Thursday Links!

* Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park. Dad Charged With Child Endangerment After Son Skips Church To Go Play. This Widow’s 4 Kids Were Taken After She Left Them Home Alone. The 90s weren’t THAT long ago, people.

* Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.

* The NEH lives! The U.S. House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday reversed a Republican proposal to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities by more than 5 percent in the coming fiscal year.

* The Darker Side of University Endowments.

* Towards the slow university.

* What Happened at City College of San Francisco?

* University of Miami: Let the planet eat Walmarts.

* “An unfinished degree barely increases your earnings while costing money and time,” economist Allison Schrager found in a review of the 2013 Current Population Survey. “Dropping out of college,” she said, is “the biggest risk of going to college.”

* The new American exceptionalism: An imperial state unable to impose its will.

* How many people alive today have ever lived part of their conscious lives in a United States of America at peace with the rest of the world? Would someone even older than I am have any meaningful memory of what such a state of peace was like? How many Americans are even capable of imagining such a state? I can remember only two periods, bracketing World War II, when I believed I lived in a nation at peace. And even these were arguably just childish illusions.

* The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, could challenge Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this fall. Lewis is reportedly looking into an exploratory committee and plans to put a campaign staffer in each of the city’s 77 community areas. A poll has Lewis leading the mayor, 45 percent to 36 percent, with 18 percent of voters undecided. The Democratic Party education wars continue to heat up. The Coming Democratic Schism.

* Sweden’s School Choice Disaster.

* Meanwhile: How long can the GOP last as the cranky oldster party?

* More Americans are aging in place. Can towns and cities adapt?

* Why I’m Not a Liberal.

* As Google’s top hacker, Parisa Tabriz thinks like a criminal—and manages the brilliant, wonky guys on her team with the courage and calm of a hostage negotiator.

* No, LeBron James Won’t Bring $500 Million A Year To Cleveland’s Economy.

* How To Talk To Babies About Marxist Theory.

* Pulitzer prize-winner, immigrant advocate detained at McAllen airport.

* Rhode Island accidentally decriminalized prostitution, and good things happened.

* Market Research Says 46.67% of Comic Fans are Female. That’s amazing given how misogynistic so much of the product is. Maybe scratch and sniff comics can drive just a few more away.

* Marvel trolls freaked-out white dudes, day two.

* Firefly: The New Lame Drawing.

* The curious grammar of police shootings.

* Federal judge rules California death penalty is unconstitutional.

* Bananalands, transparently doomed proposal to split California into six states can’t even be bothered to come up with names for most of them.

* Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is taking Activision to court over his depiction in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

* One Hundred Years of the Refrigerator.

* Fixing peer review: 1, 2.

* Will the Supreme Court buy an argument that a corporation holds a sincere religious opposition to unionization? Is PopeCo Catholic?

* Voxsplaining we can believe in: Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless.

* Then they blew it.

* Original Slip ‘N Slide patent, 1961. Even the kids in the photo have broken bones.

* Could We Drink The Water On Mars?

* Swedish man and his prolific bot are responsible for 8.5% of all Wikipedia articles.

* A Woman Meets 30 Alternate Versions Of Herself. And They’re All Better. Trailer for indie SF flick You, Me & Her, which looks great.

* And a YouTube quality 12 Monkeys reboot is really going to air on SyFy for some reason. Ripping off Continuum for good measure…

Thursday Links

* MOOCs as Neocolonialism: Who Controls Knowledge?

* More College Adjuncts See Strength in Union Numbers.

* Seven of 10 students graduate from college with loans; average debt on the rise.

* A Hard Lesson from Motown: They Will Steal Your Pension.

* Professors to Grad Students: Focus on Studies, Not Wages. Most NCAA Division I athletic departments take subsidies.

* Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield has long been a critic of grade inflation. He’s developed his own way of trying to combat it: giving students two sets of grades — the one they deserve and the one that shows up on their transcript.

* George Parros, after the concussion.

* Rest in peace, José Esteban Muñoz.

* Most of America’s silent films are lost forever.

* NY Times Runs Op-Ed Asserting Poor People Need More Carbon Pollution.

* Prosecutorial coercion should be outlawed.

In a landmark 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision on the right to a lawyer during plea bargaining, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that 95 percent of convicted U.S. criminal defendants enter into a plea bargain and never go to trial. That percentage is even higher for drug defendants, who enter into plea deals in 97 percent of federal cases, according to a new Human Rights Watch report. Prosecutors have had a significant hand in turning the criminal justice system into a system of pleas, wielding in many instances the threat of harsh mandatory minimum prison terms and other sentencing enhancements so severe that defendants may frequently plead guilty simply to avert the high risk. As Human Rights Watch phrased it, prosecutors “force” defendants to plead guilty.

