Weekend Links! Tabs Bankruptcy! All Links Must Go!

* Podcast: What is Irish Science Fiction? I’d also recommend a few new podcasts, Off Book (weekly improvised musical) and What Trump Can Teach Us about Con Law.

* Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again.”

* Researchers Just Launched a Prototype of Humanity’s First ‘Interstellar Spacecraft.’

* ‘Make It So’: Star Trek and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism.

* Star Trek: Discovery is the first Trek TV series in over 15 years. Here’s everything we know.

* Republicans don’t trust higher ed. That’s a problem for liberal academics.

* Three years after Steven Salaita lost a promised tenured position in American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the tone of his anti-Israel tweets, he’s leaving academe.

* How a New Field Could Help Save the Humanities.

* Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color.

* They’re still fighting at Hypatia.

* “If There’s an Organized Outrage Machine, We Need an Organized Response.” Recovering academic freedom in an age of social media mobbing.

* Any parent could have told you this: Ravens plan better than four-year-olds.

* How to raise an optimistic human in a pessimistic world.

* Among the dead was a so-called Dreamer, a migrant who had been brought to the United States as a young child. Frank Guisseppe Fuentes, 20, spent much of his life in the U.S. and had crossed the border in an attempt to reunite with family members living in Maryland after he was deported to Guatemala City, Jose Barillas, the Guatemalan consul general in Houston, told Univision. The Mothers Being Deported by Trump. Slain girl’s father, sister denied visas, miss her funeral. A Veteran Agent Speaks Out.

* New Jersey raised its smoking age to 21. The change will likely save lives. Honestly, just ban them outright, and soda too.

* Wisconsin is paying as much as $1 million per job, which will carry an average salary of $54,000. I’ve thought about it, and I think I’d rather have the iPhone.

* The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills.

* Don’t let your employer microchip you! Ever!

* A 21st-century form of indentured servitude has already penetrated deep into the American heartland.

* Woman turns home into museum after getting sick of black women being ignored by the art world.

* When there was a Lyme disease vaccine.

* Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle.

* North Dakota’s Norway Experiment.

* Reverse Robin Hood: The Historical Scam of Global Development.

* Dungeons and Dragons in America’s dungeons. Dungeons and Dragons and the Left.

* Who invented the high five?

* Hemingway just got beat by four words.

* Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child.

* The Bleak Left.

* A new Uber-esque school model turns teachers like me into on-demand contractors for the children of the 1 percent.

* The Sinclair Revolution Will Be Televised. It’ll Just Have Low Production Values.

* 110/111.

* The next Matt Groening series isn’t just a Futurama-but-fantasy but a joke Futurama already did. But fine I’ll give it a chance.

* A definitive mapping of the decline of The Simpsons. It’s just math, folks.

* The attack on Poland’s judicial independence goes deeper than you may think. Here are 5 things to know. Dodged that bullet. Coming soon to a collapsing empire near you!

* On 500 episodes of Comedy Bang Bang.

* When Pokémon Go defeated Milwaukee County.

* Et tu, Roomba? I trusted you.

* The World May Have Less Time to Address Climate Change Than Scientists Thought.

* And yet there’s more dicks around than ever before.

* The knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.

* #NotAllTVIsDarkAndFullOfTerrors.

* And July 30 can’t come fast enough.

---

And because Trump is a nightmare from which none of us will ever awake:

* We’re Approaching a Major Turning Point in Trump-Era Pop Culture.

* The Scariest Nuclear Threat Is Coming From Inside the White House.

After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

* The End of State.

* Turtles all the way down: Scott Pruitt wants to hijack the peer-review process to push bad climate science.

* Trump announces an unvetted transgender ban without telling either the White House press office or the Pentagon.

At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.

Were we ever so young?

* This guy is running communications now! Come on! COME ON!

* A Constitutional Crisis Is Inevitable. It’s not too early, or too nutty, to discuss grounds for impeachment. This presidency can’t be saved. A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly. Hot mic. 1 in 4. On the Brink of a Constitutional Crisis, the Nation Goes Numb.

* Psychiatry group tells members they can ignore ‘Goldwater rule’ and comment on Trump’s mental health.

* Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals. Sixteen years. We’ve long lost even the pretense that there is a rational reason for this.

