A few links, and yes even more Palin.

* Great moments in disappointed Google searchers: I hope the person who was looking for "megan fox with her ass up in the air" someday finds what they need.

* World's most obscure video game easter egg, revealed.

* Editing Infinite Jest. I think I've linked to a version of this essay before, but I can't find it if I have.

* This story has everything! Operation Midnight Climax is a new web series about how the CIA used prostitutes to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens.

* The price of oil over 25 years. And the roller coaster's just begun. Via Matt Yglesias.

* And Sarah Palin is giving every indication that she somehow intends to run for office again. Assuming that's really what's going on, and it's not something else, as I understand it the plan goes something like this:

* Quit the only relevant elected experience she's ever had halfway through her first term. (After planning to quit "for months" and having run for vice president after just a year on the job.)

* Raise a lot of money for GOP 2010 candidates and give a lot of speeches. Hope those candidates win and become important establishment allies for her. Hope too that while she's doing this no one remembers how she flamed out halfway through the only real elected experience she's ever had.

* Run for president in 2012. Hope Romney and Huckabee never mention the fact that that she flamed out halfway through the only real elected experience she's ever had. Hope that Obama and the media never mention it either.

* Profit!

Like TPM and MyDD, I strongly contend this is ludicrous. In particular, this from Josh Marshall is entirely correct and bears repeating:

To a degree it goes without saying. But it's worth reviewing just how deeply preposterous Palin's argument yesterday really was when she claimed that she refused to exploit the people of Alaska by serving out her full term.

When you run for governor, as for president, you run for a four year term. You commit, at least implicitly, to serving four years, though many people end up not doing that for various reasons. There's nothing in the implied contract about running for reelection. Indeed it's arguable that the public would be better served by a governor focusing for four years on running the state rather than laying the groundwork for their reelection.

In any case, Gov. Palin, who's served only a little more than half her first term (remember, she was elected in 2006), announces she won't run for reelection. And having decided that she won't run for a second term, she concludes that it would be exploiting the people of Alaska to agree to serve out the remainder of the term they elected her to serve back in 2006. This is apparently because she'll be a lame duck. And, she claims, lame ducks never get anything done and just spend a lot of money going on taxpayer funded junkets. So better to walk away from her job and pass it off to the Lt. Governor who no one hired to do the job at all.

We actually have states, like Virginia, in which governors are term-limited to just one (consecutive) term. Applying Palin's logic to Virginia, anyone elected to the governorship in Virginia should immediately resign because they can't be reelected. Applying this theory to the presidency, second-term presidents should resign in favor of their vice-presidents, again immediately upon their reelection. It makes absolutely no sense and bears no relation whatsoever to the world in which we actually live. And yet I am somehow certain that for the next three-and-a-half years we will be told over and over again how suddenly and inexplicably resigning your high office without warning because you've decided you don't plan to run for reelection is simply the most natural thing in the world. It's mavericky! You betcha.

* Okay, one more Palin one-liner, this one via William Gibson.

That crucial GOP demographic: "Despite the misstep, Palin enjoys an ability to connect with voters that cannot be taught." --AP

Monday late night politics.

* Strange things are happening in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford has been missing for four days. Reports are that the governor has made contact, but the governor's office won't confirm that's true. (UPDATE: The governor's office is now saying that Sanford is on the Appalachian Trail, a mere 2000 miles long.)

* Waxman-Markey Watch: In the comments Alex drops an A-bomb to describe one of the key antagonists on this bill, Colin Peterson. Apparently the bill is unlikely to be debated this week. Yale e360 had a roundup of opinions on Waxman-Markey that's worth reading, with Climate Progress providing a roundup of the roundup. Krugman (also via CP) had a recent column on the bill, too, coming out in favor of it.

* Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of drugs. Good.

* 'Eco-Friendly Meat Could Begin With Mini-Cows.' Gross.

* Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill's got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don't think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.

* And Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a reality check regarding Martin Luther King. (NB: He's already walked the post back.)

Tuesday night linkdump.

* Glenn Beck, jackass.

* It's not commonly known, but the Supreme Court actually deals with more than just abortion.

* Somedays I doubt James Inhofe's ability to rule fairly without undue influence from his own personal race, gender, or political preferences.

* Against empathy: The Terminator for the Supreme Court. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

* Sonia Sotomayor, intellectual lightweight.

* The New York Times teases the coming superbrain.

