Monday Morning Links!

* Discovery vs. the canon. All of these so-called violations can be solved with creative thinking, you cowards!

* The day Star Trek: The Next Generation was truly invented.

* This is not the dystopia we were promised. Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans.

* I really think every person who has anything to do with assessment knows it is completely meaningless but fears some other actor in the system who they think truly believes in it. Great piece from the Chronicle on just how bad it is.

* Natalie Portman on being 13 in Hollywood. Five strategies of sexual harassers.

* Monopsony in America.

* Today in the NYPD.

* Kalamazoo doctor detained by ICE after forty years in the US. ICE looks to be targeting Niec, despite a permanent green card, due to some misdemeanor property damage convictions from 17 years ago.

Border security spending, in equipment and manpower, has exploded in the last ten years. It's never ever enough, even as apprehensions have dramatically declined and net unauthorized flows have slowed to zero. https://t.co/1TJdLPiAyx

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 21, 2018

Democrats should be talking about where they are going to house Dreamers to protect them from ICE for 3+ years.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 22, 2018

* Rethinking Truman.

We remember Truman primarily as the person who was president when the atomic bombs were first used. We should also remember him, as I have argued before, as the person who ordered that the atomic bombs stop being used. And the person who, over the course of his presidency, did the most to establish that atomic bombs were not weapons to be deployed lightly ever again. One might see this as irony, but in my interpretation, it is not: it the reaction of someone who realized he had been badly out of the loop once, and wore that on his conscience, and determined it would not happen again.

* What it’s like to be a convicted felon.

* The Corruption Thesis, dystopia, and authoritarianism.

* Invasion of the German Board Games.

* I say all this because I think it’s important to bear in mind when considering the substantial subset of UCB that doesn’t get paid for its labor: the improvisors, stand-ups and sketch comics who perform nightly at its theaters. All of them work for free, and often at a loss. To perform on a UCB house team, you must complete UCB’s core curriculum, or four courses at $450-500 apiece. You must also be approved for study in an Advanced Study course—another $450-500. (Through its diversity scholarships, UCB waives these fees for 175 students each year). That’s at least $2,250 and at most $2,500 simply to be eligible to audition for UCB’s flagship Harold and Lloyd teams. If you make it, which you probably won’t, the costs continue to accrue. Members of UCB’s house teams are required to pay their coaches, and many also pay for rehearsal spaces and props. They do not recoup these costs.

* Republicans want to make it easier to kill whales and dolphins.

* As metaphors go, it’s a little on the nose.

* And the New York Times asking the tough questions: Formidable tail weaponry is nearly absent in living animals. Scientists have an explanation for what happened to the clubbed tails of the ankylosaurus or the spikes on a stegosaurus.

Thnksgvn Links

* Once again, this year as every year, we give thanks.

* CFP: SFRA 2016, in Liverpool, UK.

* The first space age was about politics. The second space age was about science. The third space age is about money.

* How to Read Žižek on the Refugee Crisis.

The basic dynamic here is that ostensibly left-wing parties have put the right wing in the driver’s seat and have no strategy other than to denounce the very right-wing racism that their preferred policies actually stoke. The refugee article aims to unmask a similar dynamic in more radical leftist circles. Among leftist commentators, academics, and online activists as well, there is an abdication of any responsible policy-making that takes actual-existing reality into account. In its place, we find only empty rhetoric aimed at guaranteeing the speaker’s ideological purity.

That’s why the refugee crisis hasn’t moved me to rage the way it has moved others. I predict both sides abandon them.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 25, 2015

The right will abandon them in anger, the “left” in hand-wringing sadness at what the right has made them do.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 25, 2015

* xkcd has another supersize edition. Here’s what we know so far.

* Officially outsourcing all my political commentary to John Kasich.

* Some college activists think making the movement a nationally despised joke might be a tactical mistake, but opinions still differ.

* Meanwhile! Arrests Made After Protesters Destroy Part of City Christmas Tree.

* Police killings since Ferguson, in one map.

* The Statue of Liberty Was Originally a Muslim Woman.

* Teach the controversy: Life on Mars was ‘destroyed by nuclear attack’, says physicist – and we could be next.

* Baba Yaga’s Guide To Feminism.

* The Fragile Framework: Can Nations Unite to Save Earth’s Climate? Spoiler alert: I have some terrible news.

* Disability and science fiction fandom.