* 64 years after Korean War, North still digging up bombs.

* William Regnery II, a man who inherited millions but struggled in business, tried for 15 years to ignite a racist political movement — and failed. Then an unforeseen phenomenon named Donald Trump gave legitimacy to what Regnery had seeded long before: the alt-right. Now, the press-shy white separatist breaks his silence.

* How Breitbart Media’s Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump.

* This is the tradition Ryan Alford sets himself against in Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law. It is from a position of deliberate disinterest in institutional personality, particularly presidential personality, that Alford builds his account of the lawlessness of US counterterrorism efforts since the 9/11 attacks and charts our country’s official passage across the “threshold between an imperial presidency and an elective dictatorship.”

* Is this fascism?

* What if Trump Ordered a Nuclear Strike on China? I’d Comply, Says Admiral. Not great, Bob!

* When you’ve lost the Boy Scouts.

* Who Is Killing American Women? Their Husbands And Boyfriends, CDC Confirms.

* Trump administration is sitting on tens of thousands of student debt forgiveness claims.

* Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated.

* RIP CBO.

* There’s nothing he can’t ruin.

* How to put Trump on Mount Rushmore, something he’s never even thought about.

* #Actually Stubbs’s tenure as mayor was deeply problematic.

* John McCain Just Proved He Is the Senate’s Biggest Fraud (Again). Your enemies are human too.

The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.

* Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.

* Understanding skinny repeal.

* Don’t forget: they win because the system is rigged in their favor. Not that they don’t get a lot of help.

* And yet! Sometimes they don’t. Good for Collins, Murkowski, McCain, and literally every Democrat in Congress, and remember that Trumpcare isn’t truly dead (no matter how many bullets you put in it) until Democrats get a veto point back…

No Bad News Today Links

* The polar vortex is coming. Here’s what that means — and how cold it could get.

* Where Black History and Floods Intertwine.

* I for one welcome our new Chicago overlords.

* CFP: The David Foster Wallace Conference has extended its deadline to January 15.

* thisisfine.jpg: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House. Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says. White House orders intelligence report of election cyberattacks.

* Chiafalo and Guerra are members of a group called “Hamilton Electors” that is seeking to convince Republican members of the Electoral College to reject Trump and agree on a consensus Republican alternative. They’re lobbying to persuade at least 37 Republican electors to join them, the minimum they need to block Trump from winning the Electoral College and send election to the House of Representatives. Democrats can stop Trump via the electoral college. But not how you think. The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump. I’ll spare you the rants from my Twitter but it’s agonizing that this is legal, workable, doable, and no one is going to try.

* Interesting strategy to discredit Electoral College here; compulsory voting in NY and CA. And I missed this one: You could swing the presidential election by moving a single county between states.

* Donald Trump confirms he will violate Constitution his first day in office.

* Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump.

* What can I say, though, he’s winning me over: JUST IN: Lockheed Martin’s market value drops $4,000,000,000 after Pres.-elect Trump tweets on F-35 program.

* What Vichy France can teach us about the normalization of state violence.

* Reminded of this one every four years in November: On Cooling the Mark Out.

* The birthering of the Democrats.

* For Bauerlein, Trump is a figure out of Hegel, a “world-historical figure” who arises at the right time to bring about a necessary change in society.

* Japanese American Historical Plaza.

* Star Wars and Vietnam.

* The smoke break and solidarity.

* Robots and literary criticism.

* Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories.

* What Things Cost in an American Country Store in 1836.

* The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island.

* Headlines that, uh, don’t seem right to me: Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news.

That Democrats are saying "we're the ones who care about FACTS" as they fall into a full-on psychotic break is like out of a Greek tragedy.

— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) December 12, 2016

* Charlie Stross vs. all media: Eleven Tweets.

* Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art.

* The Meta-Politics of Westworld.

* How John Milton Invented Sci-Fi in the 1600s.

* The World According to Stanislaw Lem.

* The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.

* This is some Black Mirror shit.

* Inside the NFL’s relentless, existential, Big Tobacco-style pursuit of your children.

* The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman.

* And okay, he’s won me back: Slavoj Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting.’

Behold, the next four years of our lives: https://t.co/fxANTMHByO pic.twitter.com/oDbqsZLMOX

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) December 12, 2016

Wednesday Links!

