Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care "plan."

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It's already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It's already made its compromises with reality. It's already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It's one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It's another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren't even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn't perfect, but in comparison, it's looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I'm pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn't be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Labor Day links.

* An oral history of Art Spiegelman's seminal alternative comic RAW, in two parts. Have I really never used the Art Spiegelman tag before? (via)

* Amusing Amazon review of Dollhouse.

* If you feel like you missed the boat on speculative realism and want to know what everybody is talking about, Larval Subjects says the Wikipedia entry is, as of today, a good place to start.

* Best of Wikipedia directs our attention to the mystery of the Bloop.

* Daily Kos goes deep inside White House plans to indoctrinate your children into European-style communofascism.

* Another post on status update activism.

* Then and Now with Goofus and Gallant.

Wednesday afternoon links 2!

* Wikipedia's Rorschach cheat sheet. My contempt for the discipline of psychology really got in the way of my reading this article; I kept thinking, "Wait, people actually take Rorschach tests seriously?"

* For more information on my feelings about the Rorschach test see the story I published in Five Fingers Review #23 (now defunct). Note: I'm not sure this issue ever actually materialized. I never got a copy.

* Two takes on how to improve your teaching: restructure your expectations about college composition and teach naked.

* If I'm reading this article correctly, M&Ms cure spinal injury.

* The only rule at Fox News is that there are no rules.

* NPR considers the uncanny intelligence of crows. Via MeFi, which has more in the comments, including video of crows exploiting traffic patterns in Tokyo to crack nuts.

Friday night links.

* Gingrich: "If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything," Sotomayor must be barred from the Supreme Court. Who does he think won the Civil War?

* Tom Tancredo: "I don't know" if the Obama administration hates white people.

* Sonia Sotomayor, notorious racist, ruled against people claiming illegal discrimination in 45 out of 50 cases. This goes along with Dave Sirin's piece on Sotomayor in The Nation to demonstrate that she is a moderate—likely too moderate—not some leftist firebrand. Anyone Obama picked to replace her would, from Newt's perspective anyway, likely be significantly worse.

* Earlier this month, a Twitter user in Guatemala was arrested, jailed, and fined the equivalent of a year's salary for having posted a 96-character thought to Twitter. @jeanfer faces ten years in prison.

* Nuclear power, too cheap to meter.

* Uhura, Dualla, and "Blacks in Space." I really think some nuance is being lost here; to take up just one point, Uhura isn't marginalized in the new Star Trek; if anything she replaces McCoy as the third lead.

* Jason Schwartzman's (fake) new sitcom on NBC, "Yo Teach," a viral ad for Judd Apatow's Funny People.

* Wikipedia has barred edits from known Scientologist IP addresses. Xenu weeps.

A few more.

* Wikipedia is doomed. Doomed!

* Storage closets of the American Museum of Natural History. With awesome slideshow, via MeFi.

* Tim Morton makes the simple but necessary point that as the only sentient agents in the area—the only beings with "response ability"—we are "responsible" for climate change whether we are "causing" it or not.

* Biggest solar deal ever announced. The article goes on to say "When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely."

* Washington Monthly tries to suss out Judd Gregg's erratic behavior.

* Legalize it? The real question is why haven't we yet.

* And Krugman (via Ezra Klein) says we may just be screwed.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

If you want to understand Wikipedia, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever check Alex's blog.

Wednesday, Wednesday.

* Why is Boing Boing giving valuable blog real estate to global warming denialism? I see Cory has admirably tried to push back against the guest blogger, but still. What a sad day for Boing Boing.

* Michael Bérubé just took the GRE Literature in English subject test again. And lived to tell about it.

* Rethinking plagiarism? Sorry, but this isn't that hard. Students know exactly what they're doing when they plagiarize. Turn them over to Judicial Affairs and don't think twice.

* Ten privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

* Joe the Plumber is now advising the GOP. WTFRepublicans?

* Fimoculous has found Wikipedia's list of lists of fictional things.

* The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertberg was not impressed with Obama's first inaugural. More shocking still is the unabashed anti-Hindu prejudice expressed in a demand that they be listed last in the litany of religious belief, even after hated atheists. Via Edge of the American West.

Link dump #3, mother of all link dumps.

