Friday afternoon linkblogging!

* 28% of Republicans claim to believe Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and another 30% "aren't sure." Results for the South are even worse. So it's official: our national discourse is completely broken.

* Entertainment Weekly asks: Was 1984 the greatest year in movies ever? I've always been partial to 1999: Rushmore, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Magnolia...

* Vanity Fair has your sketchbook history of the drug war.

* Steampunk monkey nation.

* Jericho may be returning once again as a TV movie to wrap up loose plot points. My recollection of the finale was that there weren't very many loose plot points left, but your memory may vary.

* Chris Hedges: "The Rise of Gonzo Porn Is the Latest Sign of America's Cultural Apocalypse."

* And Scientific American explores the quiet end of the Neanderthals.

Thursday roundup.

* In the Safford v. Redding case that got so much attention around the time of the Sotomayor nomination, the Supreme Court has ruled 8-1 that strip searching a thirteen-year-old girl on the word of another student in search of ibuprofen is unconstitutional. Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent, issuing a Cassandra-like warning of the plague of pills in underpants that is sure to follow. If we will not strip search our thirteen-year-olds, I ask you, who will?

* Nudism is the new Green.

* 'Seeking a tougher climate bill, green groups set eyes on the Senate.' So, giving up then.

* If anything it's amazing Tim Burton waited this long to do Alice in Wonderland.

* My "Haloscan is broken" AskMe went completely unanswered. Haloscan remains broken. Situation dire. Hope lost.

* Some screenshots of Fox News party-ID follies. From Cynical-C.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Sunday, Sunday.

* The New Yorker has fiction from the late great David Foster Wallace as well as discussion of his unfinished final novel. (There's also a profile of Rahmbo.) Discussion at MeFi.

* Even more six-word science fiction. More at MetaFilter.

* The twenty-first century: an FAQ from Charlie Stross.

* Hypothesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there's no activists, it doesn't work well. (via)

* Maybe Dollhouse shouldn't have been as series: io9 clues into the central problem facing American television production, open-ended perpetual serialization. Discussion at Whedonesque.

* Sebelius to HHS.

* The formula that killed Wall Street. Some talk at MetaFilter.

* Anime Peanuts. More along these lines at MeFi.

* Reverse-plot movies. Reverse-plot games.

* Aside from their nihilism and incompetence, the biggest problem facing Republicans is that their mythology has become too difficult for the average person to follow. It’s like a comic book “universe” where the writers have been straining to maintain continuity for decades — all the ever-more-fine-grained details are really satisfying for the hardcore fans, but intimidating for potential new readers, who are left asking, “Trickle-what? Chappaquid-who? What’s that about Obama’s birth certificate? Obama’s European now? I thought he was a Muslim! Darn it, I’ll never catch up!”

I suggest, therefore, that the Republicans use their current time of wandering in the wilderness to do their own version of Crisis on Infinite Earths. They wouldn’t have to ditch their favorite heroes, of course — we could also be treated to limited series like Rush Limbaugh: Year One, Newt Gingrich: Year One, etc. They can reboot all the plotlines, free the beloved characters of the chains of continuity, and then do it again, and yet again — until finally they find success in some genre other than politics, much as comic book superheroes have moved on to the movies. GOP: Year One.

* See also: the GOP's voice and intellectual force, Rush Limbaugh.

* Forget Switzerland: Is Ireland the next Iceland? Don't forget your recession tourism.

* Slowly but surely, here comes marijuana decriminalization/legalization. Don't forget your revenue stream.

* Imprisoned fifteen-year-old beaten by police officer. On tape.

* And put aside that old question of "justifying" the humanities: the real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach.

More David Simon blogging: YouTube has video of The Wire creator with an address on journalists and the public square at USC Law.

I am wholly pessimistic about American society. I believe The Wire is a show about the end of the American Empire. We are all, or our kids, are going to live that event. How we end up at the end of it and where we end up and whether or not we can survive and on what terms is going to be the only question from now on.

MetaFilter has great links on David Simon and the pessimistic politics of the The Wire.

First, this from the Guardian: "The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US."

I live in Baltimore, in a neighbourhood that is none of these things. I am vested in the city and its future and I can drive you to places in this city that would transform even the most devout Wire fan into a fat, happy tourist. Baltimore's charms are no less plentiful than most American cities.

And yet there are places in Baltimore where The Wire is not at all hyperbole, where all of the depicted tragedy and waste and dysfunction are fixed, certain and constant. And that place is, I might add, about 20 blocks from where I live.

That is the context of The Wire and that is the only context in which Baltimore - and by reasonable extension, urban America - can be fairly regarded. There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed. Both things are true, and one gets a sense, reading the distant reaction to The Wire, that Europeans are far more ready to be convinced by one vision than the other.

And second, clips of a recent lecture from Loyola College:

Playing blog catchup.

* Thursday night we watched American Gangster, which wound up being significantly worse than it should have been due to significant script problems. (Denzel Washington's character, Frank Lucas, is basically a complete cipher, and the pacing of the plot keeps Lucas from encountering his chief antagonist, Russell Crowe's Richie Roberts, until the last ten minutes of the movie.) Still, the movie stands as a useful lesson in the utter absurdity of the War on Drugs; both Lucas and his competitor Nicky Barnes, who separately controlled the heroin trade in New York during different points in the '70s, served ridiculously short sentences, leading to this farcical exchange in New York Magazine in which the two meet and discuss the good old days.

MJ: You guys have been described as being competitors. Is that true?

FL: Well, Nick wasn’t gonna catch me—I was paying $4,000 a key. Nick, you was probably paying $65,000 or $70,000, weren’t you?

NB: During that time I was paying $35,000.

FL: And I was paying $4,000. So there was no fight then.¹

MJ: Which one of you guys had the best dope?

FL: Mark, here you go! Stirring shit up. Man, I had the best dope in the world. I had 98 to 100 percent pure.

NB: Frank had a nice package, no doubt. I had to get a pen and a pad and mediate my stuff. But when you took the mix out, my thing was close to his. Close enough for somebody not to wait on one when they could get the other. Frank, you were mostly on 116th Street, right?

FL: Yeah.

NB: Well, I had powder in all five boroughs. Not just uptown.

FL: You were big, Nick, all over.

* Friday we spent a good chunk of the day hiking in a state park near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, before deciding to head back to NJ rather than stay the night. I'd heard good things about Harper's Ferry on the internet, and it seemed like a good chance for a getaway-on-a-budget—but it turned out to be a classic tourist trap, a fake town with nothing but overpriced shops, weird Civil War nostalgia, and bad restaurants.

We were pretty unimpressed.

But Maryland Heights is a nice little hike, though, worth doing if you're nearby anyway.

Wednesday potpourri.

* A brief history of masturbation.

* John Rawls (yes, him) on why baseball is the best of all games. More via MeFi.

* Jason Sanford isn't worried about the singularity

* But I'm worried about climate change again. As we all know, climate change ended last month, which was unusually cold. But it seems to have kickstarted up again in a big way: the world is now warming at 0.14°C/month, or 3°F/year—30°F/decade! We can only hope March is slightly cold again, bringing that rate back down to survivable levels.

* I'm also worried about Mary Ann. She'll never make it on the inside. She's too good.

It has taken an almost superhuman level of self-control, but I have resisted watching any of the last season of The Wire, allowing me to watch the entire thing in a single glorious weekend. This starts tomorrow. For now, you can read the creators' op-ed in this week's Time calling for citizen action to end the war on drugs, using the only tool at our disposal:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

There's some discussion of this at MeFi.

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.

Random links before I get back to work:

* How America Lost the War on Drugs. In Rolling Stone.

* An astoundingly complete timeline of the Planets of the Apes universe. Via Cynical-C.

* A man who walked into a police station five years after he was presumed dead in a canoeing accident has told officers he has no memory of what happened to him. Either this guy is a zombie, Jesus, a clone, or he was kidnapped by aliens. There are no other possibilities. Via MeFi.

* Rudy Giuliani: The Security Candidate.