* Today at Marquette! Dr. Robin Reid, “Conflicting Audience Receptions of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.”

* Tomorrow at Marquette! The English Department pop culture group geeks out over The Hunger Games.

* Solving prostitution the Swedish way.

“In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem… gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them.”

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 13: Engagement.

The point of engagement in this sense is not to involve the public in making decisions, but make them feel involved in decisions that others will make. That this may be done with the best of intentions is important, of course, but ultimately besides the point. Like “stakeholder,” “engagement” thrives in a moment of political alienation and offers a vocabulary of collaboration in response. So if civic engagement is in decline, one thing that is not is the ritualistic performance of civic participation. The annual election-cycle ritual in American politics is a case in point here. In one populist breath, we routinely condemn the corruption of politicians who, it is said, never listen to the average voter. And in the next, we harangue the average voter for failing to participate in a process we routinely describe as corrupted. So it’s not the “apathy” or “disengagement” of the public that we should lament or criticize—it’s the institutions that give them so many reasons to be disengaged in the first place.

* A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks.

JR: In the past you have said that you are a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Could you expand on this a bit: why are you pessimistic about the short term? What changes do you anticipate taking place between the near and far futures that change your pessimism to optimism?

IB: On a personal level, it’s damage limitation; a sanity-keeping measure. Expect the worst and anything even only half-decent seems like something to celebrate. The pessimism comes from a feeling that as a species we seem unable to pass up any opportunity to behave stupidly, self-harmfully (the Copenhagen climate talks being but the latest example). The long-term optimism comes from the the fact that no matter how bad things seem and how idiotically and cruelly we behave. . . well, we’ve got this far, despite it all, and there are more people on the planet than ever before, and more people living good, productive, relatively happy lives than ever before, and—providing we aren’t terminally stupid, or unlucky enough to get clobbered by something we have no control over, like a big meteorite or a gamma ray buster or whatever—we’ll solve a lot of problems just by sticking around and doing what we do; developing, progressing, improving, adapting. And possibly by inventing AIs that are smarter and more decent than we are, which will help us get some sort of perspective on ourselves, at the very least. We might just stumble our way blindly, unthinkingly into utopia, in other words, muddling through despite ourselves.

* “Gamechanging” climate deal that seems radically insufficient to the scale of the crisis. What could go wrong?

* Think Progress has a good rundown on King v. Burwell, the case that could kill Obamacare. Eight Reasons to Stop Freaking Out About the Supreme Court’s Next Obamacare Case.

* The growth of auxiliary activities was the primary driver in spending increases by the schools, the report concludes. From 2005 to 2012, $3.4 billion was spent on instructional and research facilities. The cost for nonacademic auxiliary facilities was $3.5 billion from 2002 to 2012. Limit athletic fees, check construction to control college costs, study says.

* The State Funding Sleight-Of-Hand: Some Thoughts on UC’s Proposed Tuition Hike.

* The Vitae Adjunct Retirement Survey.

* ProQuest says it won’t sell dissertations through Amazon anymore.

* Why Wall Street Loves Hillary

* It’s a start: Massachusetts Town Proposes First Complete Ban On All Tobacco.

* Inside America’s inept nuclear corps.

* The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) is under attack by critics who say academe is colluding with the mainstream media to push a feminist agenda in video games. How deep does this conspiracy go?

* When we think about the collapse of communism, we should emphasize and celebrate the attractiveness of a social market economy — not free enterprise.

* Can You Gentrify America’s Poorest, Most Dangerous City?

* Today, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration announced through the New York Times that it may stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession, opting instead to issue tickets without detaining the suspect. This would feel like an important step toward reasonable weed policy if New York state hadn’t already mandated it 37 years ago.

* The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars. Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.

* One in every 8 arrests was for a drug offense last year.

* Milwaukee Public Museum’s Sci-Fi Film Fest gathers large audience.

* Running a school on $160 a year.

* Is Pre-K academically rigorous enough? That’s a real question this real article is asking.

* Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry.

* Grace Dunham is now an adult and she read this book before it was published. She is managing her sister’s book tour and they are best friends. Are we really going to overlook this?

