I Guess That’s Why They Call It Jet Lag Links

* “Fantastic Breasts and Where To Find Them.” NSFW, and probably deserves a trigger warning for imagery of sexual violence too.

* Academics, Public Work, And Labor.

* Kids Returned To Honduras, Killed.

* California drought: 17 communities could run out of water within 60 to 120 days, state says. More at MetaFilter.

* Recent Glacial Melt Mostly Caused By Man-Made Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Study Finds.

* Mr. Holder and top Justice Department officials were weighing whether to open a broader civil rights investigation to look at Ferguson’s police practices at large, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The issue came up after news reports revealed a 2009 case in which a man said that four police officers beat him, then charged him with damaging government property — by getting blood on their uniforms.

* Half of black men in the US have been arrested by age 23.

* Who is an “Outside Agitator”? Unethical journalism can make Ferguson more dangerous. Police in Ferguson Are Firing Tear Gas Canisters Manufactured During the Cold War Era. Tear Gas Is an Abortifacient. Why Won’t the Anti-Abortion Movement Oppose It? Why hasn’t Darren Wilson been arrested yet? Police are operating with total impunity in Ferguson. A local public defender on the deeply dysfunctional Ferguson court system.

* Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year.

* Saying the quiet part loud: Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.

* Another edition of Aaron Bady Movie Corner.

* I thought this @nerdist interview with Matthew Weiner was great.

* Trustees agree! Trustees need more power.

* Islamic militants execute journalist, MU grad James Foley. His letter to the alumni magazine from 2011.

* The Pressure to Breast-Feed Is Hurting New Moms With Postpartum Depression.

* It’s not all bad news: This Oxford professor thinks artificial intelligence will destroy us all.

* And the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin says we should prioritize road work based on what would create the most jobs. My gosh. It’s like an Adam Kotsko rant come to life.

No Future

Unprecedented climate extremes marked last decade, says UN.

If You Want a Vision of the Future…

…imagine Ian Welsh stamping on a human face—forever.

9) Americans have decided they want catastrophe. There is NO significant force in US society pushing against having a disaster.

10) The US is trying to become a petro-state through fracking. It won’t help most Americans, and it will do massive environmental damage. It will also accelerate global warming. Yes, Obama is better on global warming than Republicans, but he’s not enough better to matter, he is, in fact, making it worse. Your grandchildren will ritually curse your very names.

Midweek Midday

* There’s really only one label for the pathetic exercise we’ve just witnessed in South Africa: deceit. The whole climate-change negotiation process and the larger political discourse surrounding this horrible problem is a drawn-out and elaborate exercise in lying – to each other, to ourselves, and especially to our children. And the lies are starting to corrupt our civilization from inside out.

* Aaron Bady: The case for making a storm in the ports. I feel certain 90% of the impetus for this piece was the desire to use that pun.

* Oh, UVM. You know better.

* Judge: Obama Administration May Have Politicized Morning After Pill Approval Process. May have?

* Plutocracy watch: More than 80 percent of giving to Super PACs so far has come from just 58 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the latest data, which covers the first half of 2011. The Republican groups have raised $17.6 million and the Democratic groups $7.6 million. Those numbers will balloon, with American Crossroads, the main Republican Super PAC, aiming to raise $240 million.)

The exceptions are two public employee labor unions, whose massive donations match those of some of the largest moguls. The rest are individuals with vast fortunes at their disposal.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Serkis: Official plot synopsis for The Hobbit. Rise of the Planet of the Apes director shares his sequel plans.

* Government shutdown, again? Really? Well, I guess it’s been a few weeks…

You Just Signed the Death Warrant for the State of North Carolina

North Carolina’s GOP-held  legislature is about to legalize fracking.

“I think it’s time to get crackin’ on frackin,'” Rep. John Blust (E-Guilford) said Monday in support of the bill.

Well you can’t argue with that.

Only When the Last Tree Has Died and the Last River Been Poisoned and the Last Fish Been Caught Will Chris Christie Realize We Cannot Eat Money

The headline reads, “Chris Christie systematically destroys all environmental progress in New Jersey.”

Closing All My Tabs Links

* For all my brothers and sisters: “What did you do the summer before you went on the academic job market? What do you wish you had done?” Duke Lit’s Job Market Resources page has been ramped up considerably in the last year, which helps.