* Jessica Jones is a Primer on Gaslighting, and How to Protect Yourself Against It. How Jessica JonesAbsorbed the Anxieties of Gamergate.

* Internet trolls have learned to exploit our over-militarized police. It’s a crime that’s hard to stop — and hard to prosecute.

* Kinsey Was Wrong: Sexuality Isn’t Fluid.

* How Chicago Tries to Cover Up a Police Execution.

* Against Ta-Nehisi Coates?

* In a Crazy Turn of Events, Viral Sensation “Phuc Dat Bich” Says It Was All a Hoax. Is nothing sacred?

* Neil Blomkamp wants to fix the biggest mistake in the Aliens franchise: the death of Newt.

* The law, in its majestic equality, permits rich and poor alike to sleep outside.

* Every Hint and Clue Hidden in the Captain America: Civil War Trailer.

* And today in data visualization: The Magnificent Bears of the Glorious Nation of Finland.

So Many Weekend Links!

I’ve been thinking all day about the “value of the humanities” and I really think it’s just that it’s good to know stuff.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015

Is there serious case that the humanities advance job skills or informed citizenship? Maybe. But it’s really mostly just good to know stuff.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015

#humanities RT @dg22727: @ayjay @gerrycanavan Well-worn, but: pic.twitter.com/l6YfmjGH7T

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015

* I’ve seen this movie: Marquette working with firm to humanely manage seagulls.

* Best game I’ve played in a really long time: Rymdkapsel.

* The Milwaukee Experiment: What can one prosecutor do about the mass incarceration of African-Americans?

* The academic community has talked itself into a very strange corner with regards to adjunctification. “Respect” is just not a good rallying point: unquantifiable, unsatisfiable, turns political struggle into emotional one. The focus should stay on the system that produces adjunct jobs instead of full-time permanent ones.

* This report that administration and construction are not significant factors in rising tuition seems totally off to me. You’re dividing by different denominators in 2001 and 2011; that masks the magnitude of the change, but also hides new spending in real terms. The last student you add should be your cheapest student: all the infrastructure is in place, you’re just adding one more. But these numbers show the opposite trend: spending at colleges is increasing even given efficiencies gained by adding more students.

* CFP: The Superhero Project.

* ‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising.

* If you, like us, lusted after the art deco tiling and rose-colored lighting of the Grand Budapest Hotel lobby, or drooled over the yellow Parisian hotel room in Hotel Chevalier, here’s some enchanting news: Wes Anderson has designed a bar.

* Bardolatry as Idolatry.

* NSA mass phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal.

* Andrew Cuomo, pretty corrupt.

* So are the Patriots.

* An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty.

* The Poverty Capitalism Creates.

* As investigation enters fifth month, Tamir Rice’s mother has moved into a homeless shelter. Online activists raised $60K for Tamir Rice’s family — so where did all that money go?

* The End of LSU.

* If you want a vision of the future.

* Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

* The Secret Lives of Homeless Students.

* Ten percent of you were meant to be police officers. You have it in your blood and bones and you will excel in this profession. For 80% of you, this is a job. It’s a job you will do well and honorably for your career with the NYPD. Ten percent of you should never have made it this far. You are too dumb, too damaged, or too criminal to be police officers and you very well will be hurt, killed, or arrested in the years to come.

* The Hater’s Guide To Avengers: Age of Ultron. Are you Over the Avengers Yet? Ultron Has Always Been a Dumb Character, and That’s Okay. Even Whedon isn’t into it.

* Leaked Email From Marvel CEO Is A Listicle About Why Women Can’t Be Superheroes.

* Reading the Black Captain America (both of them).

* Joss Whedon Didn’t Quit Twitter Because of All the Mean Feminists.

* In defense of the Mommy Track.

* Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.

* ‘Comedy Bang-Bang’s’ Scott Aukerman: From ‘Screwing Around’ to a Podcast Empire.

* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably.

* The Pink and Blue Projects: Exploring the Genderization of Color.

* I really liked TNI’s “Trash” issue, though it gets Oscar the Grouch all wrong.

* Did a study find men’s beards are filled with poop?

* We Accidentally Turned The Entire Statue Of Liberty Into A Battery.

* Halo Players Spent Five Years Trying To Get Into An Empty Room.

