Other links.

* Inevitable endpoint of historical trends: Administrators in the Undergraduate Studies (US) office [at UC Davis] have asked if freshmen seminar instructors would voluntarily opt out of their quarterly stipend for teaching the one-to-two-unit courses for freshmen.

* The Italian magazine Wired has your map of the future.

* Bootleg DVD covers.

* Dick Armey: "The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured." Of course! That's the problem.

* Someone really didn't think this one through.

* How American politics works, part 1: [The Boxer] bill will be a dead letter. Already there’s an undercurrent of anxiety in Washington that a bill can never pass as long as it’s associated with an unpopular lady senator who runs one of the body’s most liberal committees. The Senate isn’t like the House. There is no party discipline among Democrats; in fact, Democratic senators are fond of explicitly disclaiming party discipline. It’s a chamber full of large, jostling egos and not a little old-boy sexism. They’re not about to let a combative liberal woman run the show.

* How American politics works, part 2: What not to spend your empire's money on.

* Who is running for president in 2012? Only the new mayor of Manchester, N.H., knows for sure. Matt Yglesias has your chart showing no Republican can win in 2012, while Hendrik Hertzberg has something you can't get in your fancy East Coast universities: his gut.

* And Pandagon considers Betty Draper.

Gov. Schwarzenegger: All class.



In fairness, I love this.

Sci-Fi links for a Thursday without joy.

* AskMetaFilter on slammin' science fiction-themed hip-hop.

* Where I Write: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors in Their Creative Spaces.

* Just Another Post-Apocalypse Story.

* Fox is promising not to ruin Dollhouse this time around.

* Terry Gilliam is hoping to adapt a Philip K. Dick novel, The World Jones Made. Will it be the first PKD movie since Blade Runner to be actually good? (Sorry Arnold.)

* And Warren Ellis says the future is small.

Terminated: Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone out of his way to slash needed social spending in California.

The cuts include slashing $25 million from health clinics; $52 million from AIDS prevention, education and treatment programs; $16 million from domestic violence programs; $50 million from Healthy Families, which provides health insurance for poor children; and $37.6 million from In-Home Supportive Services.

That $16 million represents all state funding for domestic violence shelters.

Hard to believe the celebrity governor thing didn't work out.

"T2" is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of "T2" shows that much of the ICQL's force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally -- _maximally_ -- sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back [11] -- i.e. a megabudget movie must not fail (and "failure" here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit) and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit. One of the most reliable of these formulae involves casting a superstar who is "bankable" (i.e. whose recent track record of films shows a high ROI). The studio backing for "T2'''s wildly sophisticated and digital F/X therefore depends on Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreeing to reprise his Terminator role. Now the ironies start to stack, though, because it turns out that Schwarzenegger -- or perhaps more accurately "Schwarzenegger, Inc.," or "Ahnodyne" -- has decided that playing any more malevolent cyborgs would compromise the Leading Man image his elite and bankable record of ROI entails. He will do the film only if "T2"'s script is somehow engineered to make the Terminator the Good Guy. Not only is this vain and stupid and shockingly ungrateful [12], it is also common popular knowledge, duly reported in both the trade and the popular entertainment media before "T2" even goes into production. There's consequently a weird postmodern tension to the way we watch the film; we're aware of what the bankable star's demands were, and we're also aware of how much the movie cost and how important bankable stars are to a big-budget movie; and so one of the few things that keeps us on the edge of our seats during the movie is our suspense about whether James Cameron can possibly weave a plausible, non-cheesy narrative that meets Schwarzenegger's career needs without betraying "T1"'s precedent.

The Great David Foster Wallace on Terminator 2. (Via Candleblog.) I've said before: T2 can only be understood as a parody of the Terminator franchise as a whole.

Wow, so Terminator Salvation is pretty terrible. There are about forty-five seconds of compelling footage when You Know Who is on-screen; the rest is barely even a movie.

Here are my thoughts.

* Was that badass-but-nameless woman supposed to be Sarah Connor, who last we heard was absent from her empty grave? If not, she really should have been.
* Skynet needs to study both military tactics and military strategy.
* In particular, it should consider how effective two or more Terminators could be in situations where one Terminator might potentially be vulnerable, if only to dumb luck.
* Skynet also needs to consider its ultimate goal or goals, which, if I may offer one criticism, appear to make no sense.
* Where was Derek? Where was Derek?

Links.

* 60,000-piece LEGO diorama of the Battle of Hoth. Outstanding.

* David Lynch Twitters.

* Top green moments from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, at HuffPo.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proudly told the nation in 2004 that he joined the Republican Party because of his deep and abiding respect for Richard Nixon, apparently thought about bolting the party last year.

* And MetaFilter has your updates on quick fixes for global warming.

Things I've enjoyed on the Internet today.

* A Seth tribute to Charles Schulz.

* The ruins of Detroit's abandoned Belle Island Zoo. Via MeFi.

