Friday Morning Links!

* The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship, for research relating to H.P. Lovecraft, his associates, and literary heirs.

* Candyland and the nature of the absurd. #academicjobmarket

* Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it’s rare. ‘1 in 5’: how a study of 2 colleges became the most cited campus sexual assault statistic. Study Challenges Notion That Risk of Sexual Assault Is Greater at College. Justice Dept.: 20% of Campus Rapes Reported to Police.

* University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop.

* Greenpeace sorry for Nazca lines stunt in Peru. Oh, okay then.

* Yes we can! The measure, championed by Senate Democrats, would cut Pell Grants in order to free up money to pay companies that collect student loans on behalf of the Department of Education.

* Down and Out: The Democratic Party’s losses at the state level are almost unprecedented, and could cripple it for a long time to come.

* 21st-Century Postdocs: (Still) Underpaid and Overworked.

* We asked a legal evidence expert if Serial’s Adnan Syed has a chance to get out of prison. Meanwhile, allow Matt Thompson to tell you how Serial is going to end a week in advance.

* Good news from Rome: “All Animals Go to Heaven.” I’m really glad we settled this.

* My new sabbatical plan: NASA Will Pay You $170 Per Day To Lie In Bed.

* UC Berkeley Lecturer Threatened For Offering Injured Student Protesters Extra Time On Papers. On university administrations and the surveillance state.

* CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn’t work, but why aren’t the architects of torture in jail? Every discussion of this question begins from the false premise that the torturers were well-intentioned truth-seekers who “went too far.” The CIA knew, like everybody knows, that the point of torture is to extract confessions regardless of their truth. That’s why they did it.

* First, do no harm: Medical profession aided CIA torture.

* The Supreme Court Just Rejected A Wage Theft Suit Against Amazon. What Does It Mean For Other Workers?

* Capitalism’s gravediggers.

* “Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism.” A response from Peter Frase: Beyond the Welfare State.

* Also at Jacobin: Interstellar and reactionaries in space.

* Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car.

* Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology.

* Why we can’t have nice things: Marvel Wanted Spider-Man For Captain America 3, But Sony Said No. But the next 21 Jump Street movie can cross over with Men in Black because life is suffering.

* 7 Terrible Lightsaber Designs From the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love the guy who is just covered in lightsabers from head to toe.

* Elderly man nailed for clever identity theft scheme: prosecutors say he changed victim’s name to his own.

* Censorship (Pasadena, California).

* The nation’s millionaires are #Ready4Hillary.

* Student athletes at public universities in Michigan would be prohibited from joining labor unions to negotiate for compensation and benefits under legislation the state House approved Tuesday.

* Meet The Oldest Living Things in the World.

* And this used to be a free country: One of two concealed gun permit holders involved in a rolling shootout down Milwaukee streets and freeways last year was turned down Thursday when he asked a judge to order the return of the gun seized after the incident.

Weekend Links!

* CFP: ASAP, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

* Real-life trolley problem: programming a self-driving car to decide what to aim at in the event of a crash.

* As one of the first full-time faculty members at Southern New Hampshire’s online college, Ms. Caldwell taught 20 online courses last year: four at a time for five terms, each eight weeks long. The textbooks and syllabi were provided by the university; Ms. Caldwell’s job was to teach. She was told to grade and give feedback on all student work in 72 hours or less.

* The digital humanities bubble has popped. Climb on board the science fiction studies bubble before it’s too late!

* March Madness: The University of Oregon and the local district attorney’s office appear to have colluded to prevent a rape accusation from interfering with basketball. What a mess. “I thought, maybe this is just what happens in college,” she told police, “… just college fun.”

* How to Combat Sexual Assault: Three universities are addressing sexual assault the right way.

* The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Three Body and Chinese Science Fiction.

* Go ahead, make your jokes: Harvard Faculty Members Approve College’s First Honor Code.

* “The Day I Started Lying to Ruth”: A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer.

* The CPB also usefully charts the changing funding fortunes of higher education and corrections.  As they remind us (4), there has been an effective reversal in the priorities placed on higher education and corrections since the early 1980s.  In 1980-81 2.9% of the General Fund was spent on corrections; in 2014-2015 the Governor proposes 9%.  In 1980-81, 9.6% of the General Fund was spent on higher education; in 2014-2015 the Governor proposes 5.1%. Actually the reversal is worse than the CPB indicates since Brown’s General Fund budget does not include the spending being sent to counties for realignment.  This has allowed him to appear as if he is cutting back on correctional spending when he is not.

* Money, Politics, and Pollution in North Carolina.

* Portland Committee Reviews Arrest of Nine-Year-Old Girl. Give them time! They really need to think through if arresting kids is really a good idea!

* Snapchat goes on twenty-year probation with the FTC.

