Monday Night Links

* “The Foundation Movie Inches Closer to Being the Worst Film Ever Made.”

* Jesse LaGreca, a member of the Occupy Wall Street protests, talks to Fox News.

* Michael Lewis on debt, Vallejo, and the coming California disaster.

Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education—that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.

* There was a moment during the 2008 convention that I thought Brian Schweitzer might be the Democrats’ best candidate for 2016. I’m starting to maybe feel that way again.

* Baby pictures of famous authors.

* Having a Facebook account means the boss is always watching, even before you’re hired.

* And Think Progress goes inside the denial-industrial complex.

Psychohistory

Forget Roland Emmerich; the real Foundation adaptation was on BBC Radio in 1973.

Some Links for Tuesday

* In the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies have announced new plans to screw sick kids for money. As the Eschaton link notes, strategies to deny coverage to their captive customers are always, necessarily, a huge part of the business model for these companies. This is why they’re so hard to effectively regulate. I sincerely wish we could find the political will for single payer, if only to stop Nicholas Sarkosy’s taunts.

* Job growth in March? That’s not just good news for March, that’s good news for Democrats in November.

* How to repossess an airplane. Via MeFi. Also via MeFi:

* Cuba in the 1930s.
* Back to the Hugos and Blogging the Hugos.
* Scarface as school play. This seemed so much more endearing in Rushmore.
* Change we can believe in: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announces “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

* Will Smith to make two totally unnecessary Independence Day sequels. The title? Of course, it’s ID4-Ever. This is the monster who is ruining Foundation. He must be stopped.

* And the end of independent bookstores. Lots of factors here, of which the iPhone/Droid “barcode scanner” is just the latest. It’s terrible to watch.

Thursday Night Linkage

* A majority of people want the filibuster abolished. There’s talk of actually doing something about it. But Harry Reid has declared the filibuster must live forever. America!

* /Film speculates exactly as to how Roland Emmerich will ruin Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

* From Lawrence Lessig, via MyDD, here’s how the Democrats are planning to tackle Citizens United v. FEC. Like Lessig, at first glance I’m not certain this reaction is quite up to the challenge.

* Attention: Global Warming Isn’t the Opposite of Snow.

* And New Jersey voters get what they asked for.

Foundations

Every science fiction fan has a foundation for their nerdity. It is their Urtext. For me—and I take no particular joy in admitting this—there’s no question that it is Star Trek. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and I watched more or less every episode of Star Trek produced before the day I came to understand the show’s structural limitations sometime during the mid-’90s.

But if my nerdy nature can have a second foundation, it’s undoubtedly Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which I remember as vividly today as the day I read them a decade and a half ago. It’s only partially an exaggeration to say that for me all theories of history are but footnotes to Asimov. (If it’s good enough for al Qaeda, it should be good enough for everyone.)

Asimov Wiki
Timeline of the Robots/Foundation Universe
A favorite commentary, and a followup.

Now, I wouldn’t recommend that any of you necessarily read these books now; I suspect Asimov’s magic only really works on thirteen-year-old boys. But I bring this up because there’s word that a Foundation movie is finally going to be made, and it’s clearly going to be awful. The director attached, Roland Emmerich, directed Independence Day, the Godzilla remake, The Day after Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. On his entire IMDb page only Stargate and The Thirteenth Floor (producer’s credit) fills me with anything less than total dread. B-movies are great, but Foundation shouldn’t be a B-movie. If anything, it should be a HBO series…