The consequences for those who choose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to a trial in this system are significant. The average federal drug sentence is three times longer for those who go to trial than for those who plead guilty, at 5 years and 4 months for guilty pleas, and 16 years after trial, the report found…

* And DC has done an impressively terrible job casting Wonder Woman in a film Zack Snyder is certain to ruin anyway. Well done, sirs.

Saturday Links

* “Cochran, if we’re gonna write a story about the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald, we’re gonna have to bury the son of a bitch ourselves.”

* Time profiles Marquette’s own John McAdams, JFK conspiracy debunker. All my other comments on this subject are currently classified, to be released one hundred years in the future after all the principals are dead.

* No, College Isn’t Just for Rich Kids. Free Education for All. Here’s The 5-Sentence Personal Essay That Helped JFK Get Into Harvard.

* Gasp! Patenting Their Discoveries Does Not Pay Off for Most Universities, a Study Says.

*  The executive council American Studies Association is currently considering passing a BDS resolution against Israeli cultural institutions. Steven Salaita argues they should. AAUP says they shouldn’t.

* Genocide in the Central African Republic.

* Drowning Kiribati.

* Climate Change Is Messing Up Butterfly’s Flight Seasons.

* The kids are all right: ‘Catch an Illegal’ Game Thwarted, Becomes Immigration Reform Rally.

* The worst news you have ever heard or contemplated: U.S. to Consider Cellphone Use on Planes.

* The only version of the afterlife I’ve ever been able to believe in.

* And thank goodness Obama finally has a free hand on appointments. Nine reasons the filibuster change is a huge deal. What a F*ing Scandal the Senate Is.

Competency-Based Super-MOOCs at Experimental Charter Colleges Will Raise Pass Rates and Lower Costs While Better Preparing Students for Their Careers Innovation Disruption Etc

Obama’s Department of Education has helpfully gathered all the worst ideas for higher-ed reform into a single document for your convenience.

And A Few More for Friday

* Ridley Scott Announces Blade Runnerer Will Be Terrible. I know what you’re thinking: Green Lantern had a writer?

* Surprise! CBO report shows 50% of government tax expenditures go to top 20% of earners.

* Aspiring Marijuana Mogul, Former President Of Mexico Join Forces In Unlikely Roll-Out Of National Pot Brand.

* Wash. State Police Dogs Must Unlearn How To Smell Pot.

* And for old times’ sake, a truly classic Fox News lie: Cut government because ‘no one’ died of starvation before welfare.

ABC Is The One ABC Has Been Waiting For

ABC launches explicit “Save Happy Endings” advertising campaign.

In Which Antonin Scalia Sets Out to Completely Break My Spirit, and Succeeds

Today’s hearing on the Voting Rights Act featured some of Scalia’s most breathtaking anti-textualist and ad-hoc reasoning ever. The argument is literally that the Supreme Court is tasked to strike down popular laws because otherwise they’ll be continually reauthorized in perpetuity because people want them. Like the Founders intended!

Just astounding.

More here and here. My sole consolation here is @studentactivism’s shocking discovery that Scalia’s entire term on the Supreme Court is null and void by the well-known Constitutional principle that it doesn’t count if it was unanimous. Article 1. Look it up.

Something Something Nero Something Fiddle Something Something

The optics were already pretty bad: As an estimated 40,000 plus climate activists descended on D.C. last Sunday to pressure the president to make good on his promise to address climate change, Obama was in Florida golfing privately with Tiger Woods. It appears that it gets worse: The president was not only teeing off with the famed golfer and philanderer, he was also, according to HuffPo, joined by a “pair of Texans who are key oil, gas and pipeline players.”

Monday Night Links

* Bernard Pollard doesn’t think the NFL will exist in 30 years… because it’s just becoming too darn safe.

* Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

* Also in local news: Milwaukee sheriff says the police won’t protect you, so get a gun.

* And again! Wisconsin’s Abortion Restrictions Deny Women The Right To Terminate A Pregnancy In Privacy.

* Presenting the quinoa backlash backlash.

* Thomas Friedman op-ed generator. Even better than the real thing.

* And with each new technology, the same hyperbole, the same evangelism. On-line education is great. MOOC is a wonderful concept. But most of the institutions in the world that are over 400 years old are universities and there is a reason for that. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the impending demise of the traditional university may be much exaggerated.

* All about Siri.

* What Are Low-Ranked Graduate Programs Good For?

*  …far from being merely escapism, fiction – especially speculative fiction – is a fantastically useful arena in which to do social theory, yet it’s one that most social scientists roundly ignore.

* New Arctic Death Spiral Feedback: Melt Ponds Cause Sea Ice To Melt More Rapidly.

* Big Surprise: Yet Another Ed Reform Turns Out to be Bogus.

* Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever.

* MetaFilter has a post on the Maria Bamford Show.

* Sarah Palin slinks offstage.

* And the CW presents The Sopranos Diaries.