* I’m glad that Facebook is choosing to publish such findings, but I cannot but shake my head about how the real findings are buried, and irrelevant comparisons take up the conclusion.

* A comics Kickstarter some of you might be interested in: Bizarre New World.

* Lawmakers drop Walker’s plan to spin off UW governance.

* Art Institute of Wisconsin to stop enrolling new students.

* Remember when Gerber tried to market “baby food for teens?”

* What Was the Venus de Milo Doing With Her Arms?

* Joan Would Have Lost Her Sexual Harassment Suit Against McCann Erickson. Assholes of Mad Men’s McCann pay dividends for real-life McCann.

* Q: What do the US, Somalia, and South Sudan have in common? A: It’s totally cool to put kids in jail forever.

* Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

* Health Insurance Companies Are Illegally Charging for Birth Control.

* Report: Most College Football Concussions Happen in Practice.

* Nothing gold can stay be allowed to just be a good thing that happened one time.

* Essential Reading: “I Am Error” Brings New Insight to the History of the NES.

* From graduation to garbage job (literally): One twentysomething’s struggle.

* The source of strange radio signals that have left astronomers at Australia’s most famous radio telescope scratching their heads for 17 years has finally been discovered. It turns out that it was a microwave oven.

* “My father felt the U.S.S.R. treated him better than America,” said Tynes-Mensah, a former university chemistry instructor who was born in the Russian town of Krasnodar and now lives mainly in the United States, spending summers in Russia. “He was happy here.”

* How to lie with statistics, Nicholas Kristof edition.

* Portrait of a suicide at UPenn.

* You Oughta Know Dave Coulier Will Be On Fuller House.

* Woman Who Tweeted ‘2 Drunk 2 Care’ Before Fatal Crash Gets 24 Years.

* Galadriel, Witch-Queen of Lórien.

In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs,” I suggested that the basic humanity of Tolkien’s inhuman creatures proved them to be more worthy of our sympathy than the elves, “whose near-perfection marks them with a profound otherness.” As immortals, elves are always playing a long game in which we finite beings cannot ever hope to be much more than pawns. The characters who seem most aware of this fact in The Lord of the Rings are, in fact, the orcs, as is tellingly revealed in the dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat. They lament having to work for “Big Bosses,” remember the “bad old times” when elves besieged them, and make hopeful plans for a postwar future in which there are “no big bosses.” In their fear and loathing of aristocrats and high powers, these orcs express thoroughly modern, even vaguely democratic sentiments. The Witch-Queen of Lórien, much like the dark Lord of Mordor, champions a different social order entirely. I am not entirely sure that Galadriel’s vision for how the world system should be organized is necessarily the better one. For those of us who are in favor of changing the world, Galadriel and her coterie of hereditary aristocrats represent the enemy, a power to be overcome, and her “long defeat” cannot come soon enough.

* The Magicians is coming to SyFy.

* Sheriffs Threaten Retaliation If The Price Of Prisoner Phone Calls Is Regulated.

* Starving the beast: The UNC system in 2015.

* There are no tough choices.

* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.

* Meet the original patent troll.

* The vanishing of Molly Norris.

* Empty, Lonely Nothingness. Forever: Understanding the Fermi Paradox.

* A Cancer Survivor Designs the Cards She Wishes She’d Received From Friends and Family.

* Get my checkbook! Original drawings depicting iconic Martians from HG Wells’s sci-fi masterpiece The War of the Worlds are on sale for £350,000.

* Edit of the Day: Footloose Without the Music Turns Kevin Bacon Into a Maniac.

* Deleted Scenes of Women in Disaster Movies Written by Men.

* Get me Thomas Pynchon: Aide to Kamala Harris arrested for pretending to run 3,000-year-old rogue police force.

* Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot.

* Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water. More North Carolina Residents Warned Of Contaminated Drinking Water. Horribly bleak study sees ‘empty landscape’ as large herbivores vanish at startling rate. A future without chocolate.

* Only the super-rich can save us now.

* McDonald’s to reverse declining sales with more attractive Hamburglar.

* These Suburban Preppers Are Ready for Anything.

* Bill Clinton has an exciting new greatest regret of his presidency.

* Someone made Game of Thrones into a Google map, and it’s amazing.

* Native Americans Say This Man Enslaved Them. Pope Francis Wants To Call Him A Saint.

* Which President Greenlit A Trip To The Center Of The Earth?

* The LEGO sublime.

