Have a seat and grab something to read:

• Fascism and Nazism are not ideologies of the Left, in case any of you were still confused.
• America’s History of Torture.
• GE paid nothing in taxes in 2010. How much did undocumented immigrants pay?
• And Mike Konczal on policy in the era of mass incarceration.
• Does anyone know why this look at Chernobyl looks like a Land Rover commercial?
• Makode Linde, the artist behind the Swedish blackface cake, explains himself on Africa is a Country.
• Aaron Bady’s article from this past winter on privacy in the age of datamining, now ungated at Technology Review, “World Without Walls:”

When we talk about privacy and surveillance, it is impossible to avoid mentioning 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian account of a world without walls, where television watches you and microphones record every sound above a low whisper. But Orwell said nothing about dataveillance. And while the Fourth Amendment guarantees protection from the kinds of governmental invasions that tend to concern Americans the most (reading our mail, searching our homes), when we think about the problem this way we tend to overlook the kinds of knowledge discovery that don’t require anyone to break into anything.

Data mining as criminal investigation is a good example. Investigating a suspect’s known associates is an ancient tactic in policing, but it costs money, time, and effort, and it’s legally complicated; investigations tend to be constrained by a high threshold of initial suspicion. But as the amount of widely available data rises, another kind of search becomes possible. Instead of starting from a subject of suspicion and placing that person within a map tracing patterns of behavior and networks of associates, it becomes feasible to begin with the whole map and derive the subjects of suspicion from the patterns one finds. Pattern-­based data mining, in other words, works in reverse from a subject-based search: instead of starting from known or strongly suspected criminal associations, the data miner attempts to divine individuals who match a data profile, drawing them out of a sea of dots like the pattern in a color-blindness test. Dataveillance draws powerful inferences about people and their associates from deep and rich—and often publicly available—records of otherwise routine behavior. Automated systems monitor the environment to match the profiles of particular users to pattern signatures associated with criminal behavior, using algorithms to track and analyze anomalies or deviations from what someone, somewhere, has deemed normal.

Existing privacy protections are largely irrelevant to this kind of surveillance. The Fourth Amendment protects only what is said in a conversation. But much the way pen registers and tap-and-trace devices (which record which numbers you dial, who calls you, and how long you talk) do not trigger the same Fourth Amendment privacy protections that a wiretap would, telecommunications companies are not banned from amassing and selling vast databases of call data. The Supreme Court has ruled that once information about call “attributes” passes into the possession of a third-party carrier like a telecommunications company, it effectively becomes the property of that third party, which may collect, store, and circulate it as it pleases.

• Against the ‘unschooling’ of anarchists, the case for a smart approach to compulsory schooling:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Taylor summarizes the debate over compulsory schooling as, “Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious or not?” To me, it seems to be about sparing children the discomfort of conflict. Curiosity leads us to follow our own interests, but what about the interests of others? Conflict is what happens when we’re asked to reckon with them. Just as not every child learns to read “when they’re ready,” some students understandably “resist the critical thinking process; they are more comfortable with learning that allows them to remain passive” (as bell hooks writes).

• Congress hasn’t done anything about America’s growing long-term unemployment.
• Is now the time for Social Democrats to step up?
• Why do soldiers take photos of war?
• Laura Seay breaks down just how not to write about Africa.
• The Exclusive Club of Moral Authority: From Nick Kristof to Kony 2012.
• Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity.
• The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people, the baby boomers took care of that.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here’s Rubio: “Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.” He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party’s combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: “This isn’t conservatism: It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation.” The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama’s 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

• Occupy vs. Whole Foods – an overview of Occupy the Farm, where activists are turning UC land into a farm instead of a Whole Foods. Taking back the Tract is a model of resistance.
• What’s at stake on May Day?
• Paper and Tigers: Was Lenin Really an Anarchist?
• Occupy the Russian Revolution.
• The Catholic Church has its own war on nuns.
• The Top 5 Interest Groups Keeping Marijuana Illegal.
• The Sierra Leone Stock Exchange: where one company’s stock is traded for about an hour, once a week.
• On Jeremy Lin and race in sports: Hate and Basketball.
• Who knows the difference between a stay-at-home mother and a welfare mother?

When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself. Just ask Mitt Romney. In a neat catch that in a sane world would have put the Rosen gaffe to rest forever, Nation editor at large Chris Hayes aired a video clip on his weekend-morning MSNBC show displaying Romney this past January calling for parents on welfare to get jobs: “While I was governor, 85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. And I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’” (Don’t be fooled by the gender-neutral language—he’s talking about mothers.)

• A path to labor law reform – labor rights as civil rights.
• The “Other America” is increasingly made up of nearly-poor.
• Stand your ground laws didn’t protect this woman, who allegedly defended herself from an abusive husband.
• The two lawyers that started the “self-deportation” war of attrition against immigrants.
• The Unintended Hilarity of Patent Art.
• African asylum-seekers suffer arson attacks in Tel Aviv neighborhood.
• A Professor Addresses Sexism in the Ivy League.
• Competing Under False Pretenses: Fake Handicaps a Growing Problem for Disabled Sports.
• Binyavanga Wainaina on Africa’s unfair image.