* Atrocious: The Globe and Mail wants its management to the have the right to assign editorial employees to write and edit advertorial copy as part of their regular duties, according to this union bulletin. 

* ‘Can You Make Sure There’s Nothing Un-Islamic In Our Oriental Shlock-Fest?’ – G. Willow Wilson In The Bleeding Cool Interview.

* The point is that after years of studies about charter schools, there is not really any definitive proof of any “charter magic” they bring to the field.

* Meanwhile, standardized testing in Chicago asks immigrant students to choose the best argument for their own exclusion from society.

* Yes we can! Interest Rates on New Federal Student Loans Will Rise for 2014-15.

* Professors’ non-existent privacy rights.

* Economists: Still the Worst.

* Scenes from the adjunct struggle in San Francisco.

* Pope Demands ‘Legitimate Redistribution’ Of Wealth. Sold!

* North Dakota Is the Deadliest State to Work In.

* RIP, Community. For now!

* I’m a little surprised we don’t already have a few trillionaires lying around. Get to work, capital! You’re slacking.

* Iowa Secretary of State makes voter fraud his signature issue, pours a ton of money into finding it, comes up with 117 illegally cast votes and gets six convictions. Typical voter turnout in Iowa is around one million people.

* Scientists create truly alien lifeforms.

* The Recommendation Letter Ralph Waldo Emerson Wrote For A Job-Hunting Walt Whitman.

* The tragic case of Monica Lewinsky.

* Four Ways You Can Seek Back Pay for an Unpaid Internship.

* Stress Gives You Daughters, Sons Make You Liberal. Well, that about solves all the big questions forever.

* The Secret Origins of Benghazi Fever.

* And bell hooks vs. Beyoncé: whoever wins, we… Well, look, Beyoncé’s going to win. Let me start over.

Wednesday (Nothin’ But) Links

* If my Internets are any guide, the most-linked article of the day by a mile: Jose Antonio Vargas’s “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.”

* There is literally nothing you can say to me that will make me disbelieve the Post‘s Lady Gaga/Žižek scoop. Do not try! It’s definitely, definitely true.

* Somebody in the Democratic leadership has finally noticed Republicans are sabotaging the economy on purpose.

* Al Gore takes on Obama’s failure to lead on climate change in the latest Rolling Stone. Great piece.

* Also in Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi voyages into the heart of darkness Michele Bachmann.

* Also in change we can believe in: Obama will reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to the level they were at when he took office. Yes we can!

* More from the Mother Jones special report on work in America: Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans.

* The headline reads, “Ocean Life on the Brink of Mass Extinctions.”

* Of course you had me at Muppet Game of Thrones.

* Life imitates the Onion: Sarah Palin has quit her bus tour halfway through.

* Behold Randall Munroe’s terrible power, and despair: 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich.

* And Katy Perry comes out as a communist. It’s really no surprise; all her friends are red…

Obama Contrarianism Contrarianism

Jaimee says this article about Green Recovery provisions hidden in the stimulus bill made her feel better about Obama (and about the future) than she’s felt in months, and though it’s setting the bar even lower I tend to agree.

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world’s largest venture-capital fund. It’s pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet.

…

The green industrial revolution begins with gee-whiz companies like A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass. Founded in 2001 by MIT nanotechnology geeks who landed a $100,000 federal grant, A123 grew into a global player in the lithium-ion battery market, with 1,800 employees and five factories in China. It has won $249 million to build two plants in Michigan, where it will help supply the first generation of mass-market electric cars. At least four of A123’s suppliers received stimulus money too. The Administration is also financing three of the world’s first electric-car plants, including a $529 million loan to help Fisker Automotive reopen a shuttered General Motors factory in Delaware (Biden’s home state) to build sedans powered by A123 batteries. Another A123 customer, Navistar, got cash to build electric trucks in Indiana. And since electric vehicles need juice, the stimulus will also boost the number of U.S. battery-charging stations by 3,200%. (See how Americans are spending now.)

“Without government, there’s no way we would’ve done this in the U.S.,” A123 chief technology officer Bart Riley told TIME. “But now you’re going to see the industry reach critical mass here.”

The Recovery Act’s clean-energy push is designed not only to reduce our old economy dependence on fossil fuels that broil the planet, blacken the Gulf and strengthen foreign petro-thugs but also to avoid replacing it with a new economy that is just as dependent on foreign countries for technology and manufacturing. Last year, exactly two U.S. factories made advanced batteries for electric vehicles. The stimulus will create 30 new ones, expanding U.S. production capacity from 1% of the global market to 20%, supporting half a million plug-ins and hybrids. The idea is as old as land-grant colleges: to use tax dollars as an engine of innovation. It rejects free-market purism but also the old industrial-policy approach of dumping cash into a few favored firms. Instead, the Recovery Act floods the zone, targeting a variety of energy problems and providing seed money for firms with a variety of potential solutions. The winners must attract private capital to match public dollars — A123 held an IPO to raise the required cash — and after competing for grants, they still must compete in the marketplace. “They won’t all succeed,” Rogers says. “But some will, and they’ll change the world.”