* And a dark, gritty Sliders I wish had gone to series: Parallels. By one of the creators of The Lost Room, which I also wish had gone to series!

Spring Break So Close You Can Taste It Links

* Sing to me, Muse, of Fredric Jameson. I’ve never understood the “worst writer” slam against Fred; alongside all the other good things I’d have to say about his work I think he’s actually very clear and precise.

* CFP for the 2014 Marxist Literary Group at the Banff Centre: Energy, Environment, Culture.”

* CFP: Bruce Springsteen Studies.

* Once upon a time in America this was called advocating for justice. But in today’s America, it’s deemed a miscarriage of justice.

* Meanwhile. My god. And my god. And my god. And my god. The US courts are just a bottomless nightmare.

* Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims. Yes we can!

* Freddie deBoer on the unbearable lightness of always voting Democrat.

* The unbearable whiteness of Project X.

* 25 Years of Declining State Support for Public Colleges. Many Colleges ‘Hoard’ Endowments During Rough Economic Times. The Rising Cost of Not Going to College.

* Service, Sex Work, and the Profession.

* The SATs have been provably racist and classist for decades with no improvements; Canavan’s Razor would suggest that’s the entire point. But this time…

* The “trigger warning” has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped? Content Warnings and College Classes. The Trigger Warned Syllabus. We’ve gone too far with ‘trigger warnings.’ I think this kind of “trigger warning” — and even offering alternative assignments when circumstances warrant — is very often good pedagogy on the level of the individual classroom; I did so this semester when teaching Lolita, somewhat reluctantly, but I’d come to feel it was necessary. I’m very skeptical it would ever be a good idea at the level of administration or policy.

* An Elegy for Academic Freedom.

* 10 Unintentionally Horrifying Statues of Famous People.

* Tendrils of the invisible web: the undersea cables wiring the Earth.

* “Wearing Google Glass automatically means that all social interaction you have must be not just on yours, but Google’s terms,” Adrian Chen wrote at Gawker almost a year ago, when we all first cringed in fear.

* You know every cop is a criminal: David Cameron’s porn-filter advisor arrested for possession of images of sexual abuse of children.

* Child in wet bathing suit made to stand in -5F weather because school policy forbade her from waiting in teacher’s car.

* The Civ V files: Never Move Your Settler?

* The Fetishization of Lupita Nyong’o.

* Who owns the Oscar selfie?

* Zombie Studies in the WSJ.

* Why Sweden has so few road deaths.

* Durham school board joins teacher tenure lawsuit.

* According to a New Study, Nothing Can Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.

* Activists Erect A Monument To Rape Survivors On The National Mall.

* How Gun Violence is Devastating the Millennial Generation.

* Sea Level Rise Threatens The Statue Of Liberty And Hundreds Of Other Cultural Heritage Sites. Chipotle Warns It Might Stop Serving Guacamole If Climate Change Gets Worse. But don’t worry! President Obama’s New Budget Is Peppered With Efforts To Tackle Climate Change. Peppered!

* Milwaukee shuts down Little Caesars for day over rodent droppings. A whole day! That’ll show ’em.

* Cheerleader Sues Parents for Refusing to Pay College Tuition. Gambler sues, says he lost $500,000 playing drunk. Having not heard any of the evidence or consulted any of the relevant laws, Canavan Court rules in favor of both plaintiffs!

* How do you remember a massacre?

* How did DC manage to cast anyone but Bryan Cranston as Lex Luthor — much less Jesse Eisenberg? It’s a crime.

* Pretty mediocre hoax. Everyone knows Mattel has had working hoverboards since the 80s anyway.

* A Letter From Ray Jasper, Who Is About to Be Executed.

* And I try not to get sucked into the wingnut-said-something-crazy! scene anymore, but every once in a while: my god.

Wednesday!

* It isn’t the law that is struggling to catch up to drone technology; it’s us. Like it or not, the NextGen computerized autonomous national airspace is coming. It’s not a joke, and it’s not science fiction. Coming to terms with that is important. Disbelief won’t help at this point. The coming shift in our national airspace will push our boundaries. We’ll be able to mount legal challenges against particularly egregious uses of the technology — it’s unlikely that the sheriff of Montgomery County, Texas, will get much mileage out of his wet dream of a remote-controlled aircraft armed with tear gas and rubber bullets — but we won’t be able to imagine every permutation this technology will take. This is going to be some Minority Report–level shit.