If you’re in the need of some reading, take your pick from this sampling:

• How can Herbert Spencer’s 1892 revisions explain conservative opposition to the individual mandate?
• Libertarians and the Left: the possibilities and limitations of building an alliance.
• A Genocide in Northern Uganda? Patrick Wegner looks at the internal displacement policy of the early 2000s and debates what options the ICC has.
• Hayes Brown dissects Walter Russell Mead’s uninformed analysis of the UN.
• And Dan Drezner compares the Cold War UN to the contemporary one.
• What is Behind Africa’s Illegal Gun-Running?
• The student strike in Quebec enters its tenth week – an overview at Student Activism.
• The Disappearing Face of New York.
• How do we define dignity?

When Kim Jong Il died in December, his regime praised him and said he’d brought “dignity” to North Korea “on the highest level and ushered in the golden days of prosperity unprecedented in the nation’s history.” Or, translated from the original totalitarianese: North Koreans are two inches shorter than the average South Korean due to sheer malnutrition, and they wept forcibly at their dictator’s passing lest anybody suspected they possessed insufficient patriotic grief.

Dignity is not just a laurel for when totalitarians die but also for when we kill them. When President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, he said “his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.” I have no sympathy for bin Laden, but I would not attach the words “peace” or “dignity” to clandestine nighttime raids in which the state shoots its enemies through the face. Surely the relatives of 9/11 victims felt some quiet justice from the killing, but young Americans embraced peace and dignity by dancing in the streets and singing drunkenly of death.

So what is dignity, exactly? The word litters Cossery’s novel without much definition, much as we often use it casually with each other without ever saying precisely what we mean. In March 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics released a 555-page attempt to define the concept. It had to. Since the council’s inception in 2001 — after which its largely religious membership gave ethical opinions replicating the administration’s Christian orthodoxy on stem-cell research and abortion — critics believed it had “employed the language of human dignity so loosely that it was nothing more than a rhetorical trump card used to reject policies that were at odds with the Bush administration’s perspective,” Leslie A. Meltzer wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dignity was a blatant political weapon.

• Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook as life viewed through the Claude glass.
• Gregory Mann tackles how the media has ignored the crisis in Mali.
• Does a cities walkability affect its politics?
• Why the Mandate is Constitutional: Ronald Dworkin on the individual mandate and the Supreme Court.
• And if individual mandates are unconstitutional, why did so many founding fathers support them?
• Reading Katehi at UC Davis, a breakdown of the Pepper Spray Chancellor’s verbal dance around accountability.
• A two-tier system at the Strand – the future of organized labor?
• Some thoughts on the Healthcare mandate and the Commerce Clause’s Activity/Inactivity distinction.
• Occupy Oakland, Permitted Protests, and Police Repression.
• One Nation Under the Gun, on Trayvon Martin and America’s gun laws:

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

• America’s Deadly Devotion to Guns.
• Let’s be honest: America’s got a drone problem.
• A(nother) revision on the viability of cookstove campaigns.
• The bubble within the higher education bubble.
• Every year, JSTOR denies 150 million attempts to access articles.
• Africans Shocked by Uncivilized Antics of European Savages.
• Somebody is really mad about their seat on the airplane.
• Another great NYT correction – this time inspiring more.
• Americans think Iran is as big of a threat as the 80s-era Soviet Union.
• Misrata, one year later – a reporter revisits where his friend perished.
• How Estonia became an internet titan:

“We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,” Viik said. “So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn’t afford them at home.”

The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.

Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.

Let’s do some reading:

• The University of Pittsburgh bans transgender students from using gendered locker rooms.
• Why Sheriff Joe has Wyatt Earp in His Posse.
• Peter at PhD Octopus reviews David Harvey’s Rebel Cities.
• What Parents Tell Their Children About John Derbyshire.
• Who really benefited from the Citizens United ruling? It wasn’t corporations.
• Librarians and historians in Timbuktu protect historical manuscripts after rebel takeover.
• A series of posts on alien films and allegory by Christian Thorne:
  • ALF and E.T.
  • Avatar
  • Super 8
  • War of the World and Attack the Block
• A street artist tricks a South African diamond trading company into funding anti-diamond art.
• A 9-year-old builds the coolest cardboard arcade ever – and a flashmob comes to play.
• A woman jumps a curb and crashes into a kid on a go cart because he doesn’t belong in her neighborhood. Guess what race he is.
• The Racial Cold War is Heating Up.
• Hilary Rosen explains why Ann Romney isn’t the best adviser.
• The Real War on Moms:

“Choice” was the word on Ann Romney’s lips in her Fox News appearance this morning. “We need to respect the choices that women make,” she said several times, adding, “Mitt respects women that make different choices.” “Choice,” of course, is a word that represents in other contexts, like abortion rights, a negotiated truce on rights and liberties of women to live within and without their traditional roles. But Ann Romney’s use of it shows how limited it is as a trope: Is it a relevant “choice” for the vast majority of American women to decide whether to use their degree in French in the workforce or rationally rest on their husband’s millions to focus on five children – six, according to Ann, if you count mischievous Mitt?

