Links!

* The headline reads, "Las Vegas Nervously Watches The Water Drop."

* More likely that not, there will no major international climate deal at Copenhagen.

* NJ-GOV '13: Cory Booker drops the murder rate in Newark.

* The Nation considers the Palin effect.

* New York, after the flood. Via io9.

Wednesday night, post-Zizek-lecture links.

* President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Probably the best of a bad set of options.

* How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology. I have to confess they have my number on Chinese/Japanese/Thai, not eating fast food, and delicious, delicious Samoas—but my love of pizza and PB&J proves that beneath my leftist facade beats a deeply reactionary heart.

* Already linked everywhere: Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer.

* Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster. Related: Steve Benen, Harold Meyerson, Kevin Drum.

* GOP Death Spiral Watch: Lindsay Graham censured by the South Carolina GOP for acknowledging the existence of climate change.

* Salon: Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl is possibly the best movie about family, community and poultry thievery ever made.

A few more.

* #Nabokovfail.

* Scenes from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

* Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels and meet energy needs, the International Energy Agency warned today.

* A woman is six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or multiple sclerosis than if a man in the relationship is the patient, according to a study that examined the role gender played in so-called "partner abandonment."

* Picasso and his love of Japanese erotic prints.

* Always start your viral marketing campaign after your show is already doomed.

* The New Yorker takes down Superfreakonomics. I like this coda from Crooked Timber a lot:

Kolbert’s closing words are, however, a little unfair.

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Not unfair to Levitt and Dubner, mind you, but to science fiction. After all, two science fiction authors, Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, had their number down way back in 1953 with The Space Merchants (Pohl, amazingly, is still active and alive).

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

The Space Merchants is truly great, incidentally. Read it if you haven't.

* Twenty years after the Berlin Wall. The "click to fade" images are stunning.

Tuesday night politics roundup: Steve Benen once again makes the case for health care incrementalism. Bill Clinton makes the case for not losing. The Senate probably won't pass the Stupak amendment. Open Left, noting a PPP poll suggesting Olympia Snowe can't win a Republican primary in Maine, predicts she'll switch parties; Nicholas Beaudrot concurs and suggests a Mugwump caucus. Contrary to reports, the climate bill does not make Obama dictator. Paid sick leave is a good idea. The GOP is unlikely to take back the House in a context in which it draws all its support from the South. Why employment might not fully recover until 2013. How we can destroy the filibuster. Is Marxism relevant today?

Misc.

* Ezra Klein argues Nancy Pelosi is playing three-dimensional chess.

* "Tea Party" is now a registered party in Florida. Excelsior! The sky's the limit.

* John Hodgman now has a daily podcast.

* 40 House Democrats are now threatening to vote no on the health care conference bill unless Stupak is removed.

* Number of Ph.D.’s hired last year to “develop” carrot sticks for McDonald’s: 45. Is this on the usual job list? Interviews at MLA?

* Also at Harper's: Number of U.S. universities that have a Taco Bell Distinguished Professorship of Fast Service: just one. That's the tragedy.

There's nothing I love better than interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson.

TB: I understand that you live in a utopian community [called Village Homes, pictured above and below; images by Michael Corbett]. How does that work? Is it pre- or post-modern?

KSR: A little of both, I guess. The model is an English village really; about eighty acres, a lot of it owned in common, so there is a “commons” and no fences, except around little courtyards. There are a lot of vegetable gardens, and the landscaping is edible, meaning lots of fruits, grapes and nuts.

It’s really just a tweaking of suburban design, but a really good one. Energy mattered to the designers and we burn about 40 percent the energy of an ordinary suburban neighborhood of the same size. That’s still a lot, but it’s an improvement. Village Homes was built in 1980 or so; if every suburb since then had followed its lead, we would have much less craziness in America, because the standard suburb is bad for sanity. But that didn’t happen, so for the 1,000 people who live here it’s a kind of pocket utopia. Not the solution, but a nice place to live right now, and it could suggest aspects of a long-term solution. It’s been a real blessing to live here.

What's bringing a 'smile' to my face today? Impotent whining.



Some good analysis of what's been going on with this committee here.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Say goodbye to the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Global warming will force up to 150 million "climate refugees" to move to other countries in the next 40 years, a new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) warns.

A few midday links.

* In my previous election prediction thread I forgot to mention tomorrow's marriage equality vote in Maine, on which Adam Bink has an update at Open Left. I always think people will do the right thing on these marriage equality votes and I am always disappointed, so this year I'm expecting to lose but still hoping to be wrong.

* Looking past health care: can a climate bill actually pass the Senate? Steve Benen has more.

* The Climate Race: How Climate Change Is Already Affecting Us. Via Boing Boing. In the American Southeast:

* Average daily temperature about 2 degrees higher with the greatest increase in winter.
* Days below freezing (32 degrees) reduced to four to seven per year.
* Average fall precipitation 30% higher since 1901, with the exception of South Florida.
* Moderate to severe droughts in spring and summer have increased 12% and 14%, respectively.
* Destructive potential of hurricanes has increased since 1970, due to an increase in sea surface temperature.

* 23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million. I was a little surprised not to see Brodhead's name on the list, until I remembered how much money we pay Coach K.

* Elsewhere in North Carolina, a majority favors the public option.

Fifty-four percent of North Carolina residents surveyed by Elon University said they would support a public option. Forty-one percent said they would use a public option plan should one become available.

It's crucial to recognize here that the health care reform that is under discussion is far less ambitious than what the public would actually support; nothing close to 41% of the state will be eligible for the very limited version of the public option that is actually going to be voted on.

* How is televised science fiction doing in the ratings? What this list really shows, Dollhouse aside, is how bad TV SF is right now. Even the shows I do watch—FlashForward, Fringe—aren't exactly what I'd call good.