* Red Bull is a hell of a drug.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

Linkdump!

* The headline reads, "Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected."

* Probably the stupidest thing ever published in the L.A. Times: a bald anti-science assertion that deadly allergies don't exist.

* 'Going Under': Doctors addicted to drugs. Via MeFi.

* Valuating Facebook in terms of Whoppers.

* I don't know if I'm more worried that my insomnia will lead to paranoia or Exploding Head syndrome.

* News that by this point will surprise no one: Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models.

* Legislation has been introduced for a post-Bush truth and reconciliation commission. This is something that is sorely needed, and I hope the Democratic leadership puts its full weight behind it.

* Blago: owned. More discussion here.

* The literary world is abuzz with news of Jack Torrance's latest, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

* Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.

* Things not to do: buying a $1000 house in Detroit. Big ups to Cleveland, which is apparently turning into Detroit.

(Thanks to Bill for some of these!)

A hell of a drug: bees on cocaine 'behave like humans.'

Drugs and literature.

Philip K Dick, speed

The great sci-fi writer's intensive use of speed and hallucinogens inspired much of his work. One particular drug, Semoxydrine - similar to speed - fuelled him in the manic production of 11 sci-fi novels, some essays and short stories all in the space of one year between 1963 and 1964.

Hunter S Thompson, everything

Thompson, pictured right, wrote the infamous 1972 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about a road-trip he had taken in 1971. His alter-ego narrator sets out with 'two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers'.

Jim Rugg's "Stoned Ape Theory" from Backwards City #1 seemingly confirmed by archeologists working in the Caribbean.

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

Nighttime links.

* Weekly retro illustrations of Mad Men episodes. At right: "Joan and the Xerox."

* Ten things you didn't know about the Earth.

* Noise Artists for Obama. (via PClem)

* Obama's on Letterman tonight. He'll talk about lipstick and pigs.

"Keep in mind, that technically had I meant it this way she would be the lipstick," Obama said. "The policies of John McCain would be the pig."

* John McCain isn't such a good campaigner without Sarah Palin to hold his hand.

* And the Department of the Interior scandal is the perfect story. It's got everything: oil, sex, drugs, corruption. Drill, baby, drill.

Too Weird for The Wire: How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds. Via MetaFilter.

Monday!

* Which imaginary animals are kosher? Via Boing Boing.

* Plan59.com is a great site for retro and nostalgia art.

* MetaFilter has now apparently set about translating all of Pulp Fiction into Shakespearease, following the lead of this link.

* Cogitamus has a question for the class, via Cynical-C.

Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had multiple affairs, had been a member of the “Keating Five,” had had a relationship with a much younger lobbyist that his staff felt the need to try and block, had intervened on behalf of the client of said young lobbyist with a federal agency, had denounced then embraced Jerry Falwell, had denounced then embraced the Bush tax cuts, had confused Shiite with Sunni, had confused Al Qaeda in Iraq with the Mahdi Army, had actively sought the endorsement and appeared on stage with a man who denounced the Catholic Church as a whore, and stated that he knew next to nothing about economics — do you think it’s possible that Obama would have been treated differently by the media than John McCain has been? Possible?

* The New York Times says Harold and Kumar 2 creates a whole new genre: the stoner protest film. The legendary Randolph High School debate squad of the 1990s even gets a veiled shout-out...

* The Catcher in the Retirement Home.

* A people's history of the banana.

Spoilers for the last season of The Wire are below, if you haven't seen it yet.

One of the clearest villains in the final season of The Wire is Baltimore Sun editor James Whiting, constantly instructing his reporters to uncover "the Dickensian aspect" in the stories they cover. For Whiting, prophet of the bottom-line, these appeals to Dickensian social realism are completely cynical as the rest of the management style that has eviscerated newspaper journalism in the Internet age. But there's a self-critical irony here, and possibly even a bitter self-loathing, as The Wire in its final season has never been more Dickensian, nor its characters more typological. This aesthetic is made inescapably clear as the entropy of the series winds down in its final season, with most of its main characters defeated or destroyed (often by their own hands) and new characters arising to fill their necessary social space. The players change, but the game goes on.

The musical chairs surrounding the police commissionership, the drug "connect," and various desks at The Sun are just a few salient examples of this. The Major Crimes Unit's most quiet cypher, Lt. Sydnor, quite literally steps into McNulty's shoes (and even his suit), taking up the slack as the last man standing from the unit. The most unrepentant and unsympathetic characters of the entire series, defense attorney Maurice Levy, seems to double himself twice in the final episode, taking both Herc and Stanfield on as corrupt protégés.