The more pertinent “choice” involves a series of unappealing options when it comes to affordable childcare or workforce opportunities. According to the census, the proportion of mothers with a recent birth in the labor force increased during the recession, from 56 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008. And another Census Bureau report suggests that the 5.6 million stay-at-home mothers, a minority among mothers, have little in common with Ann Romney. They tend to be younger, Latina and foreign-born – and they are less likely to have graduated from high school or attained a bachelor’s degree. These women face markedly different circumstances from the more publicly visible stakeholders in alleged Mommy Wars, the ones who opted out of the workforce and who have the ear of people making movies and writing novels, but the women with the luxury to live on a single income at their expected standard of living are a statistical and demographic blip. The bulk of stay-at-home moms have characteristics that correlate to lower earnings in the workforce, and for them, with the high cost and inaccessibility of childcare, the “free” childcare offered by staying at home is also a rational economic choice.

• The Other Gentleman’s Agreement: the President of the World Bank and the Pope.
• Debating Palestine: Representation, Resistance, and Liberation.
• Alex Thurston argues why the NATO intervention in Libya was a mistake.
• A look at Wikipedia edits reveals a lot about the GOP primary candidates.
• The Food Fight of Our Lives – Millions Against Monsanto.
• How the New York Times invented disaster reporting 100 years ago by covering the sinking of the Titanic.
• How J. Bruce Ismay, Chair of the White Star Line, Coped With Being the World’s Most Hated Man.
• The survivors of the Titanic survived thanks to wireless telegrams.
• Yes, the 99% Spring is a Fraud:

The meeting was a few blocks from where I live. The spam said it was “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was vaguely hoping that whatever The 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.

The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.

• The head of Mali’s new junta is staying in the picture when it comes to transitions to democracy.
• How the U.S. looked the other way while Bahrain crushed the Arab Spring’s most ill-fated uprising.
• Barbie’s Plastic Politics.
• Community‘s Battle of Greendale as a guide to mass atrocity/conflict resolution.
• From Boston Review’s forum on the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement:
  • “A Framework for Democratic Change” by Tom Hayden
  • “Rock the Vote” by Angus Johnston
  • “Toward Participatory Democracy” by Danielle Allen
  • “An Anachronistic Reading” by Jennifer Hochschild

The Two-Cocktail Makeover.

Soldiers train alongside the base's pet sheep. Photo from UN, credit Albert Gonzales Farran.

White Until Proven Black: Racism in The Hunger Games.

Playing the blame game with the cholera epidemic in Haiti.

Despite massive budget cuts, there’s a building boom in our universities.

Al Qaeda is probably not coming back to New York anytime soon.

Lindy West re-watched Titanic so you don’t have to.

George Zimmerman and Robert Bales: The Watchmen and People Out of Place.

The NYU law student who spoke out against Justice Scalia has more to say.

The quietest room in the world will also drive you crazy.

American citizens’ family members in the Phillipines that applied for immigration to the U.S. the year that I was born would just now be receiving visas.

Aaron Bady on the Supreme Court’s decision regarding strip searches in jails:

If we put aside the fact that US prisons are already hives of contraband — that super-overcrowding in correctional facilities has meant that actual practical surveillance of incarcerated populations is effectively nil — the logic of this argument simply asserts that unwarranted invasions of privacy are a lesser evil than impracticality. But why do we presume that these two things are incompatible? Why must we have one or the other? Where does that necessity to choose come from?

This is why we probably shouldn’t put aside the fact that our prison system is overcrowded and underfunded to an outrageous degree. Because when the Supremes start talking about what is and isn’t workable, what they’re really saying is: we can’t afford to provide the kinds of rights which the bill of rights promises. To say that it wouldn’t be workable to treat citizens in custody as still having the rights that no court has yet ruled to strip away — that “it would be difficult to determine whether individual detainees fall within the proposed exemption” is simply to say that the work of observing constitutional rights, spending the time and money to see that it is done properly, is beyond our powers as a society. It is too difficult. There are, obviously, ways to make prisons more “secure” which do not involve putting a hand in your anus, and if the Supremes mandated that they find them, they would. It’s just that, given the massive overcrowding of our prisons (and the underfunding which flows out of that overcrowding), a hand in the anus is the cheapest way to do it.

Oh, and the aforementioned strip search ruling? Obama’s Department of Justice asked for it.

Koritha Mitchell answers some questions about her book, Living with Lynching.

