Week-Old Links at Two-Weeks-Old-Link Prices

* The San Bernardino mystery. Disband MSNBC. The story of the first mass murder in U.S. history. From the archives: The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. Your tweets are not helping.

* YOU CAN’T KNOW THAT

* The story, called “The Princess Steel,” was discovered by scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, who write about it in the new issue of the Modern Language Association journal. We May Have Just Found W.E.B. Du Bois’ Earliest Science Fiction Story.

* The CIA’s WWII Guide to Creating Organizational Dysfunction Perfectly Describes Your Toxic Workplace.

* Crank watch: What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity.” The Philanthropy Hustle.

* Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 11.

* Elsewhere on the local beat: The Transformation of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

* I teach practical, marketable skills that will serve my students their entire lives.

* Jury duty.

* Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.

* Are most academic papers really worthless? Don’t trust this worthless statistic.

* College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money.

* The future is a nightmare, and Purdue is ready.

* Self-driving cars will be the worst. Hopefully this particular problem is mostly solved by the elimination of private car ownership altogether.

* The hunt for Vulcan.

* Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism.

* Sports Corner: Stephen Curry Is The Revolution.

* Meanwhile it is stunning to have my prejudices confirmed so wholly: New Study Finds ‘Surprising’ Correlation Between Degenerative Brain Disease And Amateur Athletics.

* Cruel Optimism and the NFL, or, Life in the Factory of Sadness.

* Let us be precise: Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.

* Leaked Documents Show Alabama Police Department Planted Drugs On Black Men For Years. Meanwhile, in Chicago. UPDATE: There may be less to that Alabama story than meets the eye.

* Spoiler Alerts: Three Books on Trash.

* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.

* Assuming a round figure of two and a half billion years of beak-sharpening, and assuming (a BIG assumption, to be sure) about three days per iteration of the Doctor, you can figure, based on a solar year of 365.25 days, that there have been approximately three hundred and four billion, three hundred and seventy-five million and twelve Doctors.

* And speaking of the Doctor: I’m not even sure who #2 would be.

* Behold the Jessica Jones backlash.

* Study suggests Type 2 diabetes can be cured by weight loss — specifically the loss of half a gram of fat from the pancreas.

* What they give with one hand they take with the other: Research Points To Mental Health Risks Associated With Meatless Diet.

* This is neat: The Third Amendment to the Constitution — the one that bans the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner’s consent — is sort of the Pete Best of the early American legislative experiment. While the other amendments have had all sorts of play at the highest levels of legal rulings, there has never been a Supreme Court decision primarily based on the Third Amendment. Clearly the Founders had a goal, wrote it down, and we haven’t had too many questions about the matter since. Nice work, Founders. Anyway, there’s an idea bubbling among legal theorists to use the Third Amendment to counteract domestic spying from the NSA — a branch of the Department of Defense — and while it may not be 100 percent there, it’s interesting.

* Our bad: U.S. Holds Yemeni Man at Guantanamo Bay for 13 Years in Case of Mistaken Identity.

* Starting work before 10am isn’t just soul crushing, this scientist says it’s equivalent to torture.

* Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.

* Rape in the porn industry.

* Of One and the Other: Humans and Animals.

* Know your branches of economics.

* State sues prisoners to pay for their room, board.

* “This is the best declining mall review I’ve ever read.”

* Teach the controversy: Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?

* Magnifique! In Photos: Anarchists Clash With Riot Police During Climate Summit Protest in Paris.

* When the Onion goes dark, there’s still no one better: Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic.

* Female-Authors-Only Philosophy of Science Syllabus.

* There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds.

* Florida Woman’s Car Turned Her in for a Hit-and-Run.

* Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.

* General election watch: Democrats are fiercely committed to the proposition of nominating a perhaps fatally compromised candidate whom basically no one likes. And from Amber A’Lee Frost: My Kind of Misogyny. Wheeeeeeeeee!

* Philosophy Corner: Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you?

* Abolish TIAA-CREF.

* Was Star Wars’ Empire on the brink of financial ruin?

* This company believes it can resurrect humans in the next 30 years.

* Kill the Santa Claus in your head.

* From Climate Crisis to Solar Communism. World’s Most Vulnerable Islands Are Hoping Paris Will Bring an Impossible Climate Miracle. India Holds the Planet’s Fate in Its Hands. That’s Great News.

* Def Sec Carter To Open All Combat Jobs To Women In Historic Change.

* How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.

* Soviet erotic alphabet picture book, 1931.

* Yes, I did write a fixfic based on the “Wait—all the stories are true?” line from the new Star Wars trailer. I’m not sorry.

* There but for the grace of God go we: Man arrested with 51 turtles in his pants.

* And of course you had me at Rare 40-Year-Old Star Trek Comics Are Finally Being Released In the U.S.

Monday Morning Links

* Doomsday officially here.

In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs. And not one has come out—until now.

