode: Americans aren’t getting married, and researchers think porn is part of the problem.

* It’s almost 2015, which means it’s time to convince ourselves that the Obama administration hasn’t been a complete and total disaster. Over to you Matt.

* Indeed, this is one of the crowning lessons of Pay Any Price: that the United States is suffering from a widespread crisis of accountability, one that transcends distinctions between the public and private sectors and that encompasses both. The sources of power, real power, seem more remote and mysterious to Americans than ever before. It is no coincidence that this November’s midterm elections saw the lowest voter turnout in 72 years (a pathetic 36.3 percent). Most Americans now spend their lives hostage to forces they can neither understand nor control nor hope to shape in any meaningful way. People see themselves as objects to be acted upon, not as thinking subjects. If the architects of our post-9/11 politics believed they were subverting democracy in order to save it, that we should pay any price to keep our people safe, they should be applauded for succeeding in at least one, crucial, part of their proposition. We have paid, again, and again, and again.

* Is string theory revealing reality’s deep laws? Or, as some detractors have claimed, is it a mathematical mirage that has sidetracked a generation of physicists?

* An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a “non-human person” unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday.

* And why do you hate the South? I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

Tuesday Shazbat

* The world is awash in Robin Williams remembrances today, but for my money I’d recommend his recent appearances on WTF and Harmontown. Louie. Longreads has also collected four essays and his appearance on Charlie Rose. Robin Williams’s Best Bad Movie. Suicide contagion and social media. How to report a suicide. The MetaFilter thread.

* It’s primary day in Wisconsin. Endorsements from Shepherd-Express.

* Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friend’s death. Police Reportedly Refused Offer to Interview Man Who Was With Michael Brown During Shooting. Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard. Ferguson Police Cite Safety Risk in Decision Not to Name Officer in Shooting. Ferguson, MO, is 67 percent black, and its police force is 94 percent white. The FBI steps in to investigate ultimately sign off on everything’s that happened. Dystopia as how-to manual.

* Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs. Jon Burge, Torture, and the Militarization of the Police. American Gulag.

* Against civil forfeiture.

* Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be predicated on “peace, progress, and prosperity,” with “peace” defined as “forever war.”

* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.

* CFP: Mean Girls.

* Nnedi Okorafor’s syllabus for ENGL 254: Science Fiction.

* On the greatness of Metroid.

* The NCAA Is a Wreck Now.

* What’s less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That’s a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.

* Ursula K. Le Guin: About Anger, Part I.

* The City and the City watch: a proposal that Israel and Palestine become grosstopic, overlapping states.

* Cary Nelson keeps digging: Zionist groups planned to lobby Univ. of Illinois trustees over Salaita appointment. Corey Robin has been coordinating some boycott campaigning for English and Political Science / Philosophy, though personally I think the English statement’s extension to tenure review cases is just too self-undermining to commit to.

* Announcing The Daily Show Podcast, without Jon Stewart.

* Marquette will give John Lewis an honorary degree at the new student convocation on August 20.

* California debates ‘yes means yes’ sex assault law.

Legislation passed by California’s state Senate in May and coming before the Assembly this month would require all schools that receive public funds for student financial assistance to set a so-called “affirmative consent standard” that could be used in investigating and adjudicating sexual assault allegations. That would be defined as “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by each party to engage in sexual activity.

Silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. The legislation says it’s also not consent if the person is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep.

For some reason that escapes me, this is hugely controversial.

* The time Bruce Wayne had an affair with Barbara Gordon while she was dating Dick Grayson, impregnated her, before prompting her to head out and have a miscarriage while crimefighting. You know, for kids.

* Uber vs. Lyft: whoever wins, we lose.

* Apple’s workforce after 30 years of operation is still 70% male. And that’s better than most of the tech sector.

* Hoarders are the new Luddites.

Help a hoarder consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.

* Activision is making a new King’s Quest. Space Quest and Quest for Glory next!

* How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.

* And because everything is a bummer today: Ponzi Scheme Capitalism: An Interview with David Harvey.