From Emmit Till to Trayvon Martin: How Black Women Turn Grief into Action.

What do campus police need when dealing with protesters? More force options!

Some analysis on Azawad independence from Mali.

And let’s not forget that the U.S. helped train military leaders in Mali, including the leader of the coup.

On America’s occupation of Australia.

More critiques of Nick Kristof, this time on why we should stay away from his anti-prostitute agenda.

On privacy, secrecy, and transparency from the government to WikiLeaks, or the Fog of More:

But rather than keep fewer records, agencies increasingly used newly invented databanks, the better to build a virtual you. Their computers could pluck out any detail of your life and add it to the government’s central, databanked composite. As a result, Americans were left trying to figure out just who the government thought they were, and thus the first lineaments of the transparency movement stirred to life. It didn’t seek to roll back data collection either; instead it sought new legislation to force government disclosure — i.e., greater transparency of the state rather than protection of individual privacy. The government would keep collecting information, but citizens could see what and why. The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 offered legal tools for processing disclosure requests, and the Privacy Act of 1974 gave citizens greater access to the data collected about them. But in 1997, when Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jesse Helms co-sponsored the Government Secrecy Act, arguing that fewer documents should be classified and that more documents be declassified automatically over time, the bill died unmourned in committee.

When Facebook reprocesses our personal information, the data miners are generally only trying to sell us weirdly specific products or target ads.  But when the government is concerned, the stakes are different. In 2005, several telecommunications companies were caught supplying personal information to the National Security Agency, demonstrating the dangers of corporate data accumulation. What if the NSA decides it wants full personality profiles of everyone who “attended” #OccupyWallStreet on Facebook? It would be a matter of keystrokes to supply entire “social graphs” for each of them.

The Obama administration has also sought to prevent lawsuits against the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, no less, by invoking the state secrets doctrine; we are infinitely transparent, while the government is enshrouded, and the complicit corporations too.  It’s for national security. Try filing a FOIA request.

So, abortion survivors are a thing.

Is your facebook password more like your mail, your house keys, or a drug test?

This is what it looks like when Facebook gets subpoenaed for your info.

Minimum wage is way too low.

A big city writer goes home in defense of Dallas.

Whether your a gun rights activist, a white supremacist, or a police officer – it’s going to be a long, hot summer.

On Tinariwen, Mali, and the Failure of Western Music Media.

The GOP doesn’t think there’s a war on women,  but Reince Priebus isn’t afraid to declare war on caterpillars.

Here’s another dose of reading for anyone who is interested, in its usual disorder:

Paintballing with Hezbollah.

On Sealand and free information: The Death of a Data Haven.

The Euro Crisis: the Merkel Line, the Monti Line, and the Left.

A Tale of Two Cities: On student protests in Columbus, Ohio and Montreal, Quebec.

The Enduring Popularity of the Suntan.

I have mixed feelings about this effort to domesticate a wild species of fox in one human lifetime, which is in danger of ending prematurely.

The Foreign Language of Mad Men.

Reflections on police from someone who visited Zucotti Park the day before protesters attempted to retake it.

And further discussion from someone who visited Frank Ogawa Plaza the day after police took it.

Reflections on the march from Selma to Montgomery.

Readings culled from Aaron Bady’s long series of Sunday Readings:

• Congress’s War on the Post Office.
• Big Brother on Campus.
• The Wire: Season Six
• Austerity in Heaven’s Corridor.
• Europe invents the Gypsies.
• To Camp or Not to Camp? That is Occupy’s Question.
• This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids.
• Whose Public Safety? Trayvon Martin and Neighborhood Watch.
• Trayvon Martin and the History of Lynching.

Trayvon Martin, White America, and the Return of Dred Scott.

Martin was killed because white people are afraid of black people.

Laurie Penny reflects on race, class, and the Million Hoodie March.

The third British empire: the offshore financial empire.

A homeless woman is arrested at a hospital for trespassing, then dies in jail.

I haven’t read/watched The Hunger Games, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share:

• Some racist fans are pissed that they were duped into caring about a black character.
• And some thoughts on affective labor, femininity, and compulsory heterosexuality.
• Value-seeking surveillance in The Hunger Games.
• Could the economy of Panem exist in a real country?

Changes in the Colombian student movement.

Gandalf saves The Hobbit Pub.

One man is planning to walk down every street in New York’s five boroughs.

An abortion clinic’s landlord turns the tables on protesters. Of course the protesters escalated.

On what fact checking means in America today:

Increasingly, for American readers, there are no mistakes, only covert ideologies. And out of necessity, TV networks, newspapers, and some magazines have bought into this mentality wholesale, serving up laborious platters of “fair and balanced” to consumers who lack the will and perhaps also the capacity to engage in any critical analysis of the information they are fed. They compete with one another on the terrain of “accuracy” and “neutrality.” And it is because the U.S. media is so obsessed with its own so-called objectivity that predatory checking — an offshoot of the traditional checking in newsrooms and magazines — has dominated the discourse. Checking is no longer just a link in the editorial sausage machine; it is an integral part of the public political discourse and a fixture in American popular culture. An army of professional and citizen fact-checkers have taken the process out of the newsroom and into the open.