* Huge, if true: High Rise director Ben Wheatley: societal collapse is imminent.

* Huge, if true: Bernie Sanders can’t save America.

* Countless gynecologists failed to diagnose my rare condition – until Planned Parenthood rescued me.

* Endometriosis: the hidden suffering of millions of women revealed.

* Comic Crit reads Aurora and Seveneves.

* Last year, a group of researchers at West Virginia University uncovered one of the biggest frauds in automotive history while working under a small $50,000 grant.

* “Our society needs a massive reset in terms of its priorities [regarding autism],” Silberman said. “One of the main problems facing families now is their children aging out of services. Yet almost all of the funding into research goes into investigating causes.” […] “Many things are being ignored by going after the cause of the alleged epidemic that may not even be one,” said Silberman. “It is amazing to me, after all this arguing about whether or not vaccines cause autism that we still haven’t done a basic prevalence study of autism among adults.”

* The problem is, you can tear down an institution in a year.  It takes 25 — if you’re the best — to build it back up again. But it’s too late now. By breaking the rules of the search, Harreld helped violate the trust of the community and the values of the university. Iowa’s tradition has been sullied. If Harreld remains and wants to be a serious university president, his job is not going to be “going from good to great,” but rather repairing the damage that the Board of Regents, the governor and he, himself have done.

* Cities bear rising cost of keeping water safe to drink. It’s always worse than you think.

 

* We Lost Our Daughter to a Mass Shooter and Now Owe $203,000 to His Ammo Dealer.

* What could possibly go wrong? You Can Now Rent H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Apartment.

* Inside every dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine is a little valve that directs the flow of water. For decades, most of these valves have come from a factory in the northwestern corner of Illinois, but not after today.

* Somebody get me Samuel L. Jackson.

* n+1 against the Patriots.

* The nonprofit-Coca-Cola-industrial complex.

* Fun fact: There have been 4,286 Robins.

* Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

* Andy Daly, prophet.

* If They Build It, Will We Come? Meet The Tech Entrepreneurs Trying To Take Back The Porn Industry.

* Being Pippi Longstocking.

* Hot desking, the worst.

 

Sunday!

* Suppose you were alive back in 1945 and were told about all the new technology that would be invented between then and now: the computers and internet, mobile phones and other consumer electronics, faster and cheaper air travel, super trains and even outer space exploration, higher gas mileage on the ground, plastics, medical breakthroughs and science in general. You would have imagined what nearly all futurists expected: that we would be living in a life of leisure society by this time. Rising productivity would raise wages and living standards, enabling people to work shorter hours under more relaxed and less pressured workplace conditions.

Why hasn’t this occurred in recent years? In light of the enormous productivity gains since the end of World War II – and especially since 1980 – why isn’t everyone rich and enjoying the leisure economy that was promised? If the 99% is not getting the fruits of higher productivity, who is? Where has it gone?

* Corey Robin and Adam Kotsko on violence and “national security.” Here’s Adam:

To me, this is the ultimate disproof of the secular liberal contention that religion is the biggest possible cause of violence. Literally nothing could be more rigorously secular than “reasons of state,” and yet this principle has led to millions upon millions of deaths in the 20th Century alone. Of course, one could always fall back on the same dodge that allows one to get around the deaths caused by International Communism, for instance — “yes, they may have been officially atheistic, but in the last analysis Stalinism and Maoism are really religious in structure” — in order to define away abberant forms of “national security.”

And I think this typical dodge shows why the notion of religion as chief cause of violence has such a powerful hold — what “religion” signifies in such statements isn’t a body of beliefs and rituals, etc., but irrationality itself. It’s this irrationality that makes “religious violence” violent, not the body count. Within this framework, then, when rational people — for example, legitimate statesmen calculating the national interest — use violence for rational ends, it is not, properly speaking, violence. It is simply necessity.

(That’s the same reason why my typical rejoinder to “religious violence” rhetoric — “ever heard of money?” — also doesn’t work: the profit motive is rationality itself and could never be violent.)

* Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45.

* Undocumented Immigrants Paid $11.2 Billion In Taxes While GE Paid Nothing.

* Whistleblower Reveals Widespread Bribery By Walmart In Mexico.

* Swing States Are Swinging Toward Obama. But how will voters react when it comes out that PROSTITUTION!!!!

* Wisconsin’s Planned Parenthood suspends non-surgical abortions.

* Against lotteries: Taking money from people who have little and are powerless against even the slightest chance of escaping poverty is the kind of activity usually associated with the Mafia and street gangs. State governments are more than happy to play the part though, and they’ve gone far beyond anything organized crime ever did in terms of exploiting the desperation of the poor and selling them false hope with terrible odds. Lotteries that take their money for the explicit purpose of giving it to people who are financially better off is evidence of how completely our governments – particularly here in the South – have abandoned even the pretense of holding the moral high ground. They’ve identified the victims of an exploitative system and chosen to use that to their advantage. More here.