The investments extend all along the food chain. A brave new world of electric cars powered by coal plants could be dirtier than the oil-soaked status quo, so the stimulus includes an unheard-of $3.4 billion for clean-coal projects aiming to sequester or reuse carbon. There are also lucrative loan guarantees for constructing the first American nuclear plants in three decades. And after the credit crunch froze financing for green energy, stimulus cash has fueled a comeback, putting the U.S. on track to exceed Obama’s goal of doubling renewable power by 2012. The wind industry added a record 10,000 megawatts in 2009. The stimulus is also supporting the nation’s largest photovoltaic solar plant, in Florida, and what will be the world’s two largest solar thermal plants, in Arizona and California, plus thousands of solar installations on homes and buildings.

Obama made headlines today (and garnered some well-deserved praise) with a call for an additional $50 billion in stimulus money for infrastructure spending. This is a strategy for November that could stem the bleeding, especially as the Republicans double-down on their strategy of deliberately tanking the economy. I just don’t know why we’re only reading about it now, in Time, two years after the fact. Why isn’t he touting this aspect of the stimulus? It’s the best and most important part.

On Giving Up the Dream

Chris Hedges talks neoliberalism and neofeudalism, the civil rights movement, Camden, Obama, Clinton, Tea Parties, moral nihilism, inverted totalitarianism and corpocracy, NAFTA, welfare reform, health care, labor, poverty, Yugoslavia, post-industrial capitalism, economic crisis, imperial collapse, socialism, and democracy, among other things. The speech itself is only 27 minutes. (Via Elsie.)

It is not our role to take power. It is our role to make the powerful frightened of us. And that’s what we’ve forgotten. Give up that dream!

Select Links While I’m Away (Part 1)

* The team behind Logicomix explains structuralism.

* It really does look like health care will pass. The CBO score is good. The left is (mostly) happy again. The votes are (mostly) there. Insurance companies keep turning out to be totally terrible. Rahm is stretching for his totally undeserved victory lap. Alterman says Kucinich gets a victory lap too. Steve Benen thinks we all get one. Hooray!

* Obama Economic Team Outlook Presumes No Job Growth For All of 2010. Yes, we … oh, forget it.

* 1st Lt. Dan Choi arrested after chaining himself to the White House fence in DADT protest.

* Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness.

* A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Wow. More here.

* More March Madness: America’s Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tournament.

* NC-Sen: Richard “Dick” Burr still leads his opponents but remains under 50%. This is winnable.

* Crispin Glover v. BTTF.

* Five films, one script.

* The Hobbit begins filming in June.

* Viacom is suing Google for hosting videos it uploaded to Google. (via and via) Related: When Wells Fargo sued itself.

* Please be advised Avatar is the work of the devil.

* Okay, fine, one more. That’s what Bea said.

Monday Night

* Health care update: With only 219 “no” votes on health reform, maximum, momentum shifts toward passage. Pro-Life Dems Start Breaking In Pelosi’s Direction. InTrade Betting on ‘Obamacare.’ “I believe we have the votes.”

* Virginia’s Attorney General flirts with birtherism.

* With his celebrity fueled by a Time cover story, best-selling books, cheerleading role at protest rallies and steady stream of divisive remarks, Beck is drawing big ratings. But there is a deep split within Fox between those — led by Chairman Roger Ailes — who are supportive, and many journalists who are worried about the prospect that Beck is becoming the face of the network. More here on the more than 200 companies that won’t advertise on Fox due to Beck.

* ‘Man Arrested for Tattooing 1-Year-Old.’

* Florida Vampire to Run for President. The best part:

He recently switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican so he can run with the G.O.P.

* Attention citizens: Gay Marriage Could Lead To Men Marrying Horses.

* There is literally no way to make money selling news.

* And sitting is bad for you. Don’t do it!

Playing Catchup – 2

More catchup, First 48 Hours of the Obama Administration Edition.

* Obama signed a few executive orders today, including one ordering a reevaluation of interrogation procedures and another ordering the closure of Guantánamo Bay within the year. Glenn Greenwald is pretty happy about it, as are Steve Benen, Ezra Klein, and Spencer Ackerman, who writes:

For all the talk about Obama not governing as a progressive, take a look at his first not-even-48 hours in office. He’s suspended the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, a first step toward shuttering the entire detention complex. He’s assembled his military commanders to discuss troop withdrawals from Iraq. He’s issued a far-reaching order on transparency in his administration that mandates, among other things, a two-year ban on any ex-lobbyists working on issues they lobbied for. And now he’s shutting down the CIA’s off-the-books detention complexes in the war on terrorism.