This new wave of checkers — what the Times public editor famously called “vigilantes” — are different from the editors and aspiring writers at newspapers and magazines who silently bulletproof the stories their magazines publish (Peter Canby, the New Yorker’s head of fact checking, has acknowledged that “checkers are distinguished only by their mistakes.”)  The vigilantes work with a very different goal. They’re guerrillas; they live to pounce, to catch their enemies at their most vulnerable moments, and to parade their heads around on a stick, declaring smugly: untruth!

Middle class occupation protests in the U.S. and Israel.

The U.S. Student Association enters the era of the Occupy movement.

Why the MPAA doesn’t want your kid to see Bully.

Harvard students speak out about the media’s bad job reporting their detainment in Palestine.

From the new Journal of Occupied Studies, some thoughts on OWS:

“On the People’s Mic” by Ryan Ruby

“Uncritical Faculties” by Eric Lohman

“They Are Not Afraid” by Jeremy Varon:

As I get back into groove of blogging, I think it’s just about time for some weekend reading, don’t you?

Malcolm Harris writes a brilliant piece at The New Inquiry on Occupy Wall Street as a generational crisis.

Angus Johnston supplements the argument by breaking down critiques of college privilege.

The American Right is all culture war, all the time – from contraception to foreign policy to education.

In 80 years, 93% of seed varieties went extinct.

The adjunct problem is every professor’s problem.

How to talk to young black boys about Trayvon Martin.

Barbara Ehrenreich argues that we need to rediscover poverty.

The nation’s richest have benefited the most from the recovery, which isn’t how things happened after the Great Depression.

Investment Banking Sucks Everywhere, Including Canada.

Canada’s most recent scandal appeals to our immature sense of humor.

An al Qaeda media strategist wrote that Fox sucks, CNN is better, and MSNBC shouldn’t have fired Olbermann, in the greatest act of trolling ever.

Meritocracy and Measurement Myths.

The U.S. continues to keep secrets, punish whistle blowers, and kill citizens ten years after the War on Terror.

On Hearts and Minds in the War in Afghanistan:

It’s hard to spot the end of a war that had no coherent mission and no measurable progress from the beginning, but I’d say this is looking quite a bit like the endpoint. There appears to be little left for the US military to do but turn everything over to the sparse, corrupt, and weak Afghan government and then pull up stakes in the middle of the night and disappear. It’s eerie how we were just talking about the Fall of Saigon a week ago; we may be re-enacting something similar in the near future.

Will anyone even notice? Have the GOP candidates – or any candidate for Congress, for that matter – devoted anything but token attention and interest to Afghanistan? No, they’re all breathlessly laying out plans to start a war with Iran, taking care to stand behind the podium to hide their erections. The war nobody paid attention to, fought for reasons Afghans didn’t understand and toward ends that Americans couldn’t define, will finally get the full attention of the political system…when the candidates decide that it will be a convenient excuse to call Obama a quitter, pansy, cheese-eating surrender monkey, and betrayer of the American way.

A changing of the flag triggers debate over nation and religion in Tunisia.

The Invention of the Savage: Colonial Exhibitions and the Staging of the Arab Spring.

Republicans won’t be talking about the real reason gas prices are going up.

Some Occupy protesters are having their bail set based on whether or not they will submit to iris scan photographs.

Mike Daisey has something in common with Greg Mortenson and Tom MacMaster, but also with Jimmy McNulty of The Wire.

Rep. Darrell Issa thinks that banks couldn’t help engaging in foreclosure fraud.

Some notes on the coup in Mali that happened on Wednesday:

• Alex Thurston on the coup.
• And why we shouldn’t be so surprised by what’s happening.
• The Coup in Mali Will Make the Tuareg Rebellion Harder to Resolve.
• Some more thoughts on Mali at Africa is a Country.
• Mali’s Colonel Coup Syndrome.

An in-depth report on the failed “grand bargain” debt ceiling talks reveals the change in negotiations last summer.

Sady Doyle identifies with Sarah Palin after watching Game Change, and reflects on how she is portrayed:

Politically minded reviewers have called the Palin character “narcissistic.” You can find support for that theory in the real-life Sarah Palin, certainly. But I don’t think you can find it in this movie. This Palin isn’t self-aggrandizing; she’s needy. She bases her self-concept entirely on how other people react to her. When she watches Tina Fey portray her on Saturday Night Live, she’s mortified; when she sees people criticizing her on the news, she breaks down. When it gets really bad, she can’t speak, or look anyone in the eye; she just folds in on herself and stops functioning. And when she’s trying to stave off a breakdown, she’s stuck in a petty rage that no doubt feels like strength; she hates the world that hates her, because that’s her only way to convince herself that they’re wrong, that she still has worth.