* To immerse yourself in literary theory as an impressionable young person is a little like squinting at a piece of toast until the face of Jesus materializes. It’s a slight perceptual shift (all you have to do is unfocus your eyes) but risky, because there’s no going back to plain toast after Jesus. Similarly, once you have engaged in enough feminist readings of “The Iliad” or performed close textual analyses of “Alf” or written papers limning the intertextual relationship between “Videodrome” and “Madame Bovary” — once, in other words, you’ve glimpsed the social, political, historical and ideological underpinnings of every text ever constructed — you’ll never again see stories the same way again. They’ll shed their innocence and expose their dirty secrets and reveal the world as a darker, more dangerous place than it once seemed. (Thanks, Lindsey Fiona!!)

* Recent college grads facing mal-employment, while incoming Duke students are rightly anxious about debt. Not anxious enough, frankly.

* Affirmative action for white kids: Asian-Americans and diversity today.

* D.I.Y. Detroit: How the Alternative Press shaped the art of a city left for dead.

* At Mother Jones: The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science. Related: Kate Shepard explains the Climategate fraud. Also: Confessions of a Climate Change Convert.

* This CIA press release about their eco-friendly document destruction processes has got to be an Earth Day prank.

* Rule of law watch: Gov. Chris Christie Considers Defying Court Order.

* Debunking Trig Trutherism once and for all.

* A gaffe is when you accidentally say what you actually think: Minnesota state House Speaker Kurt Zellers (R), who is strongly pushing for passage of a voter ID law, has now backed away from comments he made in a radio appearance on Wednesday — when he said of the act of voting: “I think it’s a privilege, it’s not a right.”

* The great thing about neoliberalism is that it’s the answer to every question. The answer is the same regardless of whether your public institutions have too little money, or too much. More on how austerity works from Glenn Greenwald.

* Ideal and actual representation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

* Inside Obama ’12. John Judis explores one area in which this will be a tough sell.

Obama has tried to carve a liberal niche within this retrograde political framework by charging that the Republican plan to cut the deficit would get rid of Medicare and would keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s all well and good, but Obama is still playing on Republican turf. And it might not work. The last Democratic presidential candidate who based his campaign on deficits was Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale probably would have lost to Ronald Reagan in any case, but he would have won more than Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The other Democratic candidate who tried to make deficits an issue was Al Gore in 2000, and he lost to a candidate he should have defeated easily. And you can be sure that Bill Clinton in 1992 didn’t focus on deficits in running against George H.W. Bush.

Via digby.

* I’d never heard of either Kiki Kannibal or StickyDrama, but I read this Rolling Stone article on her weird, tragic adolescence from beginning to end (a rarity for anything they publish not written by Matt Taibbi).

* Parallel worlds are still the hottest trope in SF: Here’s a trailer for indie drama Another Earth, and a description of SyFy’s next new terrible show.

* Portal 2 news! The story is much more complicated and interesting than I noticed while I was playing.

* And mission (creep) accomplished: Unmanned drones now flying missions in Libya.

The End

The possibility that the House flips again and there will be 60 votes in the Senate for serious climate action — or for significant funding for clean energy — this decade is just not terribly plausible.  We can certainly wait for the inevitable climate Pearl Harbors, but they would have to be a bunch of them this decade worse than these and they would have to be unambiguously linked to human-caused warming by the media.

Climate Progress makes the case that on the most important environmental questions of our time Obama’s may already be a failed presidency.

Indeed, he has, arguably, poisoned the well for the next president, not merely through because of the “shellacking,” but also by his failure to use his bully pulpit to be an unabashed defender of climate and clean energy action.  Team Obama helped created the broad-based misperception that those issues are political losers, in spite of every poll to the contrary, in spite of the fact that in the one place where a broad coalition combined with political leaders who were genuine climate hawks, Californians won the clean energy and climate trifecta, including a stunning 20-point win preserving their landmark cap-and-trade climate bill.

And so the chances have dropped sharply of averting multiple catastrophes post-2040 — widespread Dust-Bowlification; multi-feet sea level rise followed by SLR of 6 to 12+ inches a decade until the planet is ice free; massive species loss; the ocean turning into large, hot acidified dead zones; and ever-strengthening superstorms that bring devastation to country after country that equals or surpasses what happened to Moscow and Pakistan and Nashville and New Orleans.

And all this was happened without even a national debate on this most important of all issues.

Sorry, Kids

Brad Plumer: What a Republican takeover of Congress will mean for climate policy.