* Also on the subject of Lena Dunham: this is an extremely clickbaity headline, but the testimony from a juvenile sex offender is fascinating and horrible.

* Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert.

* “Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes.”

* In America, today’s parents have inherited expectations they can no longer afford. The vigilant standards of the helicopter parents from the baby boomer generation have become defined as mainstream practice, but they require money that the average household earning $53,891 per year— and struggling to survive in an economy in its seventh year of illusory “recovery”— does not have. The result is a fearful society in which poorer parents are cast as threats to their own children.

* Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia.

* Scientists Have Finally Found The First Real Reason We Need To Sleep.

* Wes Anderson might be making another movie with puppets.

* In its gentle sadness, its deceptively light tone, and its inherent contradictions, this is the perfect ending to The Next Generation.  One of these days, the crew will be dispersed.  The Enterprise will be put in mothballs.  Starfleet will complete its transformation into a body that none of them particularly want to serve in.  But for now, their voyages continue.

* Peak Prequel: Sony Rumored to Be Prepping Aunt May Spider-Man Spin-Off Movie.

* And the best news ever: HBO Will Make Asimov’s Foundation With Interstellar‘s Jonathan Nolan. I may lose my mind over this show. I may even do a podcast. And a lot of what went wrong with Interstellar wasn’t even Jonathan Nolan’s fault!

All the Links of the Week in One Convenient Location

* Ending the World the Human Way: Why can no one talk about climate change?

* You’ve seen it linked everywhere, but not here! Woody Allen’s Good Name. Don’t Listen to Woody Allen’s Biggest Defender. ​The Internet Digs Up Woody Allen’s Creepy Child-Loving Past. Woody Allen, My Pen Pal.

* Basically nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. It was too much to handle.

* Last days of a model.

* The Boston Globe: The Invisible Professor. Part-Time Professors Demand Higher Pay; Will Colleges Listen? 111 Colleges Are Accused of Violating Law by Requiring Student-Aid Forms.

* Another university makes the queen sacrifice.

* Privilege and the Ph.D. The Tenure Code. 1,600 letters of recommendation.

* Fifty-Five Bodies, and Zero Trials, at the Florida School for Boys.

* Even the liberal Kevin Drum thinks former senator, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments to run of president on, unlike (say) Obama when he ran for president, or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or….

* “The entire system is a joke. There is absolutely no living, breathing person with any kind of intellect who believes that a grand jury could consider and vote on 10 complex issues in the period of time that they use to deliberate on hundreds,” Joe Cheshire, a Raleigh attorney who handles criminal cases across North Carolina, told The Charlotte Observer.

* And all perfectly legal: Missouri Executes Man While His Appeal Was Still Pending Before Supreme Court.

* Cop Who Allegedly Said ‘We Don’t Have Time For This’ Before Shooting Schizophrenic Teen Dead Has Been Indicted.

* Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8?

* Broken clock watch: Antonin Scalia is… making sense?

* Wisconsin Teacher Fired for… Receiving Emails from His Sister.

* Cook, an Edinburg marksman, was target shooting toward the school from about a mile away when he struck the boys Dec. 12, 2011. The gunshots left Nicholas “Nicko” Tijerina, then 13, paralyzed and Edson Amaro, then 14, with serious internal organ damage.

* From the archives: In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series. Harry Potter novels renamed.

* I think I’ve done this one before, too, but what the hell: Lynda Barry’s Course Syllabus.

* If It Happened There: The Super Bowl.

* Unloved Films, Part III: “The Hudsucker Proxy.”

* Daily Life in the Slave Quarters.

* A Local Teen’s Documentary on Slavery Premieres Friday in Detroit.

* How the Myth of the ‘Negro Cocaine Fiend’ Helped Shape American Drug Policy.

* Faculty set strike date at UIC.

* Closing SodaStream’s West Bank Factories Would Hurt Palestinians, but That’s Not the Point.

* ACLU lawsuit challenges Wisconsin same-sex marriage ban. Lawsuit claims Apple infringing on University of Wisconsin patent. Water Levels of the Great Lakes Are Declining.

* CVS Will Stop Selling Tobacco Products by October. I can’t believe it’s taken this long; it’s shocked me that pharmacies sold cigarettes ever since I worked in one way back in high school.

* Rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

* Brooklyn chess star battles the pressure of expectations.