But when she’s with her supporters, or when she receives praise, or when she’s with people who actually do like her, such as her family — which is rare, due to the campaign; the movie barely touches on this, what it means for her to be separated from her new baby, or what it means that her son has recently deployed to Iraq, but it’s an ever-present part of the subtext — she’s an entirely different person. You can see her sucking it in, like oxygen; becoming more centered, and charming, and confident, and functional.

At one point, after her debate with Biden, the movie shows her watching late coverage, and landing on Pat Buchanan praising her for being “attractive” and “personable.” She can’t look away. It’s the first nice thing she’s heard about herself in months, and she takes it in with terrible hunger. She looks at Pat fucking Buchanan like a starving person looking at a plate full of cheeseburgers.

A report on fuel smuggling from Nigeria to Togo, Benin and the rest of West Africa.

Military STD posters from WWI and WWII.

An effort to understand the al Shabaab/al Qaeda merger.

Did George Zimmerman abuse 911 calls?

How not to study gender in the Middle East.

George Clooney got arrested, but he isn’t helping Sudan.

State legislators want the government out of your business, unless your business is ladybusiness.

Going the full Cantor – on Israel’s special place as a US ally.

I’ve been on Spring Break and away from a properly functioning computer, so I apologize for this shorter edition of the usual weekend reading.

The problem with talking about abstract jobs.

It looks like the 1% had a fantastic 2010!

The science of altruism, and how bankers aren’t as good as ants.

People Who Think Carl Weathers in Joseph Kony.

Rush Limbaugh doesn’t want men to be forced to think about women and contraceptives.

The Deep Roots of the Birth Control Debate: The Confederates wanted to control women as much as they wanted to control slaves.

Where do African prints come from? Not Africa.

The most insane letter written by a child to a weatherman.

Of course Disney’s first black princess represents watermelon.

A video of what the hula hoop sees.

Three different crises in higher education affordability.

Historicizing the conservative think tank, with regards to the Koch-Cato debate.

The difficulties of academic commuting.

Gay marriage and birth control in the same debate.

Take the birth control battle over the counter.

And the GOP’s birth control McCarthyism.

Got some time? Do some reading:

Welcome to the Kickstarter page for the Greek government, whose motto is “release the Kraken!”

History is being used as a weapon in Tucson, Arizona and in Silwan, East Jerusalem.

The long shadow of the Vietnam War on America.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross does a preliminary evaluation of the intervention in Libya.

From Safe Zones to Where? A look at why we shouldn’t support safe zones in Syria.

I was a warehouse wage slave.

A new report that over 500 people have been killed by law enforcement using Tasers since 2001. This story is replete with really chilling accounts of unarmed people being shocked for little to no reason, for example:

Pikes did not resist arrest, and he was handcuffed while lying on the ground, according to Nugent’s police report of the incident. It was only after Pikes refused Nugent’s command to stand up that the officer applied the first Taser shock in the middle of his back, Nugent wrote.

Several more Taser shocks followed quickly, Nugent stated, because Pikes kept falling down and refusing to get back up. Grocery shoppers who witnessed the incident later told Pikes’ family that he had pleaded with Nugent: “Please, you all got me. Please don’t Tase me again.”

[Coroner] Williams said police records showed Nugent administered nine Taser shocks to Pikes over a 14-minute period. The last two jolts, delivered as police pulled Pikes from a patrol car at the police station, elicited no reaction because the suspect was unconscious…

The Biblical view that abortion is murder is younger than the Happy Meal.

Rich people are more likely to steal candy from a baby, among other transgressions.

The hilarious live-tweeting of a food coop meeting.

A plea to Presidential candidates: Skip the Auto Plant.

The Death March of the Moderates in the Senate.

Geology and the lexicon of democratic transitions.

On transvaginal ultrasounds and consent:

We should definitely stop calling a coercive penetration of a woman’s vagina irrespective of its necessity what it actually is—a sexual assault—because anti-choicers who don’t give a shit about women might mendaciously try to make hay with it.

Oh, and also because women and other people with uteri are too stupid to understand the difference between: A. Potentially medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds mandated by laymen who want to try to persuade women not to terminate an unwanted pregnancy; and B. Medically necessary transvaginal ultrasounds recommended by a trained medical professional who want to help women terminate an unwanted pregnancy in the safest and most effective way.

Gee, sorry if I scared you and your silly ladybrains by treating you as if you have agency and the capacity to understand the concept of consent!

“Why strike? Why march? Why occupy?” A preview of what’s happening in California– and why.

Floral X-Rays are super pretty, that is all.

From UC Davis: Neoliberal Universities, Banks, and the Professors Who Love Them.

From Civil War to Civil Rights.

The seven worst international aid ideas.

A new look at how to watch the Star Wars saga.