It is one thing to support something imperfect but functional. But it is another thing to support something that is imperfect, decidedly non-functional, and that has the potential for additional destruction. The problem Lohmann and other critics of carbon trading recognize isn’t merely that it’s flawed, or that it won’t work, but that it actually introduces a new and uniquely social threat to the atmosphere: the legal right to pollute it.

Via Vu, a must-read piece on why cap and trade could be worse than doing nothing at all. The only sensible neoliberal policy option remains steep carbon taxation, but despite decades of evidence about what we're barreling towards the political will still isn't there.

Even more Wednesday links.

* Not just talk: Reid and Schumer will introduce legislation to yank the health insurance industry's antitrust exemption.

* Conflicts of interest we can believe in: Hank Paulson. The original version of this post, which was up for about two minutes, confused Paulson with Timothy Geithner, who I also don't like, but who I guess is a step up.

* Among other things, this YouTube video of a Normandy Beach veteran speaking about marriage equality speaks to the (often underutilized) power of American exceptionalism in the service of progressive political causes. It's quite moving.

* 'Papers reveal Gabriel Garcia Marquez was under Mexican surveillance for years.'

* Duke Plans To Become ‘Climate Neutral’ By 2024.

* And Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune says the next two weeks of Dollhouse will not disappoint. I've been pretty disappointed all season, so I hope she's right.

Tim Lambert: Why Everything in Superfreakonomics About Global Warming Is Wrong.

Saturday!

* John Lanchester: More general conditions involving gender abnormality affect one in three thousand people – which, globally, is two million people. There are more human beings who are in some degree intersex than there are Botswanans. (via Vu)

* I have no idea what to think or say about Marge Simpson's Playboy spread.

* Regender.com swaps gendered language on websites. Here's my site regendered.

* And, in non-gender news, the Freakonomics folks are facing tons of criticism in the blogosphere over their new book, including Krugman, Brad DeLong, and a four-part series at Climate Progress. The authors have posted a response at the Freakonomics blog, but as Matt Yglesias and their own commenters note, it's fairly limp. I liked the first book, but it looks like I'll skip this one.

Thursday night links!

* I saw Zombieland tonight and was impressed with how well America kept its Big Cameo secret. (I won't spoil things either.) The movie itself is pretty fun, if less funny than it thinks and a little cartoonish at times. I find in general that I prefer my zombie movies to be psychologically realistic and thematically bleak, with roughly two-thirds of the film devoted to the building of systematic fortifications and the last third devoted to the spectacular destruction of said fortifications.

* This is a great blog and Imma let you finish, but MetaFilter has the best Balloon Boy thread of all time. Don't miss what could be the exciting start of Phase 2: "You guys said we did it for the show."

* Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won't Work.

* Nice to see Mad Men getting some press in the Atlantic, but couldn't they have found someone who actually gets the show?

Mad Men’s most egregious stumble—though seemingly a small one—involves Betty Draper’s college career, and it is generally emblematic of this extraordinarily accomplished show’s greatest weaknesses, and specifically emblematic of its confused approach to this poorly defined character. Betty, the show establishes, was in a sorority. So far, okay. Pretty, with a little-girl voice and a childlike, almost lobotomized affect; humorless; bland but at times creepily calculating (as when she seeks solace by manipulating her vulnerable friend into an affair); obsessed with appearances and therefore lacking in inner resources; a consistently cold and frequently vindictive mother; a daddy’s girl—Betty is written, and clumsily performed by model-turned-actress January Jones, as a clichéd shallow sorority sister. (Just as Don’s self-invented identity is Gatsby-like, so Betty, his wife, is a jejune ornament like Daisy, though without the voice full of money.) But she’s also a character deeply wronged by her serial-philanderer husband, and she’s hazily presented as a stultified victim of soulless postwar suburban ennui (now there’s a cliché). So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities. By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters—cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)—Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely college that Betty Draper, given to such non-U genteelisms as “passed away,” would have attended. So much for satiric exactitude.

As I complained in the MeFi thread, Betty's problem isn't that she's bland, humorless, or stupid but that she hates her life.

* Chicago and the Great Flood of 1992.

* How the Freaknomics authors blew a chapter on climate change in the book's new sequel, Superfreakonomics.

* “The original Gauntlet was released with no ending. The hundred or so levels were randomised and looped for as long as play lasted. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.”

Top 25 censored stories of the year. Don't miss:

2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature

Still waiting.

* It's not exactly Douchiest College honors, but Duke is #14 on the Times's ranking of top 200 universities worldwide.

* Bitter Laughter reports by way of Nate Silver that public option opt-out may be a compromise that can actually get through the Senate—and Steve Benen agrees it's not a bad thing.

* Also in health care: Olbermann's hour-long "Special Comment" from last night, which wasn't nearly as unbearable as I imagined it would be when I heard it was coming.

* A second NJ-GOV poll—albeit one taken before Fatgate—shows Corzine up, this time by three.

* Lots of talk today about this New York Times genealogy of Michelle Obama, focused on an enslaved ancestor who was raped by her owner.

* Pee before you fly. It's funny how low-cost, outside-the-box carbon solutions—like Stephen Chu's suggestion that we paint our roofs white—are never taken seriously. It's like our society has a death wish.

* The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.

More links.

* New trailers for Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Road.

* The EPA has announced new guidelines to regulate greenhouse gases.

* The oldest living things in the world. (via)

* Richard Kahlenberg argues at Washington Monthly towards class-based affirmative action.

* Common Roman Polanski Defenses, Refuted.

Climate change and the ancient world.

Why we can't save the planet: "God’s still up there." Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!