* I thought I was over Obama kitsch, but somehow the kids' letters to Obama featured on This American Life last week still somehow got to me. Adorable!

* Austen gets a much-needed updating: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

* The Massachusetts lottery: if you've got $10,000+ to burn, it turns out it could actually be a good bet.

* Wikipedia is looking to ruin itself. More at MeFi.

* A zoomable map of the Moon from a 1969 National Geographic. Simply irresistible.

* How to nationalize health care.

* Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again. I've been working on a piece for the Indy on nuclear power in North Carolina that covers some of these themes. Via Steve Benen.

Saturday links: links for a Saturday.

* MetaFilter's apparently been hacked. If you're using a PC and especially if you're using Internet Explorer, don't go there. Maybe don't get there no matter what.

* The New York Times proclaims "the collapse of the clean coal myth." About time, considering there was never any such thing.

* Ranking Beatles songs, #1 to #185. Via Kottke. The White Album takes some early hits.

* Is Wikipedia eating the world? Via Kevin Drum.

* Go play some Scriball.

* And a new blog is devoted entirely to Matt Yglesias's spelling mistakes.

The MetaFilter thread is, as usual, as good a source as any for information on the ongoing Mumbai terror attacks. A good and true comment from early on: "Twitter is coming of age here." Very true.

The Wikipedia page has done a good job compiling specific information on the attacks.

Horrible day.

Wikipedia and epistemology.

Political Wire catches John McCain plagiarizing his speech on Georgia from Wikipedia. Via Open Left.

Three for Sunday.

* Superbugs: all about the new generation of treatment-resistant infections.

“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

*Will the next Christopher Nolan movie be a straight-up adaptation of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns?

By leaving the Joker (literally) hanging at the end of The Dark Knight, Nolan left open-ended a story that begs to be finished. Even Tim Burton knew he had to kill Jack Nicholson at the "end". Nolan himself killed Ra's at the end of Batman Begins and he even tied-up a loose end regarding the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight. These are both clear signals Nolan knows the story has to have an end and has some idea for that end already in mind.

Nolan further foreshadows the future in The Dark Knight's climatic moments as well. Remember when the Joker tells Batman the two of them can "do this for years"? Filmmakers of Nolan's talent don't throw away lines like that, especially in a moment like that. That was the director signaling to the audience that he understands one of "The Dark Knight Returns'" main themes - that the Joker's very existence is primarily to be Batman's nemesis and their fates were inevitably intertwined, as well as a signal that their final showdown will in fact come years down the road.

Which brings us back to the three-act structure: Act One (Batman Begins) was the first Batman story. Act Two (The Dark Knight) was a classic tragic turning point.

So what does this demand Act Three be?

Well, not only the final battle of Batman and the Joker, but also the last Batman story, of course.

More discussion of the idea, which I can personally guarantee will never, ever happen, at io9.

* A not-quite-complete list of Kramer's business ideas. Not quite complete, because Wikipedia has even more.

One of my favorite writers, the criminally under-appreciated Nicholson Baker, has a lovely article in the New York Review of Books entitled "The Charms of Wikipedia." (Via MeFi.) The whole article is good, but it's the ending that really gets me:

As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007 — deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas — all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic—Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow." In September 2007, Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia's panjandrum - himself an inclusionist who believes that if people want an article about every Pokemon character, then hey, let it happen — posted a one-sentence stub about Mzoli's, a restaurant on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. It was quickly put up for deletion. Others saved it, and after a thunderstorm of vandalism (e.g., the page was replaced with "I hate Wikipedia, its a far-left propaganda instrument, some far-left gangs control it"), Mzoli's is now a model piece, spiky with press citations. There's even, as of January, an article about "Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia" — it too survived an early attempt to purge it.

My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor — and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control — is to get Broughton's Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing. I think I'm done for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.

Via Boing Boing, Wikipedia's list of failed predictions.

Alan Weisman, author of the key apocalyptic text of the moment, The World Without Us, was on The Daily Show last night. Here's the video:



Ron Riggle's Operation Fluffy Bunny report was also pretty excellent.

Meanwhile, just about all of The Colbert Report was mandatory viewing last night as well: here's Stephen on the Freakonomics terrorism kerfluffle, skepticism, and (maybe my favorite news story of the year) corporate edits of Wikipedia.