Most poignant for me—and even moreso for Jaimee—was Duquan's slide into oblivion, reproducing the resurgent Bubbles just as clearly as Michael's new brutality stepped into the void left by the superheroic Omar. Omar's killer, another cold cypher, the demon child Kenard, has a thousand-yard stare on his face as he is led away at the end of the season that brings to mind the brutal stoicism of Marlo Stanfield.

(That last sentence contains the three moments from the season that stick more clearly with me. The one thing for the whole season I was spoiled for was Duquan's use of heroin, so I had a few weeks to prepare for it—but it hit poor Jaimee like a ton of bricks at the end of episode 5.9. Omar's shooting was so entirely unexpected that I refused to believe it had happened for several minutes, and only really accepted it when the body was zipped up at the end of the episode. And Bubbles's final ascent from the basement to the kitchen was structurally obvious in retrospect, but totally unexpected until the moment it happened; I was nearly moved to tears.)

Seasons four and five of the show dance to the same score, the story of how the situation of late capitalism reproduces itself along explicitly Althusserian ideological status apparatuses like the school, the mayoral bureaucracy, mass media. The city of Baltimore becomes not a character, as some have said, but in some ways the only character—a reality that is best seen in the long montage at the end of the season, which stops following the characters we know and begins to flash shots of unknown, presumably authentic Baltimoreans, as the original theme song begins to play. We're back where we started. In fact we never left.

In the face of this ideological steel trap my attention is drawn again to the few characters able to escape the grinding of the machine. The poignant, hopeful shot of Namond on Bunny Colvin's porch that ended season four—which I said somewhere or another could have been a beautiful last shot for the series as a whole—is called back by the late discovery of a Namond who is now thriving as a champion debater. Pretty to think about—until we remember Randy, Michael, and Duquan, each with the same or more potential, just unluckier.

Likewise, Poot, the last of the original Barksdale kids—not the best, not the most worthy—is able to walk away from the game. He gets a job at Foot Locker. He seems happy.

Still more complicated is the ambiguous final image of Marlo Stanfield, cut in the street in his fine suit. Stanfield, always powered by an inexorable inner drive and an interiority that has always been totally inaccessible to the audience, remains just as frighteningly inscrutable at the end as he ever was. Is he going straight, as Stringer wanted but never could? Is he unable to stay off the street, like Avon? What is he thinking?

I'm sorry these thoughts are so late and so fragmented, but the show is much bigger than a single blog post. So here are a few others:

* A shot-by-shot commentary on the final montage from New York Magazine, alongside 10 Unanswered Questions and a last long, boozy Irish wake for the show.

* The MeFi thread.

* The American Prospect's roundtable.

* The Wire and women. This is a rather important topic I didn't even get to in my ramblings above.

* Alan Sepinwall's interview with David Simon, and his end of show recap. The House Next Door's recap.

* Heaven & Here, The Wire blog.

* Kottke has a whole lot of other links, and I notice now that I'm finally going through my links that he keyed into the same doubling I wrote about above. He gets a few I didn't mention, too: Carver is the new Daniels, Kima is the new Bunk...

Great show. Perfect, almost. In the last year and a half we've lost The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood... I'm afraid the Golden Age of Television finally ended last week.

"A Day in the Death of Donny B," a short film from 1969 about life as a junky. Via MeFi, where they're also concerned about academics getting high on Adderall.

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.

Things that are guaranteed to totally wig me out: AP probes that find trace amounts of drugs in our drinking water.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

I've been blogging for a few years now, and over that time I've linked to Philip K. Dick related material a whole lot of times. Here, in honor of reading Dr. Bloodmoney this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called "the Shakespeare of science fiction":

* "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it's the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of Waking Life. [+/-]

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

* Another great essay at Grey Lodge Occult Review: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place -- processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak -- this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues -- if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory -- should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?

* R. Crumb's comic, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick."

* The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.

* Philip K. Dick and drugs.

* Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut. [+/-]

Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?

PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.

* Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination. (Warning: spoilers for the last book we're going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, Dr. Futurity.)

* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Times. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Lethem on Philip K. Dick. Again. Stanislaw Lem on PKD.

* Jameson on Dr. Bloodmoney.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)