On Brazilian action movies and Colonel Nascimento’s War.

Statfor is a Joke and so is Wikileaks for Taking it Seriously.

The “right” and “left” are arbitrary in the climate debate.

A political story with legs – on Mitt Romney and his roof-tied dog, Seamus.

According to police that think it’s pertinent to spy on Muslim communities, these are locations requiring further examination.

On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses; or Why Chancellors Say Stuff Like That:

…The brick-and-mortar campus languishes while Chancellor Birgeneau and Dean Edley chart a new agenda for the university by turning to for-profit online education and corporate tech parks as models for the future “space” of UC-Berkeley. And this is a transformative course: both the online UC and UC-Zhangjiang Tech Park jettison the arts, humanities and social sciences almost from before the very beginning. In the case of the online university, this streamlining comes as a result of a curriculum that only offers courses lending themselves to online format, typically ones that rely upon rote memorization. Biotech research initiatives that may turn into degree-granting programs focus on securing agreements with multinational corporations and Chinese national labs, but defer consideration of the programs’ educational mission until after research plans are well under way. As a result, both programs fit education to available technology and available funding (or funding that is promised to be available).

It should not surprise us, therefore, that plans to corporatize and technologize the university have been coupled with an accompanying disinvestment from and disinterest in the current space of the university. As a result, the coincidence of police brutality on the Berkeley campus and the chancellor’s trip abroad points to more than a series of logistical missteps on the part of an administration physically distanced from the university campus. It stems from a deep, structural lack of concern for the future of the current UC-Berkeley, both the campus itself and the students it serves.

It should not, therefore, surprise us too much that while police are paid to beat students in the name of “health and safety,” the university can’t even pay people to pick up trash on campus anymore.

When asked, for example, about what students might miss out on when they “go to class” at the computer screen in their bedrooms instead of on an actual campus, Dean Edley opined,  “What you won’t get? There won’t be beer bashes, yeah.” That’s right: college campuses are only good for keggers. If you shared my initial response to this statement – an inclination to forgive what must have been a misguided and altogether regrettable slip of the tongue – Edley has reiterated and defended his views on multiple occasions. And Dean Edley’s disregard for the current university is matched only by that of UC President Mark Yudoff who confided to the New York Times that “being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery.”

These are not just examples of administrative rhetoric at its most hyperbolic, or of “down-to-earth” men speaking off the cuff. This is who they are. The language we use to describe our world reflects our understanding of its contours, and of how we want to shape that world’s future. And so, to sum up: in Dean Edley’s words, the university campus is value-less ground; in President Yudoff’s, it’s a dead wasteland. These are precisely the sorts of imaginative de-populations of the university that underwrite Chancellor Birgeneau’s ability to describe UC-Berkeley students as “intruders” and then send in riot police to forcibly remove them. In the interests of “hygiene and safety,” administrative regulations aggressively and violently champion the banal, and in so doing, they actively foster the exact campus atmosphere which allows them to dismiss university culture as value-less – and so move towards privatizing it. The space of the university campus is not only good for nothing; the space must be rigorously protected so that it becomes good for nothing.

A short note on the impact of the NYPD’s decision to spy on Muslim students.

Africa’s Dirty Wars, a review of William Reno’s Warfare in Independent Africa.

Mining in the DRC: Bad Business and Backroom Deals and Has Due Diligence Helped?

Hiring hit men online is a real thing, apparently. Although it’s a little different from Horrible Bosses.

Jeremy Lin has overcome the stereotype threat.

And of course the excitement about Lin has to do with race, but it’s not all smiles.

How Twitter Helped a US Mom in Central Asia Find a Cancer Doc for Her Son.

When you’re talking about Boko Haram and al Shabaab’s foreign fighters, how do you define foreign?

David Frum and Ta-Nehisi Coates write about Andrew Breitbart.

Julian Assange and Europe’s Last Dictator.

Sexism in the video game community shouldn’t be acceptable:

If sexual harassment is such an intrinsic part of your community that it can’t be taken out without “turning it into something that it’s not,” then just as a rule of thumb, it probably should be turned into something that it’s not.

If your community can’t introduce a baseline of respect for another human being without being destroyed, then your community should probably be burned to the ground and have salt spread on the ashes so that it’ll never come back.

An Asian-American guy ended up on TIME’s Latino voter cover story.

Witchcraft and the British media.

The weekend reading continues marching forward, with these links in this order:

An architectural history of Zuccotti Park and One Liberty Plaza.

Police use Twitter to fight crime in Kenya.

The Fire Next Time: The Comayagua Prison Fire and Khader Adnan

Two Kinds of Non-Violence.