* Here’s an interesting wrinkle I’ve encountered in a few places. Many scholars sign work-made-for-hire deals with the universities that employ them. That means that the copyright for the work they produce on the job is vested with their employers — the universities — and not the scholars themselves. Yet these scholars routinely enter into publishing contracts with the big journals in which they assign the copyright — which isn’t theirs to bargain with — to the journals. This means that in a large plurality of cases, the big journals are in violation of the universities’ copyright. Technically, the universities could sue the journals for titanic fortunes. Thanks to the “strict liability” standard in copyright, the fact that the journals believed that they had secured the copyright from the correct party is not an effective defense, though technically the journals could try to recoup from the scholars, who by and large don’t have a net worth approaching one percent of the liability the publishers face.

* Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” into the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:

“Th[e National Security Agency’s]  capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.  [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“

Now, the NSA is building a $2 billion dollar facility in Utah which will use the world’s most powerful supercomputer to monitor virtually all phone calls, emails, internet usage, purchases and rentals, break all encryption, and then store everyone’s data permanently.

* And Mark Stone was an undercover anarchist.

Breathable Air Is For Closers

Yesterday’s post on North Carolina Republicans and hydrofracking should have noted that our insane GOP majority is only just getting started.

Friday Night Links

* How Michael Pietsch stitched together The Pale King. I’m reading this now; a post on it may be forthcoming if I find the time. No promises!

* Nate Silver may be right that the fortuitous discovery of 8000 Prosser votes by a known partisan hack may be incompetence, not corruption, but nonetheless the whole situation seems carefully crafted to infuriate me as much as possible. Investigations, such as they are, are underway.

* Government shutdown looming. What could go wrong? TPM has three possible outcomes, while Ezra Klein reminds you (in case you needed the reminder) what Planned Parenthood actually does. Walking back his lies to the contrary, the odious John Kyl sums up the whole of conservative ideology in just seven little words: “not intended to be a factual statement.”

* When anti-gay activists change their minds. Don’t miss his official retractions.

* And education “reform” takes a hit in New York City.

State of the Tuesday

* Obama’s State of the Union is here. I didn’t watch, but I saw enough on Twitter to see that Obama didn’t learn his lesson the first time he announced a spending freeze. So stupid.

* Obama leads all challengers in North Carolina.

* No filibuster reform for you.

* Planned Parenthood tries to head off another moronic right-wing hoax—by calling the FBI.

* Frances Fox Piven vs. Glenn Beck.

* Why Johnny can’t learn: “Sexy News Anchors Distract Male Viewers.”

* And Hemingway’s blonde jokes.

Q. Why did the blonde drive into the ditch?
A. She was overtaken with despair. No one was awaiting her arrival.

Still OoT But With Unexpected Hotel Wifi Links

* Ripped from the pages of Infinite Jest, a playable version of Eschaton. (via)

* Via Pete Lit, federal government to use its immense buying power to benefit society.

By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.

This looks to me like perhaps a first case of the end-runs Obama will have to make around our broken legislative institutions if he hopes to avoid a failed presidency. Another good sign: the final embrace of sidecar reconciliation to finish the job on health care.

* Of course, that headline in the New York Times gets it wrong, as Steve Benen has been desperately trying to explain to anyone who will listen: Democrats don’t need to pass health care via reconciliation because health care already passed through the regular order. Regardless, the Republicans are promising a full-on freakout if reconciliation is used; what might they do?

* “Pentagon fesses up to 800 pages’ worth of potentially illegal spying, including peace groups and Planned Parenthood.” Hey, thanks for admitting it! Of course we won’t prosecute you; you were just protecting the homeland!

* Eliza Dushku to ruin another Joss Whedon production.

* The pornography of infinity: China Miéville on J.G. Ballard.

* J.D. Salinger v. Raiders of the Lost Ark.

* Wikipedia’s list of landings on other planets. Did the Soviets think there was life on Venus? They certainly seem to have thought there was something there. Via Boing Boing.

* Secret origins of the cellar door line from Donnie Darko.

* FantasySCOTUS.

* Really good reading of the U.K. version of The Office that focuses on Gervais’s critique of celebrity culture to explain, among other things, how David Brent could possibly have won a promotion on a 5-2 vote of the company board or been hired by a consulting firm—as well as why the U.S. version, in dropping this thematic angle, will always be intrinsically inferior.

* If I were a Brigham Young student, here’s the process I would have to undertake to grow my beloved beard.

* Students at the University of Mississippi want Admiral Akbar as their new mascot. I wholeheartedly endorse this effort.

* Also Via MeFi: Personal pop-culture rules. “No Robin Williams” and “anything involving dinosaurs” are two I think I follow.

* And Matt Yglesias selfishly takes a stand against one of our most-beloved cultural institutions. No special rights for late-in-the-alphabet people!