Links for the Weekend

* Obama makes an unexpected post-election bid for the Canavan bump: NASA May Unveil New Manned Moon Missions Soon.

* Charlie Stross visits 2512.

* China Miéville offers a brief history of the recent filmic ideology of the necessity of walls against zombie hordes.

* ORCA shrugged. More here, here, here, here. This is still, essentially, poll denialism, but it’s fascinating that the Romney campaign put so much stock in a system whose basic assumptions they’d never bothered to test.

* MetaFilter tries to hash out America’s new marijuana laws. Mexico says legalization “changes the rules of the game.”

* This image posits that the juridical distinction between slave and free is isomorphic with today’s cartographies of parliamentary politics; it implies that today’s Northern liberals have inherited, and protect, the precious freedom(s) denied to so many in the antebellum world. It implies that the rupture of the Civil War was not much of a rupture—continuity is the name of the game here. It thus elides the discontinuous rupture of black political subjectivity: the image would have us believe that today’s political cartography retains the form adjudicated 162 years ago by the desires and compromises of (mostly) white men, all of whom in some fashion profited from the political and juridical de-subjectification of blacks throughout the Americas.

* Reddit gets ready for Puerto Rico by designing some 51-state flags.

* Is everyone on the autism spectrum?

* 68 Percent Of American Voters See Global Warming As A ‘Serious Problem.’ There’s a culture war and Democrats are winning. What The 2012 Election Would Have Looked Like Without Universal Suffrage. Colorado Establishment: Republicans must improve or die. I liked, and forgot to link, what Freddie said the other day:

It occurs to me: part of the problem with our political media and analysis is that they always define Republican victory in terms of political direction and Democratic victory in terms of extremity. That is, a Republican victory is seen as a repudiation of liberalism, while a Democratic victory is seen as a repudiation of extremism. One suggests a push towards the right is the mandate of an election; the other suggests a push towards the center is the mandate of an election. Just another way in which the media pursues a “heads conservatives win, tails liberals lose” narrative.

* But don’t get too excited: in times of Democratic strength their leaders just turn on them and enact the austerity measures the Republicans are too weak to enforce themselves. We saw it with Obama, and California’s about to see it with Jerry Brown.

* Senators lining up behind filibuster reform.

* Ohio seeks to just rig the vote in the face of the Republican demographic implosion. Let’s Kill the Electoral College So We Never Have to Pay Attention to Ohio and Florida Again.

* And the Supreme Court will review the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. Prediction: pain… UPDATE: Supreme Court Appears Ready to Nuke the Voting Rights Act.

FiveThirtyEight

The Number of Things Nate Silver Gets Wrong About Climate Change.

Tomorrow’s Constitutional Crisis Today

If Gallup is right, then that looks to me like we’re headed for an electoral college/popular vote split. Last night, I spoke with Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, to ask him if I was missing something. He said I wasn’t. “That’s certainly what it looks like,” he says.

But Newport was cautious in interpreting his numbers. Gallup’s poll cheered Romney supporters because it showed Romney gaining ground even after the second debate. But Newport didn’t see it like that. Remember, he warned, it’s a seven-day poll. “I think we’re still seeing leftover positive support for Romney and I don’t think we’re seeing impact yet from the second debate,” he says. 

I had some links throwing some cold water on the Gallup poll at the tail end of my linkdump last night.

Congratulations, Baby Boomers, You Destroyed the World After All

Satellites recorded an unprecedented rate of ice sheet melt in Greenland this month. Over the course of four days in July virtually the entire surface melted—an area larger than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations.

On average about half the surface area of the ice sheet melts in summer. But between 08 and 12 July 2012 the melt spread from 40 percent to 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet.

‘If Someone Like Scalia Can … Decide That Wickard Isn’t a Binding Precedent, Then the Idea of Binding Precedent Is Essentially Empty’

Nineteen of twenty-one Constitutional scholars think the mandate is Constitutional, but only eight are confident SCOTUS will uphold the law. Paul Campos gets his denunciation of Scalia in early:

Justice Scalia spent his career as a lawyer, law professor and judge in that legal world – a world in which Wickard was no more eligible for serious reconsideration than Brown v. Board of Education or Marbury v. Madison are today. It ought to be obvious that if someone like Scalia can, at this point in a half-century-long career, decide that Wickard isn’t a binding precedent, then the idea of binding precedent is essentially empty, which in turn highlights the inevitable emptiness of the idea of any useful distinction between law and politics.

But this is not obvious, least of all to Justice Scalia, who I have no real doubt actually believes the things he says and writes, no matter how many times his public acts contradict his avowed beliefs. Scalia believes in a version of the rule of law whose existence is refuted by nothing so well as his own career. And that ultimately is more disturbing than a career dedicated to the most self-consciously manipulative Machiavellianism.

Wisconsin Post-Mortem

Josh Marshall has your depressing defeat report with slight silver lining.