* James Cameron: Avatar was always imagined as a six-picture hexalogy. Stick around for a fun Doctor Who spoiler/rumor if that’s your thing.

* Rethinking depression in teenage girls: “Depression? Really? How About Anger and Powerlessness?”

* No! No! I won’t believe it! Military expert says there’s no way Batman’s TDKR ‘Bat’ could fly.

* Battle Royale is an obvious can’t-miss hit for a post-Hunger-Games, post-Walking-Dead TV landscape. Just about the only way it could miss is if network executives changed it so the kids weren’t killing each other, just beating each other up…

* And you can take it to the bank: Human immortality could be possible by 2045, say Russian scientists. Guaranteed!

This Post Is for Your Eyes

This post is for your eyes.

* Andy Kehoe’s “Psycho World,” a slightly more surreal Where the Wild Things Are (and I can only imagine he’s completely sick of hearing that).

* Future worlds and alternascapes from James Paick.

* And WebUrbanist builds off my infamous Statue of Liberty post with 25 Post-Apocalyptic Visions.

Final Cylon Update

Reading between the lines of the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica, we can narrow down the possibilities for the Final Cylon a little bit further. Taking Xena at her word that there are actually only four Final Cylons in the fleet, this suggests that the remaining Cylon was either dead or already on the basestar.

Already on the basestar:
Roslin, Adama, Baltar, Helo

Dead:
Cally, Billy, Kendra Shaw & Admiral Cain, a host of others

I seriously doubt it’s Adama, and it really shouldn’t be Baltar, for reasons I’ve already talked about. Helo has always been someone everyone assumed couldn’t possibly be the final Cylon because of the Cylons-can’t-have-babies issue—which makes him a pretty interesting choice, especially since that assumption’s now out the window with the Tigh-Six pregnancy.

Most of the clues right now seem to be pointing as Roslin, but I still like Cally. As far as I can tell she’s the character whose return/revelation as the Final Cylon would open the most dramatic doors, and in particular would really point the way towards a realization of the human/Cylon reconciliation plot that appears to be the main thematic for the season.

Good episode tonight, by the way. I was spoiled on the Earth revelation from way back, but I was still moved by the sheer nihilism of the ending shot. Even if it seems a little strange that these characters and only these characters would be the landing party, the final long-take was beautifully, beautifully composed. And while we didn’t see a tell-tale Statue of Liberty head, I’m definitely with those who think those were the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Monday Night Links

Monday night and the feeling’s right.

* If you haven’t been back to the now-infamous Statue of Liberty post, I’ve updated it about twelve times with a ton of new images. According to Google Analytics, that page’s been viewed over 26,000 times, which is pretty incredible.

* BarackObama.com has video of the Ted Kennedy endorsement, which looks to be an even bigger deal than I’d hoped.

* Schlumberger, the oil-field-services giant that has acquired microwave technology intended to free petroleum from oil shale, won’t bring the technique to western Colorado immediately.

…

The Green River Formation of western Colorado, eastern Utah and southwest Wyoming contains the equivalent of an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of crude oil, enough, Raytheon said, to meet current U.S. demand for 250 years. We’re saved!

* And it’s a good thing too; today is the 50th anniversary of history’s greatest invention, LEGO, which like everything else is made from sweet, sweet oil.

* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair: the desert reclaims the town of Kolmanskop in Namibia. Via grinding.be.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

UPDATE: Keep ’em coming! I’ve added a whole lot more below.

It was my week to post at culturemonkey this week, and I delivered with a post about the motivations for apocalyptic fantasy, what it is and what it’s for. Check it out. Comments, criticism, and elaborations of all sorts are very welcome.

While writing the post, in connection with Ryan’s theory that the most salient feature of apocalypse in science fiction is the way in which the same images are simply repackaged for us over and over again, I was struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the ‘net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor:

Fantastic Universe, August-September 1953

Kamandi #1, 1972

The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

Cloverfield, 2007

Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, 1999

Planet of the Apes, 1968

The World Without Us, 2007

Escape from New York, 1981

D.C. Countdown teaser poster, 2007

A.I., 2001

And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Let me know in the comments what I’ve missed…

UPDATE: Stealing a few more ideas from my commenters:

Part of a campaign promise during the elections in 1978 to bring the “Statue of Liberty to Madison.” As a result of this effort the Pail and Shovel Party (Stu was one of the major masterminds) was given the Politician of the Year award for keeping the most campaign promises of any Wisconsin elected officials. The Daily Cardinal was outraged by this expenditure and actually burned it down. The following year after re-election the Statue was rebuilt. A security guard was placed inside of the head after getting an ice fishing hut permit.

