More Monday Links!

* Martin Luther King’s Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income. Restoring King. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” “Beyond Vietnam.”

* Jebediah Purdy: No One’s Job: West Virginia’s Forbidden Waters.

* Well, here’s something interesting from the entrance survey to the “It’s Not a MOOC, It’s a Movement” “History and Future of Higher Education” Coursera course: You are invited to take part in a research study conducted by your instructor, Professor Cathy N. Davidson, and a graduate student from North Carolina State University, Barry W. Peddycord III. The purpose of this study is to assess a tool developed to automatically assess the quality of peer reviews on writing. The tool, called “Automated Metareviewing,” reads the essay and a review of it, and then measures how relevant, helpful, and specific the review was.

* Adam Kotsko has a provocative post today on higher ed and masculinity, reframing the crisis of rape culture on campuses as a byproduct of the hypermasculine spaces of fraternity and athletics colleges nurture for development purposes. In the comments I felt the need to try to extend this observation a little bit to the toxic masculinity that sometimes dominates academic departments themselves.

* State Higher-Education Spending Continues Slow Recovery.

* The future, folks: Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It. Microsoft’s ‘smart elevator’ knows where you’re going.

* It turns out you can get fired as a cop.

* Science has figured out why cold air smells different.

* On Thursday, Seay received a $10 off coupon from OfficeMax that was address to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed In Car Crash, Or Current Business.”

* The Air Force has roughly 500 officers in charge of protecting and maybe someday launching America’s arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles. Nearly all of them cheat on every exam they take, at every chance they get, according to three veterans of the force.

* Candy Crush Saga studio claims to own the word “candy” the same way it owns your every waking moment.

* And Tom Tomorrow has your typical day in the governor’s office.

Monday Morning Links

* Scenes from the class struggle at CUNY.

* Quiggin’s Razor: If we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned, and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later, we would be right most of the time. Via Kevin Drum.

* The Real Petraeus Scandal: the compelled veneration of all things military. Via LGM. See also Spencer Ackerman: How I Was Drawn Into the Cult of David Petraeus.

* The New Yorker notices that it won’t be long before Texas will be a swing state.

“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”

The Republican Party’s electoral map problem.

But even in that silver lining for Republicans, you can see clouds. Arizona and Georgia, both of which Romney carried in 2012, gained seats in 2010 because of fast population growth, but Democratic dominance among Hispanic voters in each is expected to make them potential swing states in 2016 and 2020.

Their Southern politicians problem. The Washington Post‘s lengthy election post-mortem. Politico just can’t imagine where the GOP could be getting all its terrible journalism. Perhaps it will always be a mystery. Tom Tomorrow gets in on the action. “We Just Had a Clas War and One Side Won.” Worst class war ever.

* Young voters turned the tide for Brown’s Prop 30.

* Walmart Black Friday Strike Being Organized Online For Stores Across U.S. I’m staying home that day because I hate Black Friday and everything it represents in solidarity.

* Hurricane Sandy and the Disaster-Preparedness Economy.

It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.

* In the winter of 1955, the editors of a newly launched magazine called Sports Illustrated sent William Faulkner to watch an ice hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens.

* And Being Elmo makes Kevin Clash out to be a living saint. I hope his version of events turns out to be true. As someone just tweeted at me, I’m probably going to hell for even linking this story at all.

Who Was That Masked Candidate?

I made this same joke on Twitter a month ago, but Tom Tomorrow up and runs with it.

Tuesday Morning

* Well, it certainly doesn’t sound very jubilant: A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

* The Wire: The Musical.

* The Watchmen sequel gets meta right off the bat.

* André & Maria Jacquemetton talk to Slate about “Commissions & Fees,” while Jared Harris talks to the New York Times. Big spoilers for the most recent episode, naturally.

* My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. 

* Adam Kotsko reviews one of the next books in my increasingly long “free time” reading queue, Red Plenty.

* From the too-good-to-check files: 

A Dutch company has launched a reality television-type project to establish a human settlement on Mars by 2023.

Mars One, as the project is called, aims to bring a total of 40 astronauts to Mars between 2023 and 2033. Organizers say the astronauts will be expected to remain there permanently – “living and working on Mars the rest of their lives.”

Where do we sign up?

* Which Wisconsin? Lorrie Moore in the NYRoB.

*  On Friday, the Michigan Supreme Court cleared the way for Detroit voters to determine whether or not marijuana should be legal.

* A new study shows “Women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn—if you control for life choices.” The whole idea of “life choices” is itself essentially an argument-from-privilege, taking male experiences as neutral and unmarked and female experiences as a deviation from the norm—but women earn ten percent less even when you buy that line.

* ‘No surprise at all: ‘stand your ground’ defendants more likely to prevail if the victim is black.’ No one could have predicted!

* You already know how a bill becomes a law. Now let’s take a look at how a secret memo becomes a kill list.

* Pittsburgh, before smoke control.

* “Right of conscience” watch: NJ Doctor Would Reportedly Rather Let Patient Die Than Treat Him For ‘Gay Disease.’

* Special pleading watch: I can’t wait to find out why Minnesota’s big shift towards marriage equality doesn’t count as evidence for the bully pulpit, either.

* What happens when psychiatric hospitals disappear.

* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes an old-school sci-fi glimpse at the future of human evolution.

Monday Lunchtime Links

* You’ve got to wonder how much New Jersey kicked to the Center for Public Integrity to get this surprise least-corrupt accolade.

* Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board.

* As we face the certain extinction of all life on earth, the question on everyone’s mind is: How will this affect the 2012 presidential race?

* Facts are stupid things: Growth In Government Spending Under President Obama Slower Than During Bush, Reagan Administrations. But don’t worry! The White House’s generous offer for even more cuts is still on the table.

* Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military?

“For decades the military has been using video-game technology,” says Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using retooled video games to train their personnel.”

Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending. The prototype for the first home video games console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates, a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date back to at least the second world war.

Later, the games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994, look uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.

“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”

* Daniel Engber at Slate has your Apple apologetics.

But Daisey’s version wasn’t even substantially true. It was substantially false. The version of the story that aired on the radio gave listeners a clear and false impression of the abuses at Foxconn. It inflated the prevalence and massaged the data. How much deeper could the lies have gone?

…

Apple employees are being mistreated in China, but perhaps not so much or so often that it really matters to most people, harsh as that may sound.

Related: zunguzungu on The McNulty Gambit.

* In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that corporate donations to campaign Super PACs were legal because there was no reason to think they led to “corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This was a remarkably specious argument in the first place, but now we’re apparently going to test it to destruction.

* More on the SCOTUS beat: If you believe that the Court’s conservative majority is itching to strike down Obamacare, then the task is to launder this decision of partisan motivation. The Paul Clement court.

* Still more: Obamacare on Trial: Case of the Century?

* If the hole in the ozone layer were discovered today, we’d let the planet burn.

* A Critical Look at the Future of Zoos.

* Fresh from arguing that the female orgasm doesn’t exist, science now concludes women can have orgasms from exercising. Make up your mind, science!

Fun Facts about Newt Gingrich

Sometimes you just have to turn things over to Tom Tomorrow.

When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It

Tom Tomorrow.

There’s Always Going to be Somebody Who Disagrees

Tom Tomorrow for president, or at least the OLC:

The Plasticity of Ideology

Tom Tomorrow.

Tuesday Links

* How—and why—writers’ papers end up in British and American libraries.

* The Guardian loves China Miéville and radical SF.

* Creeping cowboyism: White House Tells Media It Was Ready to Risk War with Pakistan. We can take comfort I suppose in the fact that this is 99% bluster; full-on war with Pakistan was not a likely outcome of the raid. There’s more from TPM, where Josh Marshall speculates there could actually be some meat to this.

* Obama to pick a fight on immigration reform.

* Could Democrats retake the House in 2012?

* Almost forgot to link to this amusing, time-travel-flavored Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

* And a trip inside Mike Huckabee’s brain.

Huckabee has joked that he “answers” to “two Janets.” One is his wife, Janet Huckabee. The other is Janet Porter, the onetime co-chair of Huckabee’s Faith and Values Coalition. And Porter, the former governor has said, is his “prophetic voice.” But that voice has said some weird things over the years: Porter has maintained that Obama represents an “inhumane, sick, and sinister evil,” and she has warned that Democrats want to throw Christians in jail merely for practicing their faith. She’s attributed Haiti’s high poverty rate to the fact that the country is “dedicated to Satan,” and she suggested that gay marriage caused Noah’s Flood. And there’s this: In a 2009 column for conservative news site WorldNetDaily, Porter asserted that President Barack Obama is a Soviet secret agent, groomed since birth to destroy the United States from within.

Monday!

* Thirteen Three ways of looking at Obama:

* What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?
* Regardless of whether or not you think President Obama is a progressive surrounded by failing institutions, a Rubinite centrist who puts on a good show, a political neophyte who is perpetually getting rolled by his adversaries or someone who hates fighting and prefers either floating above the fray or getting the half-a-loaf quickly, the way he is losing his battles should worry you about the longer-term project of liberalism and the Democratic Party.
* And, of course: 11! Dimensional! Chess!

* In other political news, Republicans have no one.

* When words change meaning.

* When space shuttles are retired.

* Science proves your students don’t really understand their sources.

* Science proves for-profit universities are a huge scam.

* Of course you had me at 10 Spectacularly Third-Rate Spider-Man Villains.

* And Tom Tomorrow is an it-getter.

Middleman Saves the Day Again

It looks like a budget deal has been secured—and Obama only had to negotiate John Boehner seven billion dollars above his opening offer.

Truly, another triumph.

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.

Lies Michele Bachmann Told Me

Tom Tomorrow’s Tea Party history lesson.

Friday Night in Arlington

* Travel the galaxy from the privacy of your couch with these retro Star Wars travel posters. (Thanks, Fiona!)

* Rally for Sanity Watch: Liberal and left activist groups will be out in force trying to swell their ranks. I wonder how they’ll feel after Stewart says they’re half the “problem.”

* Rally for Insanity Watch: 1, 2, 3.

* Here come the Dollhouse comics.

* Between a solid science fiction and crackpot that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the science fiction.

* Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach will co-produce “a screwball comedy about an escort, a theatre director and a private detective.” Something called Moonrise Kingdom is said to be Wes’s next directorial project. I’m already excited.