* A Mystery Illness Is Causing Starfish to Rip Themselves Into Pieces.

* What would happen if a cue ball struck a rack of 15 perfectly round, frictionless billiard balls, exactly head-on?

* Gasp! Marx Was Right!

* Gasp! Tar Sands Oil Development Is More Toxic Than Previously Thought, Study Finds.

* Gasp! Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force, Report Says.

* 12 Post-Potter Revelations J.K. Rowling Has Shared.

* On “Imported from Detroit.”

* The Fall of East Cleveland.

* California Considers Raising Its Minimum Wage To The Highest In The Country.

* CNN: The Worst.

* What They’re Saying About The Grand Budapest Hotel.

* Some great beach art.

* Now hanging on the wall of my office: The Life of Thought.

* It’s very important to McDonald’s that you know McNuggets are acceptably gross.

* Science Fiction as a Childhood Coping Mechanism.

* And the future truly is weird: Woman Gives Birth To Children, Discovers Her Twin Is Actually The Biological Mother, But She Is Technically Her Own Twin.

A Few More Tuesday Links While I Procrastinate

* Penn Puts Hiring Ban on Smokers.

* A team of scientists led by chemist Richard Kaner had just finished devising an efficient method for producing high-quality sheets of the Nobel-prize winning supermaterial known as graphene — with a consumer-grade DVD drive. That was groundbreaking in and of itself, but the real surprise came when Maher El-Kady, a researcher in Kaner’s lab, wired a small square of their high quality carbon sheets up to a lightbulb.

* Talkin’ TNG at Grantland and An und für sich.

* Fraternities on the side of good. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria.

* More massive profits for banks. I guess the crisis really is over!

* Tennant says he’s starting to ‘give up hope’ for Who 50th return. You bastards. This was a gimme.

* And a massive, massive LEGO Hogwarts.

Thursday Links

* IQ ‘a myth,’ study says. You mean almost everybody who lived a hundred years ago wasn’t learning disabled by contemporary standards?

Among the study’s other findings:

• While aging has a detrimental effect on reasoning and short-term memory, it leaves verbal abilities “completely unimpaired.”

• Smoking has a negative impact on verbal abilities and short-term memory but does not affect reasoning skills.

• People who play video games performed “significantly better” in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory.

• Products that are advertised to improve brain function aren’t effective. “People who ‘brain-train’ are no better at any of these three aspects of intelligence than people who don’t,” Owen said.

* Big MetaFilter post on Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

* We need DNA tests before you can vote: Iowa’s GOP Election Official Has Found Only 6 Examples Of Voter Fraud Out Of 1.6 Million Votes Cast.

* Why Nate Silver is Not Just Wrong, but Maliciously Wrong.

* Joe Lieberman’s last act as a senator is surprisingly not all that malicious or destructive.

* Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream basement.

* Dinosaur Comics creator’s Choose-your-own-adventure Hamlet beats all Kickstarter publishing records.

* And Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up.

Colbert Nation?

Can Stephen Colbert run for president again? I think we’re finally ready.

‘After Tobacco’

What if everyone just stopped smoking?

Wednesday Whatever

* Empathy fail: Science proves the kids aren’t all right. Via MeFi.

* Science also proves conservatives really just need a hug.

A study at University College London in the UK has found that conservatives’ brains have larger amygdalas than the brains of liberals. Amygdalas are responsible for fear and other “primitive” emotions. At the same time, conservatives’ brains were also found to have a smaller anterior cingulate — the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.

* How it works: Upton once considered a “moderate on environmental issues,” but has worked hard to refashion himself as a hard-right defender of pollution in recent months. Some Tea Party groups tried to block Upton from taking the gavel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, attacking his past support for energy-efficient light bulbs. Upton previously claimed that “climate change is a serious problem” and that “the world will be better off” if we reduced carbon emissions. However, in the course of the past two years — as he received $20,000 from Koch Industries — Upton has shifted to oppose not only cap-and-trade legislation but any form of limits on climate pollution whatsoever, instead supporting investigations against climate scientists and lawsuits against the EPA and its supposed “unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs”… Via Benen.

* Sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression: Another take on life in Yazoo City, c. 1960. Also via Benen.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger: worst governor ever?