My question would be: can we not foresee a continuation of that ridiculousness for the foreseeable future, where you have one fiction built on another fiction, one crisis to the next?

Yes. I raise that question a bit in the book by saying there are these fictitious forms of capital that can continue to circulate and feed off each other, and they’re all Ponzi schemes, which can sometimes go on for a long time. Yes, there may be some possibility we’re moving into this era of fictitious capital formation and circulation, which is then managed by the central banks because they can just add zeros to the money supply at the drop of a hat, and have been doing so. First off, it seems to me increasingly senseless, and I suspect that people will start to say, well what’s the point of all of this? Secondly, I think the internal contradictions of that are that there’s going to be crashes, but then there have been financial crashes popping off all over the place for the last 20 years and capital has survived. For instance, there’s one in Indonesia, one in Argentina and then there’s one somewhere else. Dubai World goes bankrupt, somebody else goes bankrupt, there are all these asset bubbles popping up all over the place, and maybe we can continue in that vein for a while. But at some point, I think the possibilities will run out.

Saturday Morning Links!

* In case you missed it: I had a mini-reading of Snowpiercer yesterday, focusing on liberal guilt.

* Chicago’s Harold Washington College refused to hire a 66-year-old woman full-time because of her age, according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I’m stunned people aren’t talking more about this; irrespective of the merits, this has the potential to completely upend academic labor practices if EEOC wins. What long-term adjunct couldn’t present a similarly compelling case of being “passed over” for a younger, less experienced candidate?

* Government agents ‘directly involved’ in most high-profile US terror plots.

* The Historic Proof Obamacare Foes Are Dead Wrong On Subsidies. Well, they’re sure to abandon this specious line of malicious bullshit now!

* 5 media mistakes in the Halbig debate.

* Capitalism and Slavery: An Interview with Greg Grandin.

* California Is Now Experiencing Its Most Severe Drought Ever Recorded.

* Democracy Now tackles the question of whether the Iron Dome is real.

* For 17 years, James Doyle was a nuclear policy specialist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then he wrote an article that made the case for getting rid of nuclear weapons. After that, his computer was seized, he was accused of releasing classified information, and then he was fired. What happened?

* The so-called “Swedish model” banning the purchase but not the sale of sex is catching on in Europe. But does it work? And for whom?

* A Brief History of Shakespeare Criticism.

* The Woman Behind Guardians of the Galaxy, on Writing an Unexpected Blockbuster.

* There’s An Idea For A Galaxy Quest Sequel. Sold!

* And Happy 50th Birthday, Adam Duritz.

Friday!

* ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. The power of #YesAllWomen. Media monsters gotta monster.

* Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF.

* Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive.

* American jails have become the new mental asylums – and you’re paying the bill.

* “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that. I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.” Modern-Day Slavery in America’s Prison Workforce.

* Scenes from the school reform scam in Newark.

In fact, not a cent of Zuckerberg’s money has gone toward hiring counselors, social workers or nurses. Meanwhile, “there have been DRAMATIC cuts to wraparound services,” wrote Mike Maillaro, Newark Teachers Union’s director of communication and research, in an e-mail. Last year, every attendance counselor in the district was eliminated.

Hawthorne Avenue reports losing eight support staff members since 2011, including a guidance counselor and two instructional coaches. The school has neither a music teacher nor a librarian.

Zuckerberg’s money would instead “create systemic education reform in Newark.” In 2011, it was reported that a full third of the foundation’s cash had found the pockets of consultants. As Dale Russakoff recently reported in a lengthy New Yorker article, that total now sits at about $20 million.

Though a smattering of grants have benefitted local causes—after-school yoga ($31,000), book drives ($1.2 million), new district schools ($2.1 million) and sundry others—over 40 percent of the money granted to organizations has left the state. Outside talent and recruitment agencies, for instance, raked in over $4 million to align district staffing with Anderson’s politics.

* In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good.

* Chris Christie can’t afford to pay public teacher pensions… but still hands education megacorp $82m in subsidies.