* Spy Vibe, a blog devoted to the '60s spy aesthetic. Also via MeFi.

* Three Jane Austen sci-fi films are apparently in the pipeline: Pride, Prejudice, amp; Zombies; Pride & Predators; and Lost in Austen.. What can account for Austenmania?

* I can't believe putting a totally unqualified action-movie star in charge of the world's fifth largest economy has turned out so badly for California. More on this from Ezra Klein, who actually points the finger not at Arnold but at systemic gridlock, i.e., the California state constitution and deluded Orange County Republicans.

* Why we love gambling: almost winning is almost as good as actually winning, as far as our neurochemistry is concerned.

* Grade inflation is a feedback loop: students now expect a B just for showing up.

* Life as a tie-in novelist.

* Braid, Game of the Year 2008 by all accounts, is finally coming to the PC.

I had a nasty case of food poisoning or something last night—fever, chills, the whole bit. But now I'm back and quite literally better than ever. A few links to celebrate my recovery:

* Early reviews of Dollhouse remain mixed. We'll know tomorrow....

* This YouTube clip (via MeFi) captures just the barest sliver of the greatness of the Conan DVD commentary. It is our civilization's highest cultural achievement.

* The trailer for the new Tarantino is out.

* How to teach non-canonical material responsibly in a composition class: lesson plans from Scott Eric Kaufman on Dark Knight and Watchmen.

* Two satellites have collided in orbit. Apparently that's never happened before. More from MeFi.

* Happy birthday, Charles Darwin. More from Satisfactory Comics.

The legal challenge to Proposition 8 rests on the distinction between a "revision" and an "amendment."

"In passing Prop 8, the people of California basically put an asterisk next to the equal protection clause in the constitution," said William Araiza, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Now, he said, "it fundamentally comes down to whether the court considers this a major change or not a major change."

Specifically, opponents of Proposition 8 argue that this kind of change is a "revision," not an "amendment." The distinction is important, legal experts say, because revisions require two-thirds approval in the legislature and then a popular vote. Amendments can be approved by popular vote only.

If, as opponents say, the court finds that Proposition 8 qualifies as a revision, then the proposition would be found unconstitutional because its proponents would have, in effect, skipped the required legislative step. If the court strikes down the initiative on these grounds, it is not certain the lawmakers would take up the issue again.

If the court sides with Proposition 8 proponents and allows the amendment, the recourse for gay rights activists would be to put the matter to voters again through their own initiative or take the matter to federal court -- something most activists are not ready to do, given the current composition of the Supreme Court.

Forty state legislators have signed a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of this argument that the proposition be voided. Via MyDD.

Meanwhile, slight credit where it is slightly due: the Governator speaks out against Prop 8 only one week too late.

"It's unfortunate, obviously, but it's not the end," Schwarzenegger said in an interview on CNN this morning. "I think that we will again maybe undo that, if the court is willing to do that, and then move forward from there and again lead in that area."...

Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. "I learned that you should never ever give up.... They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done."

And in fairness to Michele's earlier call of "bullshit" it must be admitted that I don't think Obama's said anything about Prop 8 at all.

This epic Fark thread is my new favorite thing on the Internet.

Why Republicans are better at conventions.

But, to extend a point I raised last night, I don't think the definition of McCain has been sharp enough. Each speaker seemed to approach the task his/her own separate way (and sometimes not at all), leaving viewers with a kind of mish-mash of objections: too many houses, too unilateralist, too long in Washington, too close to right-wingers, too resistant to energy reform. The one person who distilled the objections into a single, pithy critique was Kerry, with his inspired "Senator McCain" versus "candidate McCain" riff. But I worry it'll get lost in the whirlwind.

Which brings me to my point: Had the Republicans stumbled onto such a worthy frame, their convention would have played it on a permanent loop. (I'm sure they'll do that anyway, with less inspired material.) Every no-name speaker would have repeated it, so that, even if you'd barely been paying attention, you'd be mouthing it unconsciously by the end of the week.

I'm becoming very curious about just what form that "less inspired material" will actually take. What are the smears that the Republicans are going to run with at their convention?

They seem to really like the whole "The One" meme a lot, but that's not going to take them very far, especially after a sizable chunk of Obama's highly publicized speech is devoted to praising the hard work of his disciples volunteers and laying the groundwork for the biggest voter registration drive in history.

After Paris Hilton and Housegate, the celebrity line of attack seems pretty stalled, too, and doesn't make a lick of sense at a shrine to Ronald Reagan attended by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. (UPDATE: Whoops. Looks like Arnold's afraid he'll get his skirt dirty.)

The Muslim thing seems pretty far past its sell-by date. Same with Rezko, despite the heroic efforts of my cousin to flog that dead horse.

So is it just going to be the infanticide smear? Is that the last bomb left to throw? Will they call him gay? Back again to Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers? The nation can't be this stupid, can it?