Death, Taxes, Football, Violence, Air Car, Globalization

Friday morning links.

* Rest in peace, Bobby Fischer. Here's the traditional MetaFilter obituary with a lot of dots, a lot of stupid chess puns, and a lot of links. And here's a post from the early days of Backwards City on Fischer's 2004 arrest in Japan, which also includes a link to the rules for "Full Chess" that Fischer devised for greater variety and challenge.

* But the link between watching football — specifically college football — and violence may not be a myth. A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver examines whether assaults and other forms of aggressive behavior increase when major college football teams play home games, and finds that they do. More strikingly, perhaps, incidences surge most when upsets occur — whether the home team wins or loses.

* Bush considering $800 bribe tax rebate to help spur economy. Money can't buy you love, Mr. President.

* In both the Washington Post (link fixed) and New York Times this week are articles pooh-poohing the Air Car, a $2500 high-efficiency vehicle scheduled to go into production in India this year. In addition to the absurd hypocrisy involved in the U.S. lecturing anyone on greenhouse gases or wasteful consumption, the greater point to take away from all this is that the decades-old Big Lie of globalization is again being exposed before our eyes. It has never and will never be the point of globalization to enrich poorer countries and bring them "up" to a Western standard of living; that's just the story we tell ourselves whenever someone reminds us that our sneakers are made by little slave kids. Now that it looks as if nations from the Global South actually could begin to made headway towards a Western standard of living, how does the West react? We recognize this moment not as the happy culmination of sixty years of economic charity and beneficence—finally, our hard work has paid off! the rising tide has lifted all boats!—but instead as a economic, environmental, and geopolitical disaster. We're terrified to be faced with the thing we always claimed we were working towards.