* Obama has 62% approval in Texas and 60% in Tennessee.

* And the Senate has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Yes we can?

Ben and Jerry’s FTW

Ben & Jerry’s for the win.

Yes We Did

Al Giordano reminds us that one year ago today Barack Obama got his ass handed to him in New Hampshire.

The pressure was now on Obama. How could he possibly retake the initiative after the New Hampshire primary shocker? That same January 8 night, he took the stage in Nashua:

And with three words – “yes, we can,” introduced for the first time as a call and response line in his speeches – Obama parlayed his defeat into a victory. In temperament, with confidence and calm – and with the assist of a raucous crowd that was determined not to let the setback get it down – he kept himself in the game.

I remember that speech well, and I bet you do too: it was a much-needed call back to arms on what had seemed, at the time, to be a devastatingly and perhaps determinatively bad night. “Maybe I’m doomed to always back the wrong horse,” I wrote in the post introducing the speech. “But maybe not.”

In a week and a half, he’ll be president.

Friday Night Yes We Cannery

Yes we can update for a Friday night.

* Obama wins Omaha.

* Franken fairly likely to win Minnesota.

An Associated Press analysis of the nearly 25,000-vote difference in presidential and Senate race tallies shows that most ballots lacking a recorded Minnesota Senate vote were cast in counties won by Democrat Barack Obama.

…

“These numbers present a roadmap for a Franken challenge,” he said. “It suggests there are about 10,000 votes in the largest Democratic counties that are potentially going to tilt in Franken’s direction.”

Waive the recount, Norm! For the good of the nation.

* Uncounted votes may push Begich past Stevens.

* “Revolution as Fulfillment,” or “It was a creed written into the founding documents”: how America perpetually repositions its revolutionary breaks as continuity with the past.

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. … At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

* From 52 to 48 with love: Ze Frank lets the healing begin.

Barack Obama and the Dawn of the Fourth Republic

Michael Lind’s striking post at Salon argues that the historic election of Barack Obama this week represents the start of a fourth American Republic to match the First (1788-1860), the Second (1860-1932), and the Third (1932-2004ish), a 72-year structural pattern that will likely catapult Obama into the pantheon of truly great American presidents: Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, each in their own way founders of the nation.

Policy shifts, more than public opinion polls or election results, suggest that a truly transformative moment may be upon us. The first three American republics display a remarkably similar pattern. Their 72-year life span is divided into two 36-year periods (again, give or take a year — this is not astrology). During the first 36-year period of a republic, ambitious nation-builders in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton strengthen the powers of the federal government and promote economic modernization. During the second 36-year phase of a republic, there is a Jeffersonian backlash, in favor of small government, small business and an older way of life. During the backlash era, Jeffersonians manage to modify, but never undo, the structure created by the Hamiltonians in the previous era.

In this calculus Obama is the new, progressive Hamiltonian, whose reinvigorating vision the nation will dominate American politics for decades. And Bush is likewise the last Republic’s final Jeffersonian:

George W. Bush was not only the final president of the Jeffersonian backlash period of Roosevelt’s Third Republic, but the last president of the 1932-2004 Third Republic itself. The final president of a republic tends to be a failed, despised figure. The First Republic, which began with George Washington, ended with James Buchanan, a hapless president who refused to act as the South seceded after Lincoln’s election. The Second Republic, which began with Abraham Lincoln, ended with the well-meaning but reviled and ineffectual Herbert Hoover. The Third Republic, founded by Franklin Roosevelt, came to a miserable end under the pathetic George W. Bush.

Provocative stuff. Now Obama just has to live up to it.

One Night Later

One night later, they’re still chanting “Yes we can” on The Daily Show.

‘“Somewhere in the Universe a Gear in the Machinery Shifted’

The rout of the Republican Party, and the accompanying gains by Democrats in Congress, mean that Barack Obama will assume office with vastly more influence in the nation’s capital than most of his recent predecessors have wielded.

The only exceptions suggest the magnitude of the moment. Power flowed in unprecedented ways to George W. Bush in the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It flowed likewise to Lyndon B. Johnson after his landslide in 1964.

Beyond those fleeting moments, every president for more than two generations has confronted divided government or hobbling internal divisions within his own party.

The Democrats’ moment with Obama, as a brilliant campaigner confronts the challenges of governance, could also prove fleeting. For now, the results — in their breadth across a continent — suggest seismic change that goes far beyond Obama’s 4 percent margin in the popular vote.

The evening recalled what activist Eldridge Cleaver observed of the instant when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and a movement followed: “Somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery shifted.”

Scenes from the Liberation

Huffington Post has your first round of scenes from the liberation.

New York

Senegal

Obama’s step-grandmother in Kenya

Martin Luther King’s sister in Atlanta

Indonesia

Washington, D.C.