* Black legislators in North Carolina are blasting a provision in the State Senate’s budget bill that they say is an attempt to force the closure of Elizabeth City State University, a historically black institution, WRAL News reported.

* The Intractability of Op-Ed Habits.

* Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say. Even Middle-Class Students Have Poor Odds of Graduating From College. 2 Years On, Two-Thirds of This Graduating Class Aren’t Financially Self-Sufficient. How to end the college class war.

* Making Olin’s problems worse, the school’s only subject, engineering, is very expensive to teach. Unlike other schools with a broader array of programs, Olin cannot subsidize engineering students by charging their classmates the same tuition for cheaper majors such as English and sociology. At many schools — although they may not know it — liberal arts majors are in effect helping to underwrite the high cost of science and technical education.

* All This: Mad Men and the Persistence of the Old Regime. As good as it gets: Mad Men and neoliberalism. Mad Men‘s Robert Morse on Dancing Into the Sunset.  Mad Men’s Trudy Campbell is a KGB Spy. The Matt Weiner Interview. As fun as this show is, it’s about some pretty grimy shit.

* In an attempt to emphasize heterosexuality, fear or hatred of homosexuals and misogynist language developed. The bro, in short, is a culture-wide defense mechanism against the gay.

* Back to the top of the order: Let’s Debunk Scientific Racism, Again.

* Most Doctors Would Refuse Their Own Aggressive End-Of-life Treatments.

* Judge Orders Antitrust Suit Against NCAA to Go to Trial Next Month.

* BREAKING: The rule of law is a joke.

* Government files reveal official campaign of spying against Occupy Wall Street.

* Nobody Wants To Host The 2022 Olympics.

* So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. A Pushback on Green Power. What Will Climate Change Deniers Say…?

* The religious right, who liked to call themselves the “moral majority” at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn’t Roe v. Wadethat woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from “segregation academies”—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued. 

* Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature (2014). Just clap your hands if you believe in job training!

* It doesn’t get better: Sorry, nerds: Fraternity brothers have more fulfilling lives later on.

* Incoming Title IX Mess: Duke Student Sues For Diploma After He’s Expelled for Sexual Assault.

* RIP, Maya Angelou.

* Angus Johnston’s Content Warnings.

* Two great tastes! NCAA Teams Up With Defense Dept. on $30-Million Concussion Study.

* Cruel optimism watch: Hulu In Talks To Pick Up New Season Of Community.

* This made me very sad.

* And nothing good will happen anymore: Alfonso Cuarón says he won’t be directing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Sunday Links

* Maps that will change the way you see the world.

* Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization.

* Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream.

* Ideology at its purest: State bans rehab of orphaned wildlife.

* Devaji Tofa, community leader from Mendha Lekha, told Down To Earth that the traditions of the Gond tribal community to which the villagers belong, do not see land as property or something to be owned by individuals. “It is seen as a community resource.” The modern concept of private ownership has done a lot of damage to communities, said he. “With private ownership, people tend to get selfish and isolated.”

* Judge Throws Out Officers’ Convictions in Killings After Hurricane Katrina.

* The Arctic is on course for an ice-free summer within the next few decades, as scientists on Friday declared that sea ice in the region had fallen to one of the lowest annual minimums on record.

* Corey Robin: “Voldemort Comes to CUNY.”

So that’s where we stand. The delicate flowers of academic freedom at CUNY wilt before the jeers and jibes of a few students but warm to the blazing sun of the state. A four-star general who led two brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Eurasia, a former head of the CIA whose hazing rituals at West Point alone probably outstrip anything the NYPD did to these students, requires the fulsome support of chancellors, senates, and deans. But six students of color beaten by cops, locked up in prison for a day, and now facing a full array of charges from the state, deserve nothing but the cold silence of their university. So much tender solicitude for a man so wealthy and powerful that he can afford to teach two courses at CUNY for a dollar; so little for these students, whose education is the university’s true and only charge.

* Just a tiny sample of the radical incoherence the right gets away with. These statements are days apart.

* And A Philosophy of Tickling.