The conclusions should be clear. There are two kinds of non-violence. One is an ever-changing and ethereal rhetorical construct used largely to deligitimate popular struggles. The other is a practice that involves the risk of injury, death or imprisonment. In short, almost any simple political protest of the kind that are undertaken in the West without much forethought, is a non-violent act of civil disobedience when undertaken by people under despotic military rule like the West Bank. Real—not rhetorical—non-violence, is truly threatening to the established order of things. Incredibly self-less acts like those of Adnan are its ultimate, most devastating expression. And exactly why they can never be defined as such by the world’s governments or liberal non-violence proponents.

The undue weight of truth on Wikipedia.

Laura Seay takes a look at the damage Nick Kristof is doing in South Kordofan. Tom Murphy had this to add about South Kordofan and Darfur. Daniel Solomon, national director at STAND, agrees. All three are worth reading.

This obituary includes rowing across the Atlantic and the Pacific, shooting at Boy Scouts, killing jaguars, attempting to get killed by a jaguar, being a pirate, and running a mink farm.

On Jeremy Lin on ESPN’s Accidental Racism.

Books + tweezers + surgical tools.

Opinions on what we should miss from the days when salad was a jello.

Dining After “Downton Abbey,” when British food culture was hit by austerity.

Students at UC Davis are suing their university over the pepper spray incident from last fall.

Every sentence Bart Simpson has written on the chalkboard.

More on how the culture war never ended, this time from Andrew Hartman at USIH.

Why do clicks in the English language sound different from those in Xhosa?

A despicable ad in Georgia shames fat children to “spark debate:”

I am so sick of this “at least we got people talking about it” and “the debate means we achieved our goal” defense of indefensible ads. We heard it with Pete Hoekstra’s racist political ad, too: It doesn’t matter what we say or how we say it, as long as people talk about it–even if that talk is, “Holy crap, this is inappropriate.”

Or if that talk is, “Honey, I had no idea that being fat was ruining your childhood. It’s time for you to stop eating so much.” Or if it’s, “I’m eating nothing and exercising all the time–why am I not skinny enough?” Or if it’s, “I’m so disgusting. I deserve everything that comes to me.” Being arresting at the expense of kids and starting a conversation at the expense of kids is worth the potential trauma.

To Children’s [the organization], it’s worth it to have ads that give kids ammo to hate themselves and give their classmates–and, hell, even their parents–ammo to bully them. It’s okay that the ads fall back on the standard trope that fat just comes from eating too much and “fat prevention … begins at the buffet line.” It doesn’t matter that the ads ostensibly target parents but put woebegone fat kids front and center, as long as it gets people talking.

Occupy continues to win victories.

Thoughts on a word: nappy.

“Anyone who visits Bahrain and never gets a whiff of tear gas is a poor tourist, indeed.”

There are morning people and night owls, but what do people do in the afternoon?

Before the Industrial Age, people used to be early birds and night owls.

A glossary of terms relating to the many types of Roman prostitutes.

Changes in French policy in Africa:

From the early days of independence many people said that France had been a more successful decoloniser than Britain because Francophone countries were more stable and prosperous. The fact was that France had never left. Behind every minister’s door would be a French official paid for by France making sure that the minister knew what he was supposed to be doing. And near every presidential palace would be a garrison of French soldiers or legionaires in case a mob (or the country’s own soldiers) decided to cause trouble. The currencies of the former French colonies were linked to and supported by the French franc and then the Euro. French companies treated Africa’s resources as their own and French presidents could summon votes at the UN with a simple phone call.

Thinking About Thinking About War.

What is a student loan?

“No Mas!”: Inside the Dismantling of Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Program, Part I and Part II.

United Citizens vs. Citizens United – a look at the effort to nullify the ruling via amendment.

This NBA player has no country.

Towards a Sustainable Margaritaville:

And yet I fear that our children might not grow up in the same Margaritaville we’ve been able to enjoy. A Margaritaville where you can get shithoused on a quiet jetty and think about what it would be like to get a dolphin high. A Margaritaville where you can take a dump on a snow-white sand dune and swear at a baby pelican. A Margaritaville where college dropouts, irrespective of race or creed, can listen to Pink Floyd and dry-hump below a rainbow. These are the experiences I cherish, and I know that I am not alone.

Now, I realize what I’m about to say might not make me the most popular man in town, but I just want to pose a simple question to you all. Which human organ parties the hardest? A lot of you might say the genitals. Others, the face area. But I would argue that the hardiest party in the human body is in our hearts. And I’m asking you to use your hearts in securing a brighter future for our town.

Twitter connections are like air traffic.

Crooked Timber is holding a seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years:

• Chris Bertram’s introduction
• The Unmourned Death of the Double Coincidence
• The World Economy is not a Tribute System
• Debt Jubilee or Global Deleveraging?
• The End of Debt?
• The Return of Grand Narrative in the Human Sciences
• The Dangers of Pricing the Infinite

Why Studying Africa is Good for You.

China’s Ghost Cities.

Portrait of the Artist as a Rookie Cop.

What happens when you swap the audio for Lego commercials for boys and for girls?

This video installation blew my mind – a new twist on a camera facing a screen.