* And you can have my smoking ban when you take it from my cold, dead hands.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (and Several More)

* Between the tax compromise and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, I think Obama did a tremendous amount to help his chances for reelection this week. Rachel Maddow rightly calls the DADT repeal the president’s victory:

Politically, the thing to not lose touch with here is that this is the President’s victory. This is something about which the President took a lot of criticism, a lot of abuse, a lot of skepticism from his otherwise most loyal supporters. He continually insisted that this was possible that it would get done.

Guilty as charged. I confess I also love the sweet sound of right-wing screams, especially when their own caucus collapsed in the face of this “generational change.” Even Richard Burr voted the right way!

* It looks like Harvard and Yale will return ROTC to their campuses in light of the repeal. Frankly I’d prefer to see the trend going the other way—we need tighter restrictions on military recruiting, not loosening of the few restrictions that already exist—but I suppose this was unavoidable.

* Seen on Facebook: Obama wants to let gays vote. That’s why I’m voting Tea Party.

* Watch out Texas: bad news coming.

* Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions…

* The message to Nicky Wishart and his generation is very clear: don’t get any fancy ideas about being an engaged citizen. Go back to your X-Box and X-Factor, and leave politics to the millionaires in charge. Via MeFi.

* And still more trouble for Britain: There are a growing number of grassroots organisations campaigning about the over-professionalisation of childhood football. Give Us Back Our Game launched four years ago. “The game has been taken away from children by over-competitive coaches and parents,” says founder Paul Cooper. It has several offshoots, including Football Football, an initiative to revive inner-city football. Then there’s the Children’s Football Alliance, which champions “mixed ability” football, and the Don’t X The Line campaign against over-the-top parental behaviour at children’s football matches. Also via MeFi.

* Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances.

* And Fringe announces its move to the Friday night death slot with style.

Courageous Underdogs Fighting a Corrupt Elite Engaged in a Conspiracy to Suppress the Truth or Foist a Malicious Lie on Ordinary People

On denialism.

Wednesday!

* You know who else loved gay soliders? That’s right.

* BP failed to provide protective equipment to the volunteers who helped in the initial cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Of course they did.

* Great anti-BP, anti-right-wing political cartoon from Tom the Dancing Bug: Lucky Ducky in “Slick Deal.”

* Progress: we now live in a world without (new) Hummers.

* Meet Ardi Rizal, a two-year-old Sumatran baby who smokes some forty cigarettes a day. The government has offered to buy his parents a car if he stops, but they claim he gets too angry without smokes.

* A Duke University archive of television advertising has gone live just in time for my Watching Television class to use it.

* Film Studies for Free does Wes Anderson.

* And here’s a neat video of Airplane! side-by-side with the original 1950s film from which its script was apparently directly lifted, Zero Hour!

Too Many Linkdumps Lately – 2

* Can you detect the subtle flaw in SEIU’s NC strategy?

* Another Detroit slideshow.

* Rachel Maddow spent twelve minutes debunking the ACORN hoax last night. Truly great television.

* Two profiles of WikiLeaks from the Independent and Mother Jones.

* Kumbwada, Nigeria, where an “ancient curse” is said to keep men off the throne. Via MeFi.

* Philly to decriminalize marijuana? California to legalize it?

* David Cross says probably no Arrested Development movie. This is quite literally the worst news I have ever heard.

* I’m amazed you were ever allowed to smoke on a submarine.

* The for-profit university: threat or menace?

* Are you absolutely, positively, and wholeheartedly ready to publish your novel?

* And confidential to Glenn Beck fans: Glenn Beck thinks you’re a sucker.

Still Can’t Believe It

Smoking ban, hooray.

Wednesday 1

Wednesday 1.

* A dissenting view: as someone who has recently taken up smoking in order to be more like Barack Obama, I require regular fluff stories on the president’s cigarette habit to know whether I should smoke on any given day.

* An anti-bullying measure has passed the North Carolina House, a big win for the LGBT activists who pressed for it. Triangulator notes that the bill was opposed by nearly every Republican in the chamber.

* Why we need to criticize Obama from the left: “Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees, officials said Tuesday.

* The Tampa Bay Times has a huge expose on the Church of Scientology, via MeFi.

* And did you know Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common?