Tuesday Links Quickly

* A refreshingly honest business model: For-Profit College Recruiters Taught To Use ‘Pain,’ ‘Fear,’ Internal Documents Show.

* The new Journal of American Studies issue on Oil Culture is free to read. Looks great.

* UWM’s C21 has announced its fellows for next year.

* Cracked suggests all contemporary science fiction descends from a bad unauthorized sequel to War of the Worlds, Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

* Another KSR interview.

* Snoop the Dogg is no more. I am Snoop the Lion, and I come to you now at the turn of the tide.

* Rest in peace, Dominar.

* And the Democrats figure out how to get the magic of malicious bullshitting working for them for a change.

Accidentally Reading Her Stage Directions

“It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” Mrs. Romney said.

Links without Context or Content

* Pawlenty on the 2012 GOP field: We’re all liars without conscience or remorse.

* DATELINE 2050: Atheist Muslim Fundamentalists run the country! Oh, if only we’d listened!

* Finally a reason to go back to Daily Kos: Tom Tomorrow has just become their cartoon editor.

* Halfway there: Foreign nationals who are married to U.S. citizens of the same sex may apply for spousal green cards and other benefits, immigration authorities announced Monday, but it remains to be seen whether the government will issue them.

* At McSweeney’s: Rubber stamps I wish I had for grading freshman composition papers.

* At the Chronicle of Higher Education: 6 Easy–and Not So Easy–Pieces of Advice for Grad Students. Kids, it’s all it takes.

* And watch out, man-children: Peter Jackson is looking to girlify The Hobbit.

How to Win an Argument

Paul Waldman on the political value of shamelessness.

It’s great that The Daily Show is around to heap some scorn on these blowhards, but it won’t really do them much harm. One thing they understand very well at Fox, and in the conservative movement more generally, is the political value of shamelessness. As long as you say what you’re saying with conviction, it doesn’t matter how absurd or hypocritical it is. You may not get the majority of the public to agree with you, but you can get a good number. And among the functions Fox serves for the right (along with conservative talk radio) is the rapid dissemination of arguments and a model of argumentation. They tell conservatives not just what they should say, but how they should say it. A key component is that every argument is presented without a shred of doubt, and with a clear delineation between heroes and villains, the people we should be celebrating and the ones we should be hating.

As a result, conservatives may not win every argument, but they almost never get routed completely. And they manage to keep the debate from moving too far away from where they’d like to be. Right now, at a time when the public’s preferred solutions to the budget deficit run to raising taxes on rich people and cutting defense spending, those kinds of things are not even being considered. Instead, the administration and Republicans are arguing about just how much they should screw the middle class and the poor (Republicans say a lot, Democrats say some, but not as much).

‘The Most Important Thing to Recognize about the Right-Wing Freakshow’s Latest Pimp-N-Ho Videorama Is That Today’s Anti-Choice Activists Don’t Think They Can Get Their Way If They Say What They Actually Believe’

What James-O’Keefe-style hoaxes really say about the right, from Jed Lewison at Daily Kos.

Saturday Night

* Breaking news: Houston, Texas, has elected an openly gay woman as mayor. That’s… unexpected.

* Is Ben Nelson a lost cause on health care? Related: Tom Harkin may introduce bill to eliminate the filibuster. Yes, please.

* We are living through the Californiafication of America—a country in which the combination of a determined minority and a procedural supermajority legislative requirement makes it impossible to rationally address public policy challenges. And thus the Democratic president and his allies in Congress are evaluated on the basis of extreme compromise measures—supplicating to dispassionate Wise Men like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman, buying Olympia Snowe a vacation home, working bills through 76 committees and countless “procedural” votes–rather than the substantive, policy achievements of bills that would merely require a simple majority to pass. (via Benen)

* Nice OpenLeft diary on malicious bullshitting as the key to climate change denialism.

* Jersey shore nickname generator. From now on please address me only as “The Condition.”

* Will Prince Charles never become King?

* Will 2010 be like 1994?

* And from the Atlantic, the evolution of reading.