Quick links.

* At a newly revitalized Bitter Laughter: 73% of American Medical Association doctors want a public option.

* In the New Yorker, two takedowns of GOP insanity and obstructionism.

* Wal-Mart: actually not so great. Via MeFi, which includes a bonus link to a nice take-off on Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from socialism Soviet-style state capitalism.

* Also via MeFi: The New York Times's Toxic Waters: "A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators' response."

* And the thing from my lists I most enjoyed reading today just happens to be online: Thomas Pynchon's "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?" (UPDATE: My drive towards procrastination compelled me to write a brief HASTAC post on this.)

By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies -- conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50's, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns -- exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions -- most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of "human" as particularly distinguished from "machine." Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age -- curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

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You're doing it wrong. Via Boing Boing.

Happy Canada Day. Let's celebrate with links.

* SEK considers Infinite Summer's weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary "generations." Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I've decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I've caught up to where I'm supposed to already be in the book.

* "Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial": just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.

* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world's least-fun summer camp.

* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here's Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.

* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.

* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)

* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it's been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I'm glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel's Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.

* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:

"Something worked very well," said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.

Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They've all got a few stories like this," he said. "Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call 'statistically improbable' cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it's not the only one."

Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to "be the Doubting Thomas," but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.

What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely "statistically improbable" from what is "genuinely miraculous"?

Still more.

* Is Brandeis broke?

* Nobody kills themselves in New Jersey. Stat via the MetaFilter thread on secularity and the social good.

* Springsteen says Wal-Mart deal a mistake. Also: How to come to terms with Bruce playing the Super Bowl.

* The child stars of Slumdog Millionaire still live in 'grinding poverty.' That is absurd.

* And Fox and Warner Bros. have agreed there's enough Watchmen money for everyone.

Friday, Friday.

* Massachusetts has repealed the 95-year-old law that has been used to block out-of-state gay marriages, removing the last major barrier to nationwide legal challenges of marriage discrimination.

* There's water on Mars (but don't try to drink it). And there's a liquid lake on Titan, too.

* Also in legal news: Bush's claims of absolute executive privilege have been smacked down in the courts. Score another small victory for the rule of law, and start writing up that Karl Rove indictment.

* Garfield without Garfield book announced.

* The Los Angeles City Council has passed a year-long moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. (More at MeFi.) Food in this country, as we've talked about many times, is in crisis—but this is a symbolic gesture, not an actual policy.

* Also in food news: How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat. Also via MeFi.

* And now you can watch the growth of Wal-Mart across America. Locusts. Zombies. Plague.

As you can see, I've been slack blogging the last day or so—I've been catching up with other things. Here are a few Friday links to keep us busy:

* I've got a short review in the Indy of Harvey Pekar's new book on the history of Students for a Democratic Society.

* Joseph Romm of Climate Progress has an article at Salon arguing "it won't be easy but we can fix our oil and climate problems at the same time."

Thus we come to one of the biggest questions of our time: Is humanity wise enough not to pursue carbon-intensive alternative fuels, even though pretty much all of them are economically profitable at current oil prices?

Wisdom! Curses! Our one weakness!

* A judge has ruled that Wal-Mart doesn't have a trademark on the smiley face.

* Also at Boing Boing, a bed that will protect you from the terrorists.

The media seems to be doing its damnedest to help Barack out for tonight's debate: the front-page story of the New York Times looks like the gift-wrapped answer to the inevitable Rezko slur, while Good Morning America has video of Hillary Clinton sitting idly by on the board of Wal-Mart while the friendly megastore beat on unions.

It's not all good news for Obama, though—The Washington Times reports that his commitment to the incredibly stupid Drug War is not especially iron-clad. For me that's three wins for Obama, but as a dirty-hippie quasi-pacifistic vegetarian atheist I'm not the target audience for just about anything that happens in American politics.

The sum of all Wal-marts covers significantly more square footage than all of Manhattan. Capitalism wins. Via Boing Boing.