Deus Ex Level 1 (video game)

World War I poster

Independence Day (amazed that I missed this one)

Thundarr the Barbarian (My favorite so far. Here’s Skot’s description from the comments:

In the ’70’s Saturday Morning cartoon “Thundarr the Barbarian” the Statue is shown in a decayed state at the start of each show, and there’s an episode where the evil wizard Gemini imbues the statue with life (but better than in Ghostbusters 2) and an awesome flame-throwing torch! The basic concepts and story ideas for that show came from the fertile but sometimes repetitive mind of Jack “King” Kirby, who also created the Kamandi comic book for DC, as seen above…

The latest Smashing Pumpkins album, Zeitgeist (2007)

Eerie-in-retrospect book cover from Bluejay Books, 1985. The artist’s name was Thomas Kidd. (Thanks to revdoug for the email)

UPDATE 2:

Brett emailed in with a great screenshot of the Statue of Liberty in The Fifth Element, which has not been destroyed but rather swallowed by an expanding New York megapolis.

UPDATE 3: Jeff from Gravity Lens sends along this wild image from the recent D.C. Comics “Sinestro Corps” storyline:

Tim in the comments leaves behind links to the Statue of Liberty under threat in X-Men and Children of Men:

And another album cover, this one from New Jersey’s own God Forbid’s fourth album, IV: Constitution of Treason:

UPDATE 4: Jeff sends along two more, one the usual sort of doomsday image and another desecration of a very different sort:

UPDATE 5: Commenter Ty may have found the earliest example, “The Next Morning” from the Feb. 24, 1887 edition of Life:

UPDATE 6: Later, Ty came back with two more, first from an alternate-universe Statue’s destruction by helicopter in Batman Forever

and the other a much-longed-for clip from the statue’s appearance in Ghostbusters 2. I can do him one better, though: Google Video has the clip.

Google Video has also got Spaceballs, too, naturally, as well as Superman being thrown through the torch in Superman II.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7856985522976157958&hl=en

UPDATE 7: Over night a few more links were added in the comments, including this beauty from 1889, J.A. Mitchell’s The Last American:

as well as two video-game scenarios, World in Conflict and Command and Conquer: Red Alert:

Elsewhere in the world of video games, Eman Resu also points us to the Resident Evil 3 trailer, where the replica Statue of Liberty outside the New York, New York casino in Vegas is used to signify for apocalypse:

UPDATE 8: Another cool one from the comments, a comic-booky illustration (don’t know what year it’s from, unfortunately) given the title “Cloverfield Monster Revealed!” on Flickr:

(Identified! It’s from the “Dinosaurs Attack!” Topps trading card series.)

UPDATE 9: Here’s a nice still from Ghostbusters 2 I just found in the Fark thread on this. Incidentally, the Fark link coupled with the Boing Boing link plus a few other big ones (National Review Online?) makes this the most popular thing I’ve ever posted by a mile, eclipsing even the “Our Brains Don’t Work” link on Backwards City from back in 2004. It’s kind of amazing.

UPDATE 10: rootbeer277 founds some pictures of the Statue in Superman IV here:

Elsewhere in the comments people have provided video links for related scenes from Twisted Metal 2 and National Lampoon’s European Vacation.

And Traveler sends in a still from Deep Impact:

UPDATE 11: Wow, they’re still coming in. Lady, That’s My Skull writes in with two more from the comics, Atomic War #1 (1952) and Incredible Hulk #206 (1976).

And Anonymous points us to this Audi ad from the early 1990s:

UPDATE 12: It’s been a few days and this post still keeps getting hits. It’s getting close to 25,000 people now, which is astounding.

First, from the comments, MagicManky has the Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back parody:

Also in the comments, Slade leaves links to a number of sought-after images of the broken Statue of Liberty overshadowed by the Statue of Justice in Judge Dredd, both film and comic:

Finally, in what’s likely to be the last image I add here for a good while, Viktor emails an Italian propaganda poster from World War II which reads “Here are the liberators”: