Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations or heretofore unexpected reserves of good will for the franchise—or maybe J.J. just nailed it—but I found Star Trek surprisingly good. And "good" is an amazing accomplishment given the self-contradictions inherent to the project:

1) innovate and revitalize a franchise that, let's face it, is built almost entirely on the bedrock of nostalgic repetition;
2) do so while further hamstrung by the excruciating prequel format.

But Abrams strikes a more or less successful balance, aside from a few hamhanded "R2-D2, meet C-3PO" moments and a little too much handholding and lampshade-hanging.

As is probably to be expected, the prequelization provides both the worst parts of the movie and its primary source of narrative pleasure. As a certified member of the Nitpicker's Guild I confess I was a bit annoyed to see how little effort was made to stick with the original continuity, even granting the timeline shift. Many of the gadgets had different behaviors and limitations than in the original show; no one knew Romulans were related to Vulcans until part of the way through the original series; Chekhov didn't join the ship until later; Pike wasn't the first captain of the Enterprise; etc, etc, etc. (You can fanwank most or all of these away with "The USS Kelvin Changed Everything," but that's not very satisfying. Clear lines of cause-and-effect matter, especially in time travel stories.)

That this cherished original continuity is essentially bulldozed permanently by the film is pretty unfortunate and will, I think, permanently damage the franchise in the eyes of its loyal and notoriously defensive fanbase, especially as fifty years of strict adherence to Roddenberry's particular Utopian vision has not prepared them well for our heroes to lose a planet, much less the entire timeline.

But at the same time it is quite fun to see these characters meet each other, and Abrams does an amazing job of capturing the feel of the original series (all the way from aesthetics right down to the level of contrivance and occasionally nonsensical plot points). That the actors playing McCoy and (especially) Spock are very good mimics of the original actors helps things along a lot as well.

It's also astounding how apolitical the film tries to be; I went in with the idea of writing a post about neoliberalism and Star Trek and it just didn't give me much to work with. Now, this is a neoliberal, United Nations fantasy of the future, to be sure, in which difference only exists to be flattened out—but that's really true of almost all Trek, DS9 and some other choice episodes excepted. (There's also a making explicit of the longstanding metaphorical connection between Vulcans and Jews, with a Vulcan Holocaust followed by a choice between diaspora, assimilation, and resettlement in a "new colony," but I don't know what to do with that yet.)

Star Trek (2009) is no better or worse, politically speaking, than what Star Trek's always been: a fantasy of what the world would be like if consumer capitalism had no labor or environmental costs and American military-cultural hegemony was pure, stable, and uncomplicatedly good. It remains our defining ideological fantasy, in other words, the thing that blinds us still to the sort of world we're really living in and the sort of future we're actually creating.

So it's no surprise that at this point my thoughts turn to the mediocre, to the unchosen, to the radicals and the subaltern and the dissidents. What becomes of difference in this future? We see these people only sometimes, in the background: Sisko's dad, Picard's brother. Usually they exist only to be made Star Fleet officers or good Federation citizens by the end of the episode, and we see no one like this in this movie at all. The lack of flexibility in this narrative template has grown, I think, exhausting, and it's for this reason that over the years I find myself much more drawn to presentist and mundane SF, or apocalyptic futurity, or to anti-Trek futures like Firefly, the first few seasons of BSG, or Samuel Delany's Triton.

But all the same every so often it's nice to come home again.

Just one request: no more product placement, please; there's no money in the future, much less corporations...

I don't know what I ever did to the guy, but the creator of PhD Comics hates me.



See also.

Quoth Variety:

In recent years, the nets have mostly turned Friday over to unscripted fare. With the exception of CBS, which wins the night with middle-of-the-road dramas like "Ghost Whisperer," the nets' more recent attempts to launch scripted dramas have come up short.

This spring, that has included Fox's sci-fi duo "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," which isn't expected to return, and "Dollhouse," which remains on the bubble.

Pair it with Fringe for half a season; it's obvious and perfect. If it helps, I recant everything I said last night. Best episode ever!

Misc.

* Batman and D&D alignment. I think "chaotic evil"'s a bit of a stretch. Via Neilalien.

* Lesbians have seized control of the world's supply of poems. It is appropriate to panic.

* Star Trek as liberal fantasy: 1, 2, 3. I'm planning on seeing it tomorrow, I'll have more to say then. (Image via Matt Yglesias.)

* Wire creator David Simon testifies before Congress on the death of newspapers.

A few quick Dollhouse reflections in light of tonight's "season" finale. Spoilers below, naturally.

* All in all the Alpha plotline was fairly disappointing, my appreciation for Alan Tudyk aside. It reduced a little too neatly to a run-of-the-mill serial-killer plotline when there seemed to be much, much more potential there. I'm not calling network interference, necessarily, but things seemed rushed and a little undercooked. Joss fumbled this one.

(UPDATE: To be more precise, he fumbled the plotline in almost exactly the same way he fumbled the Adam and First Evil storylines on Buffy. The composite event—which shouldn't have been caused by a mechanical malfunction—should have made Alpha actually Godlike. Alpha's portrayal in this episode ruins almost everything about what was interesting about the character to begin with. It's also somewhat inconsistent with the way the event had been portrayed in earlier episodes, especially with regard to Topher and Adele's puzzlement over how it happened—which is not to suggest Dollhouse has a particularly good record on the consistency front in any case.)

* Called the Fred situation last week, though I was hoping she'd known she was a Doll all along. I think the character had significantly more potential that way—though it's interesting to think that she was just set up to be the hero of the second season, the Dollhouse's only self-aware victim and the audience's new clearest focal point for narrative identification.

* Which also makes her a pretty good candidate for season two's Big Bad.

* Neil and I spent a lot of time last week talking about Dr. Saunders and whether or not her Dollness suggests that the Dollhouse is able to do direct editing/programming of memories ("imprint code"), as opposed to a fuzzier, less exact approach ("imprint soup"). (I'd always assumed imprint code, and that most of the characters would turn out to have been modified in some way or another; Neil was more skeptical.) At first glance, this episode suggests they can edit directly—but the more I think about it it seems more likely that every Dr. Saunders is a Doll.

UPDATE: Though the fact that Fred/Saunders remembers a version of the Alpha attack that explains her scars may shift the balance back towards direct editing / imprint coding again.

* Is Victor really gone? He was one of the best actors on the show, that's just not possible.

* It will would be interesting to see whether Mellie is really released. I'm also curious what deal Ballard signed; "I'm nobody" suggests he agreed to do the rest of her service as a Doll, whereas I think most people were expecting he'd be hired as a handler.

* Since the Dollhouse's contracts aren't legal, of course, there's no reason not to have your cake and eat it too. Once Ballard is enslaved, bring Madeline back in for a treatment.

* It also remains the case that you'd want every employee to be a Doll, all things being equal; see Dr. Saunders above. Why would they even let Dominics, Boyds, and Tophers in the door, when they can cook up compliant and perfectly loyal substitutes in-house? One possible answer to this might have to do with the exact nature of the Doll programs; if they're imprint-soups as opposed to imprint-codes, maybe there are structural limits to how long they can be used before the personality imprint goes bad or breaks down.

* Echo/ED remains, by far, the least interesting thing about this show. I was really hoping they'd kill off the Caroline wedge so at least something interesting would happen there.

* Well, that's a little unfair; apropos of the Great Transporter Debate this episode makes it a little hard to see how the process of being "wiped" isn't itself necessarily death. If we accept that continuity of consciousness is required for metaphysical identity—and we wave our hands at things like sleep for just a moment—then it would seem to be the case that "Caroline" can be hypothetically restored after her five years are up and she's hypothetically released from her contract. But it's equally clear that the person who wakes up in Chrissy Seaver's body is not metaphysically identical to the original Caroline. So how can the one revival result in a "real" resurrection and the other in a "false" one? What's the difference between "copy" and "restore"? It could only be Ballard's "soul," which, like Topher, I scoff at. So it seems to me that when you're switched off, that's it, you're dead, which has some pretty serious implications for comas, head injury, amnesia, insanity, aging, sleep, and just about everything else having to do with what we naively believe consciousness is.

*Hope you noticed and enjoyed the brief Firefly shout-out as much as I did. Take that, Fox. (UPDATE: Missed at first the Angel bit about souls in jars—it was a double shoutout to both his unjustly canceled shows...)

Sadly, despite the hopes of all good nerds, that's probably it for Dollhouse. But "Epitaph One" comes out with the DVD this July, and there's even rumors today that Joss might spin-off that into a new show. Because spin-offs of failed one-season flops are so very common.

Nightime links.

* Change we can believe in: 'Obama Administration Set to Fire Its First Gay Military Linguist.' Obama's lack of leadership on gay issues, DADT first and foremost, is really startling—especially given that a majority of Americans already believe DADT should be repealed.

* At one point news of a new Ron Moore sci-fi pilot would have gotten me very excited; I was so young, once. Airlock Alpha says Virtuality most likely won't make it to series.

* Lots of things have been said about A-Rod, but this pitch tipping thing seems like a big, big deal if true. Black Sox scandal big.

* The Complete Book of Space Travel.

* As any nerd can tell you, there's a new Star Trek movie opening this weekend. io9 has your basic primer, while Slate prefers a history of the Klingon language. If you're looking to bone up on Trek, Memory Alpha might be your best bet.

* The MPAA thinks educators shouldn't get a DMCA exemption to use decryption software to show clips in class. Instead, they should use a camcorder to tape the clip off the TV. What could be more easy?

In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?

Schadenfreudelicious: Joe the Plumber to quit the GOP.

UPDATE: The author of the original TNR piece, Jeffrey Rosen, has returned to defend the article blame his editor.

Poor Sonia Sotomayor: she hasn't even been nominated yet and she's already been smeared six ways from Sunday. Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has the definitive must-read take on all this, particularly with regard to the calculated misuse of anonymity to manufacture a impression that, whether false or true, contains none of the factual content required for proper evaluation in the first place.

TPM and Matt Yglesias (1, 2) have been on this too.

Thursday, Thursday.

* My four-word post on marriage equality in Maine yesterday somehow turned into yet another epic comment thread about gay marriage. I just know this time we'll hammer out agreement.

* Science fiction in the New Yorker: "The Slows" by Gail Hareven.

* Dollhouse "certain to be canceled." Keep hope alive.

* Wolverine, despite by all accounts not being very good, gets a sequel.

* Craig Arnold update: they think they've found his trail.

* 'MLA Urges Chairs to Focus on Adjunct Issues.'

* When the bomb goes off, everyone's got one last thing to do before they die. A game.

Sean Hannity, patriot, wants a revolution.

Neosecessionism: because the Left hates America and only conservatives are patriots.

Bill O'Reilly has finally gone too far.

Bill O'Reilly has a plan for the Republican Party to get its mojo back: Go after Bruce Springsteen!

...O'Reilly last night, in his Talking Points Memo segment, cites a remark Springsteen made at the Pete Seeger tribute concert the other night:

At 90, he [Seeger] remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself. ... He sings all the verses, all the time. Especially the ones that we'd like to leave out of our history as a people.

This incensed O'Reilly -- who nonetheless spotted an opportunity therein:

Now, Bruce Springsteen is not a PhD in political science, obviously. But his snide reference to America defines how the far left sees this country. And you know what? Most liberal and conservative Americans disagree with him.

So let me spell this out to that even the Republican leadership can understand it. Get solutions to problems. Explain your Culture War positions clearly and without spite. And most important, stick up for America! Because the Democrats are certainly not doing that. Use that strategy, GOP, and you'll get back in the game.

Video at the link. Here's "American Land" from the Greensboro show last week.



The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
Come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothin in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they're still dyin now
The hands that built the country were always trying to keep down...

Needless to say I don't think "snide" is quite the word. All the verses, without illusions.

Maine makes it official.

Games!

* Arrow of Time, a nice tower defense variant.

* Today I Die and Storyteller, both from the creator of I Wish I Were the Moon.

You have to earn it: 'Senate Democrats Deny Specter Committee Seniority.' Not sure if Specter's latest flub had any role in this, but it's safe to say that Arlen's not impressing.

Just a brief footnote on the Maine marriage equality vote: State Rep. Sherly Briggs voted against the bill despite the fact that her daughter is a lesbian. There's a lot that might be said about this, but what strikes me most is the reasoning she read into the record:

I have been struggling with this bill for months knowing it is going to come forward … that I'm going to have to choose … I'm so sorry I'm going to hurt my family, friends, citizens of the state of Maine. See, my daughter is gay. I have known this for about 15 years. Throughout all this time, I have kept my personal feelings on this matter separate … She has never ever heard me express my opposition to this in her life … I would never hurt her. I would got to end of the earth for her. But because I feel so strongly about opposed to this bill, blame it on my upbringing or the good book. … I can't change how I feel … But because of who I am and where I am and as a member of this legislative body, ethically it is my duty and responsibility to publicly say to my daughter that I do not support [gay marriage]. I just had to finally confess to her exactly how I feel and now I have no choice.

What she's describing, of course, is the experience of coming out of the closet.

Tuesday night.

* Early review of The Fantastic Mr. Fox at the Rushmore Academy.

* Van Gogh's ear actually cut off by Gauguin? Now I don't believe in nothing.

* Carbon taxes vs. cap and trade. More at Kevin Drum.

* Advocate torture? That's a disbarrin'.

* Mexican legislature votes to legalize small quantities of narcotics.

* Maine legislature votes to legalize marriage equality. DC: ditto.

* And this map at Wikipedia claims the entire energy output of the world could be provided by six very large solar energy facilities operating at just 8% efficiency. Via MeFi.

"Quimby the Mouse," a Chris Ware animation for the recent live This American Life.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

This blog kills fascists hurts their feelings. More at Daily Kos.

Hitting the peak: according to analyst Raymond James, global production of petroleum peaked early last year.

Satisfactory Comics honors me with some Doodle Penance after a Google Search for "dan clowes -canavan -daleks -ghostwriter -scooby -grantbridge" brings what I can only imagine was a very disappointed searcher to their site.

There's a story here somewhere, possibly involving my ghostwriting Dan Clowes's issue of Scooby Doo vs. the Daleks. But perhaps I've said too much.

Monday tidbits.

* Early polls out of the Senate race in Pennsylvania, post Specter-shuffle.

* An end to the Boston Globe? (UPDATE: No?)

* Bibles and scripts from your favorite TV shows: 1, 2. (Via Zack.)

* Condition your child the Darrow way. (Via Neil.)

100 days of Fox News.



Pace yourself, guys, it's a long way to 2020.

(via Cyn-C)

American Stranger has a long-form take on the question he posed the other night in my living room: What have been the great cultural innovations since the 1990s? Are there any?

YouTube user ekimp252 already has clips from last night's Springsteen show. So does blueboyb.

Latest Dollhouse renewal rumor:

NBC has already indicated that it's unlikely to make a serious play for "Ghost." Some executives at Fox are intrigued by the idea of buying "Ghost" -- and possibly pairing it with a second season of Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" -- but it seems unlikely a deal would be done.

Via Whedonesque.

Sunday 2.

* Caprica: actually not bad? Will I really allow myself to be roped in by Ron Moore again? The worst parts of the pilot are the parts that force the tie-in to BSG; I wish the show could have been green-lit without it.

* Dollhouse tidbits: an easter egg from the last episode pointing to the true owners of the Dollhouse and an answer to the question of what's going on with Fred/Dr. Saunders/Whiskey.

I'm not your friend in here, Echo

Looks more and more as if Fred's body, the former Whiskey, was imprinted with a copy of Dr. Saunders after the original was killed by Alpha. I think this accounts for both why she hates the Dollhouse and why she won't act against it; she needs it to continue to exist.

* A six-part interview with Alan Moore at Newsarama from my new friend and local writer Zack Smith. Via MeFi.

Don't panic: your .tv domain name will still be good even after the island of Tuvalo is completely submerged.

Sunday!

* Your attention please: Arlen Specter would like you to know he is not a loyal Democrat.

* 'The Politics of Climate Hacking: What happens if one country decides to start geo-engineering on its own?'

"This is not at all hard to do," Granger told the audience, declaring that "a single large nation"—especially a nuclear power, which might act with relative impunity—could easily exercise the option. A run of bad news from the climate scientists might convince a government that the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet was accelerating, and that Earth's low-lying areas were facing an imminent rise of 3 feet or more in sea level. "If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?" Morgan asked. (One could equally envision a left-leaning, low-lying European nation with the same inclination.) Geoengineering "turns the normal debate over climate change on its head," he and some co-authors wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. Getting nations to agree to cut their greenhouse pollution has proved to be the ultimate free-rider problem, as the biggest nations must all cooperate or the planet will keep getting warmer. The Pinatubo option creates the opposite dilemma: As the discussions in Lisbon made clear, any of a dozen nations could change the global temperature all by itself.

It's becoming increasingly clear, I think, that international political actors view geo-engineering as the option of first resort; there are still no serious coordinated efforts to reduce carbon emission, so radical a dereliction of duty as to amount to a suicide pact—unless they've convinced themselves they can jury-rig some ad hoc solution as the crisis escalates.

* See also: the world, 4 degrees warmer and An Introduction to Global Warming Impacts: Hell and High Water. All via MeFi.

* Alain Badiou on the communist hypothesis.

"But that reduces your communist adherence to nothing more than a faith! Rather than look at its practical impact upon the twentieth century, you just say, 'Oh, well, that wasn't pure, it wasn't true to the idea, but I know the idea itself remains right.' That's a form of faith."

"Maybe, but faith is a great thing sometimes."

* Does DC own Superboy again? Via io9.

* Join Alex Greenberg on a trip to the retro-future.

Amazing concert, best of the three Springsteen shows I've been to. The whole band was in a good mood and for whatever reason they've decided that Greensboro is a great venue for them (probably has something to do with all the transplanted Jerseyans). Everything rocked.

We were close, too; deep in the Pit, just a row or two back from the stage. Enjoy a few pictures at Flickr from my very bad camera phone.

Here's the setlist, courtesy of Backstreets.com:

Badlands
Radio Nowhere
Outlaw Pete
No Surrender
Working on a Dream
Seeds
Johnny 99
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Raise Your Hand
Seventh Son
Hang on Sloopy
Growin' Up
I'm on Fire
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Human Touch
Kingdom of Days
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born to Run
Cadillac Ranch

ENCORE
Hard Times
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Land of Hope and Dreams
American Land
Glory Days

Then, at the end, Dave Michaels caught Bruce's sponge.

Dollhouse ratings still not promising.

Off to see Springsteen at the Greensboro Coliseum. Everyone'll be there.

Another very good Dollhouse. I wonder if this show might have had a better run if the first few episodes weren't so very terrible. Run episode 10 first, then 6-9, then 11-13, and you've got yourself a show.

Still, I'm thinking more and more that we may actually get that second season, if only an abbreviated one. I think Fox wants to win back some credibility from nerds and critics, and it'd be perfect to pair with Fringe next year.

Just not on Fridays.

I have to admit, at this point I'll be sad if we don't get any more.

The Plank climbs aboard the anti-Scalia train, though it doesn't use that terminology.

What I suspect many liberals really long for--and this is reflected in the Dahlia Lithwick piece Adler links to--is not so much someone to push the Court in a substantially more liberal direction (at least in the short term), but someone to unabashedly play culture warrior in the way that Scalia has sometimes done. Someone to "speak with a roar" and exercise "dramatic flair"--"some cross between Rachel Maddow and Emma Goldman." What they're unhappy with is not primarily the Court's decisions, but the absence of a liberal on the Court with the ability to capture the imagination of the public (and perhaps legal academia) in the way that Scalia has. To be a Supreme Court justice is to have access to a sort of intellectual bully pulpit that few other jobs come with, and it's in this capacity, rather than the doctrinal one, that liberals have been disappointed.

I'm not sure many liberals have given much consideration to the notion that there might, in fact, be a direct trade-off between public dynamism and behind-the-scenes effectiveness. But it's a question they'll now have to grapple with sooner rather than later.

Question of the night (hat-tip: Ryan): What have been the great cultural innovations since the 1990s? Are there any? We struggled for an hour tonight to find something more noteworthy than "YouTube" or "text messages/status updates." These are platforms more than cultural forms.

"Blogs" (as cultural form, not platform) come closest, but even these really originate in the homepages of the '90s...

Rumor has it that Kim McLane Wardlaw (9th Circuit) may be the front-runner for the Supreme Court. You know she'd be a good justice because she's got "law" in her name. But there's also a certain poetry in this, as she wrote the lower-court brief in the case that most recently highlighted the gender imbalance on the court, Redding v. Stafford, in which the 89%-male body held that it was no big deal for a thirteen-year-old girl to be subjected to sexual humiliation from school officials in an fruitless effort to find ibuprofen on her person.

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—"what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.

More discussion on the very disappointing decision at Pandagon and The Paperback Museum.

The Watchmen companion DVD, Tales of the Black Freighter, is now out and available from Netflix. It's a very mixed bag. The "Tales of the Black Freighter" short gets everything exactly wrong; animated straight from the comic, there's no sense of the wonderful inter-cutting between narrative frames that justifies its presence in the original; in short, it's another fetishistic recreation that entirely misses the point.

The "Under the Hood" short, in contrast, is probably the best piece of Watchmen I've seen, in that it comes closest to accomplishing what so many of us had hoped the movie might: a creative translation of the comic form to the film form, as opposed to just making the pictures move. Here, Hollis's autobiography is replaced with an episode of "The Culpepper Minute," a 1970s news magazine a la 60 Minutes, that was devoted to the book. (In fact, it's a 1980s rerun of the 1970s episode, a nice bit of doubling.) The short isn't perfect by any means—it's a little corny, and there are, among other things, some truly anvilicious moments of ironic foreshadowing—but by and large it nails the format, making good use of the graphics novel's huge scope in the process. (Lots of interesting characters who barely saw screen time in the film get their chance in "Under the Hood.") This one is definitely worth the half-hour; it actually made me like the film a little more.

Morality is impossible without belief in George W. Bush.

In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush.

Via.

Picking up speed: Maine's Senate has backed marriage equality, with passage likely in the state's House as well.

Morality is impossible without belief in God.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

Supreme Court vacancy roundup.

* Unexpected procedural quicksand in the Senate Judiciary Committee could make it harder to get a nominee through now than if Arlen Specter hadn't switched parties.

* Conservatives have had their eye on top contender Sonia Sotomayor for some time.

* Primary flashback: Obama on his ideal nominee.

* "White men need not apply." Yeah! When will we get our turn?

I twittered last night about whether the buzzword for Obama's upcoming Supreme Court vacancy should be "liberal Scalia" or "anti-Scalia." "Liberal Scalia" looks to be off to an early lead, but thinking more and more about it I think we really want an anti-Scalia: a jurist whose thoughtfulness and equanimity informs her decisions.

Not claiming to know the answer to every question in advance is, after all, arguably the key progressive value.

The liberal Scalia is another hack, just "our" hack. We want Scalia's opposite number, not his non-evil twin.

'Almost programmatically unmemorable': A.O. Scott pans Wolverine. But can't you see? It's metafiction.

“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue. A twist at the end that gives poor Wolverine a bad case of amnesia — turning him into a kind of Jason Bourne with sideburns — is a virtual admission that nothing terribly interesting has been learned about the character. He forgets his origins before the movie devoted to their exposition is even over. It won’t take you much longer.

Speaking of Star Trek, the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast got deep into the weeds this week on Dollhouse, The Prestige, clone "immortality," and how the transporter on Star Trek is a fax machine that shreds its input when it's done with it. (Bill has more on his home blog.)

Having spent a good portion of my childhood working out the metaphysical implications of such technology, I myself was moved to comment. As someone with a well-documented and simply unhealthy fear of death, I must admit that the consciousness-as-Ship-of-Theseus direction these discussions invariably take is both the only possible solution to the problem as well as a clear ontological horror in its own right.

...even in one of the series' high points, there's this lingering suspicion that nostalgia and sentimentality is all these films ultimately have to offer.

Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard at the House Next Door consider the various cinematic failings of the first six Star Trek movies.

I've written before, I think, about the Trek franchise's basic structural limitations, and how I've grown so sick of them that I find both episodes and movies from the series essentially unwatchable now. I think Bellamy and Harris do a good job unpacking that, and while I'd quibble here or there I find it hard to argue that taken as a whole Trek (like Star Wars) just isn't very good—or rather that it's fairly good at being fairly bad, which is kind of the point. There's a long history of popcorn-style fare in SF, from the Buck Rogers series onwards; quantitatively it's probably the bulk of SF ever produced, by a country light-year. But distill out the nostalgia and the ephemerality of spectacle and it's hard for that sort of material to get me excited anymore—and that's even before we start talking about the political perniciousness of a certain kind of Trekian science fantasy which I find both anti-historical and anti-ecological, implicitly arguing that technology will save us as a culture from ever having to take responsibility for our consumption, or to even simply think things through.

Savage Chickens on choice.

MSNBC reporting now that David Souter is stepping down from the Supreme Court. Holy smokes. What a week.

UPDATE: Discussion threads at Daily Kos (1, 2), Talking Points Memo, MetaFilter, MyDD, Politco. My commentary is limited entirely to silly quips on Twitter at the moment, but I sincerely hope Obama recognizes that Supreme Court appointments are not a time to play it safe. 60 senators (hey Arlen), height of his popularity—time to go nuts.

More tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: Already seeing a lot of buzz around Sonia Sotomayor.

UPDATE 3: More names from SCOTUSblog: "The three obvious candidates are Elena Kagan (SG), Sonia Sotomayor (CA2), and Diane Wood (CA7). The sleeper candidate is Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm."

UPDATE 4: Wikipedia is on the case.

Opening scene of the Ferris Bueller TV show. Don't miss the world's worst theme song.



Oh, 1990. How I miss you.

Poet Craig Arnold has apparently gone missing in Japan while working on a book about volcanoes and the end of the world. Paper Cuts has details.

I liked Joe Biden again for almost one whole day.

Details are emerging about the publication of The Original of Laura, the partially completed book Nabokov asked be destroyed after his death and which is now being published by Random House. Apparently the book will contain facsimiles of the index cards on which it was drafted.

Random.

* Call us "brights": Evidence is reviewed pointing to a negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief in the United States and Europe. It is shown that intelligence measured as psychometric g is negatively related to religious belief.

* The New Hampshire legislature has passed gay marriage. Live free or die!

* Teaser images from the "lost," DVD-only 13th episode of Dollhouse. This looks really, really good.

* Watchmen watch: costumed vigilantes in Cincinnati.

* "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tells lawmakers it has no power to stop a Salt Lake City firm from taking tons of waste from Italy, processing it in Tennessee, then disposing of it in Utah." Well, who the hell does have the authority?

Not even God-Man can escape the trend of "dark" superheroes.

Classic sci-fi covers: the art of Penguin SF.

Tough times for Jared Diamond.

I have seen more photos
of Barack Obama
than I ever seen

of my own mother.
Blame the Press,
digital photography, all

the camera-phones,
raised like Rockefellers,
above the rest of us.

My old teacher Thomas Sayers Ellis gets the last word at 100dayspoems.blogspot.com.

I'm 4.6% as terrified since the World Health Organization announced that there are only seven confirmed cases of swine flu fatality in Mexico, not 152. But I'm 2100% more angry at sensationalistic media hype and cynical fear-mongering from people who, by now, should at least be pretending to know better.

Twitter's twaffic is mostly a twick.

A Nielsen survey reports that more than 60% of users who sign up for Twitter don’t return to the site the following month. So while Twitter’s traffic has catapulted to 6 million unique viewers each month, only 40% of new users actually stay to play.

“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months,” writes David Martin, the VP of primary research at Nielsen Online, “but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”

More information is coming out about the alternate universe Michele Bachmann comes from: it turns out that in Bachmann's timeline it was FDR's Hoot-Smalley tariffs that turned an otherwise run-of-the-mill recession into the Great Depression.

Now, of course, in our universe this was called the Smoot-Hawley Act and it was signed into law in 1929 by Republican President Herbert Hoover. Moreover, here on Earth-1 FDR didn't even take office until 1933, at which time the Depression was almost four years old.

We've got to find some way to send Bachmann back home.

The government has announced the first swine flu fatality outside Mexico, a two-year-old child in Texas. Drudge, needless to say, is reporting this news with the sense of decorum and responsibility he is so rightly famous for.



Having gotten suitably excited about Typhoid Maria, we can now move on to the discovery of patient zero.

Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez survived the earliest documented case of swine flu in an outbreak that has spread across four continents.

His family lives in the 3,000-person village of La Gloria in the state of Veracruz, where a flu outbreak was reported on April 2.

Lab tests confirmed that Edgar was the only patient in Veracruz to test positive for the swine flu virus; the others had contracted a common flu. Health officials had returned to Edgar's sample only after cases of the new flu strain were spotted around the country.

...Edgar has recovered and playfully credits ice cream for helping him feel better.

He can have his ice cream after he tells us who helped him engineer the virus.

Wednesday is the day I historically post links.

* It all finally makes sense; Michele Bachmann says the crazy things she says because she comes from an alternate universe where Jimmy Carter was president in 1976.

* Also in alternate-universe news: South Korean scientists claim to have cloned glowing dogs.

* Tough times in the mother country.

* They're turning Margaret Atwood's (very good) Payback into a full-length documentary about debt.

* "Crazy" Joe Biden was a key figure in the Arlen Specter party switch. Now who's laughing?

* The headline reads: "Student, 11, steps up to lead school band when budget constraints leave PS 37 without band teacher." Get this kid a scholarship anywhere he wants to go, and pour some real money into public schools already.

* The eleven most endangered historic places.

* Classic science fiction film on the Internet.

* The Bush-Obama position on state secrets takes a much-needed hit.

* The Fight Club Theory of Ferris Bueller.

* An entity passes the Hofstadter-Turing Test if it first creates a virtual reality, then creates a computer program within that reality which must finally recognise itself as an entity within this virtual environment by passing the Hofstadter-Turing Test. So now we just need to get Skynet self-aware.

UPDATE: Bioware has now apologized.

Homosexuality does not exist in the Star Wars universe, according to Bioware, the developers of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the new Star Wars MMO...

Would-be players were discussing in the MMO's forums how the game might handle future gay and lesbian relationships - and Bioware freaked out, shutting down those discussion threads and banning the words "gay," "lesbian" and "homosexual." Says community manager Sean Dahlberg:

As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars.

Thread closed.

Come now, Sean, aren't we being just a bit naive?

I'm not going to lie. It wasn't easy choosing an accompanying photo for this post.









Given that companies like Bioware are (one assumes) actually trying to make money with their products, it's continually surprising that they degrade and undervalue the importance of slash in fan communities. Why haven't more creators tried to (literally) capitalize on this interest? Aside from J.K. Rowling (who generally stuck to heterosexual coupling, the notable case of Dumbledore excepted) and Smallville (which for years injected a heavy slash subtext into the relationship of Clark Kent and Lex Luthor), SF franchises largely remain terrified of open acknowledgment of their own queerness, much less embracing fans' noncanonical slash repurposing of the work.

I'm telling you, there's money to be made here.

Facebook backer announces his new Facebook group: 1,000,000 Strong Against Women Having the Right to Vote.

Cogitamus continues to do great work on the connection between human-animal diseases like the swine flu and unsanitary conditions in the meat industry.

The netroots blogs are already talking about a primary challenge to Specter, despite apparent party-boss promises to the contrary. Right now most of the talk centers around the Employee Free Choice Act, which Specter recently decided he opposed back when he was still trying to protect his right flank from Pat Toomey. There's been speculation that Specter's reference to EFCA in his statement earlier today referred only to voting against the bill itself, and that he'd vote to invoke cloture—but it's looking now as if he won't vote for cloture either. In that case put money on the idea of a "miraculous compromise" on EFCA that modifies the language just enough to give Specter cover to flip-flop back. A Ned-Lamont-style primary challenge backed by Labor and the netroots would otherwise be almost inevitable, Rendell's promises notwithstanding, and unlike Connecticut Pennsylvania has a "sore loser" law that would prevent a Liebermanesque run as an independent.

P.S.: Don't miss Steele's response to all this invoking the ugly specter of Arlen Specter's mama.

Line of the day goes to Josh Marshall, writing about the Arlen Specter switch:

Late Update: Needless to say, this is quite a coup for the GOP, likely engineered by Michael Steele as a way to smoke out enemies.

The implosion of the Republican Party continues apace: CNN is reporting that Arlen Specter is switching to the Democratic Party. Crazy! Never thought the little guy would do it.

UPDATE: Lots of "Holy Shits!" being dropped in Left Blogistan today over this—glad I went with "smokes" instead. Also, it occurs to me that now Neil and Srinivas have to vote for Arlen Specter. Tough luck, fellas.

UPDATE: But let's not lose our heads.

The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague's cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Specter, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet Theory." This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you'd have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.

It's Tuesday and I'm feeling just a little bit feverish.

* It's come to this: they're going to remake Drop Dead Fred. Don't ask why.

* Oh, the wisdom of markets: Stephen Dunbar demonstrates that Peak Oil has "peaked" by citing the temporary crash in demand due to the financial crisis and speculative recovery technologies as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Crisis averted!

* Meanwhile, the climate is still totally screwed. See also: The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska will soon be among the first “climate refugees” in the United States. What's their governor have to say about this?

* Superpoop messes with Texas.

* David Kurtz comes through with your daily dose of swine flu commentary, the first on the rhythm of pandemic and the second on the deep, pervasive rot throughout the global meat industry.

* Science has proved that conservatives don't get Stephen Colbert.

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

Whenever I hear about this sort of thing I'm just shocked. Not only is the parody on The Colbert Report completely unsubtle—it's so unsubtle I even wouldn't say it counts as satire—but it's not as even as if Colbert is trying to fool anyone. If you didn't get the point just from reading the sidebar during "The Word," he breaks character, both deliberately and undeliberately, all the freaking time. Multiple times every show. He's practically holding the audience's hand.

Let's hope "more likely" still represents a rather small part of the sample...

Top submission titles at VQR, 2007-2009. Here's the 2006-2007 list. Via Kottke.

Bad news: the swine flu appears to have gained access to a time machine.

Yet another Monday linkdump.

* Rep. John Lewis and four other congressmen were arrested today in front of the Sudanese embassy protesting the genocide in Darfur.

* Quantifying the seven deadly sins.

* Dinosaurs may not have been killed by the Chicxulub impact after all. This example of the scientific method working is naturally taken up by anti-intellectuals at the Corner to prove the scientific method doesn't work.

* More on the connection between swine flu and industrial agriculture.

* The Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?" is now the official song of Oklahoma, instantaneously making the state 1000% more awesome.

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize we're floating in space?
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?

* Scientific American concurs.

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

To save the university we must destroy it.

It once again falls to Marc Bousquet to explain what the actual problem is; it's the labor system, stupid. Via MeFi.

It's true what Drawn! says: there's some very good stuff in this Flickr stream.

Monday links.

* Vernor Vinge guarantees the Singularity by 2030. Take it to the bank. Via Boing Boing.

* They'll get the stone wall around East Campus when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

* Today's most useful single-serving site: http://shouldibeworriedaboutswineflu.com/.

* The judgment against Eichmann speaks to Bybee: Far from absolving him of guilt, his remoteness from the actual torturers—his thoughtlessness—increases the degree of his responsibility. His is a special kind of evil—the evil of nonchalance where there should be outrage.

* Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism.

* Meanwhile, Krugman seeks to tell the future by looking at programs Republicans have most recently tried to cut funding for.

"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."

Iceland after the crash.

May it please: artist Maira Kalman visits the Supreme Court. (link fixed)

Sunday! This time for real.

* The federal government has declared the swine flu a public health emergency. Clearly the time has come to panic.

* Nate Silver has an interesting post analyzing some counterintuitive environmental polling showing Americans tend to believe ecological crises will harm others more than themselves.

* Isaac's experimenting with 3-D comics. I couldn't get it to work—but then again I could never see the 3-D image in those "Magic Eye" posters either.

* Another proposal to fix Chess: add a "slight win."

* Nobody does media criticism like Glenn Greenwald.

The very same pundits and establishment journalists who today are demanding that we forget all about it, not look back, not hold anyone accountable, are the very same people who -- like Broder -- played key roles in hiding, enabling and defending these crimes. In light of that, what is less surprising than the fact that, almost unanimously, these very same people oppose any efforts to examine what happened and impose accountability?

* In the spirit of Dinosaur Comics, Topsy the Electrocuted Elephant. (Thanks, Denise!)

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who was last making headlines for suggesting that Texas may consider seceding from the Union, is requesting help from the federal government to deal with a possible swine flu pandemic.

Devilstower tries to marshall the mighty power of Daily Kos in defense of Dollhouse's sagging ratings.

Those who perish in the upcoming swine flu pandemic will, at least, be spared the horrors of the geomagnetic apocalypse. See also: Dark Angel's Pulse.

Rest in peace, Bea Arthur. Now the world's just a little less Golden.



(image found via a Google Image Search whose results may shock and appall you)

Mostly non-apocalyptic Sunday links. (UPDATE: Yes, I know it's Saturday.)

* J.G. Ballard's last story, in the Guardian.

* The governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela have issued a statement in response to the 5th Summit of the Americas that declares, in part, that capitalism is destroying the planet. Why do the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela hate America / Jesus / puppies?

* See also: An anti-environmentalist lobbying coalition for industry has been caught, cigarette-lobby-like, ignoring its own experts.

* See also: this cartoon.



* Myths about the National Popular Vote Bill. This page actually answered a few of my objections, mostly about the likelihood of post-election pact-breakage.

* Crimes committed by Ferris Bueller during his day off.

The swine flu outbreak in Mexico has everybody talking about pandemic and 1918. Schools and public events have been shut down in Mexico City, where 20 have died from the outbreak. The victims are mostly otherwise healthy people between 25 and 45, an atypical result likely caused by a phenomenon known as "cytokine storm."

Here's an aspect of the story the American media, unsurprisingly, isn't touching: the outbreak has been linked to factory-style pork production.

Matt Yglesias has your must-read pithy observation about conservatives' newfound disdain for "banana republics," with Steve Benen, Josh Marshall, Glenn Greenwald, and Steve Benen again filling in the gaps.

Jim Tedisco has pulled an anti-Coleman and conceded in NY-20, thereby proving that Obama has been right about everything thus far.

Friday.

* How to score 1830 points in a single turn of Scrabble.

* A recent study has proved scientifically that we're all dicks.

You might expect that being prompted (primed) to think of yourself as a good person would make you more altruistic or moral — but, in fact, the exact opposite appears to be the case. Primed to think about what a good person you are, your most likely reaction is to think you’ve paid your morality dues and go on about your business.

* Universities during the meltdown.

Since most American colleges have an endowment less than 1 percent the size of Harvard's, most do not have Harvard's problem. But they have other problems. The sources of income on which they depend—tuition revenue (at private colleges) and state appropriations (at public colleges), as well as annual alumni contributions (at both)—are under pressure too. Everyone knows about the competitive frenzy to get into a few highly ranked colleges, but in fact most of the 1,500 private colleges in the United States do not attract significantly more applicants than they can enroll. On the contrary, they struggle to meet enrollment targets, especially now that families in economic distress are turning to public institutions, which tend to be cheaper.[2]

* Glenn Greenwald's three laws of actually existing media bias.

(1) Any policy that Beltway elites dislike is demonized as coming from "the Left" or -- in this case (following Karl Rove) -- the "hard Left."

(2) Nobody is more opposed to transparency and disclosure of government secrets than establishment "journalists."

(3) The single most sacred Beltway belief is that elites are exempt from the rule of law.

Jaimee has some new poems online this week, "Chlamydia" and "Echo and Narcissus."

American Stranger has a report on Left Forum 2009 that segues into a smart discussion of the future of American ideology.