Weekend Reading

The weekend is right about to start, which means you’ve got some reading to do.

Some occupation reading:

• What if blue-collar workers support Occupy Wall Street?
• Aaron Bady on the homeless and the unemployed at Occupy Oakland, and how some journalists only see rats.
• And also on how the city’s narrative spins, from ignoring the Occupy Oakland to allowing it to evicting it.
• On finding diversity in Liberty Square.
• Looking for a way to use money to spread information? Enter Occupy George, a really creative idea to inform others, actually.
• And if you want even more infographics, Occupy Design.
• The dogs of Occupy Wall Street, as seen at right.
• The Move On march at Occupy Oakland – protests within protests.
• Frank Ogawa Plaza isn’t just an occupation, it’s a community.
• Occupying LaLa Land in LA.
• Maybe it should be “we are the 30%?” – a short look at who is unhappy in Canada.
• Shit is fucked up and bullshit. Srsly.
• Some might want to rise up against the man, but what if we just prove that we don’t need the man anymore?
• Reflections from the Spanish assemblies for the Occupy movement.

And for non-occupied news:
Remember when the police raided UC activists occupying Wheeler Hall? Several students have sued the university!

The Canadian crimes plan, from Texas’ perspective.

This is how easy it is for the US Government to read your e-mail.

How important is Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, anyways?

On white feminists using the n-word.

From Thursday morning, the post-Qaddafi journalism you will read over the next 72 hours.

In a similar vein, headline predictions for the Ohio exotic animal incident.

Working in menial labor is worse for your mental health than being unemployed.

When it comes to central governments, maybe Somalia doesn’t need it.

So I guess students with speech impediments aren’t supposed to talk in class?

We’re already doing it to Earth, let’s mine the fuck out of the moon!

Some men are so baffled by lesbians, they refuse to believe they exist.

A history of Schadenfreude, and other Germanisms.

Anita Hill, twenty years later.

If you’re selling stuff on eBay, does it matter what race you are?

What’s with these black women being all unmarried and stuff? Let’s get them married and fix all our problems!

Looks like Alabama’s unemployed aren’t ready to take the jobs that the undocumented workers were stealing from them.

And this Alabama deli owner was tarred and feathered for defending legal, documented workers. Way to be.

Wrangling university faculty is harder than herding cats, even with num nums.

Weekend Reading

After an inexplicable week off, here are some things for you to read. For starters, lots of Occupy Wall Street (and other place names) links:

OWS: Now with Dozens of Graphs!

Robert Reich on Occupy Wall Street and the Democratic Party.

Paul Krugman on why Wall Street is freaking out.

What Boston and New York say about the movement’s expansion.

What do all of these encampment protests want? “Real democracy now!”

On the General Assembly in Liberty Plaza.

In Boston, who is really threatening the people and the land? Hint: They have riot helmets on.

Occupy Wall Street needs demands about as much as SNCC did.

50 best signs from Wall St.

Photos from Occupy _____________.

A terse little timeline of the OWS movement.

The Onion gets in on the action.

Did you ever think that maybe the anarchists want to stay off the sidewalk and in the street?

Occupy Los Angeles is getting co-opted by pretty much everyone, including the City Council.

The women at Occupy Boston are having trouble at the GA.

Dear Occupy Wall Street, With Solidarity.

On the growth phases of a social movement like OWS.

Occupy Atlanta needs to face the fact that race is a factor – and it always has been.

An open letter to the 53% guy.

America's Leadership in Nobel Sciences

And it’s worth noting that Hitler was a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize – twice.

And how the Nobel Prize for Literature is kind of silly.

If you read one thing from today’s links, read this post on the Reality of Threats and Blogging – do it now.

The truth about Steve Jobs.

With baseball and football occupying separate spaces nowadays, what to do with empty stadiums? Cleveland might have the answer.

The colors of the Apple line.

Arizona has two spots on this list of six places that look weird on Google maps.

The problem with fair trade coffee.

Herman Cain likes the “Chilean Model.” but it looks a little like “

Obamacare” if you ask me.

Does Ron Paul have fake eyebrows?

Four aid workers got kidnapped in Kenya, but the press only reported on the two international aid workers, ignoring the two Kenyans.

The most you’ll ever need to read about camouflage colors.

Reading the Bible frequently could make you liberal.

Iran tries to get into Africa, with a few bumps along the way.

Weekend Reading

While it’s still ungodly hot in Arizona, fall is supposedly on the way for most of you. If you’re not taking some time to step outside and enjoy the weather, you might as well take some time and stay inside reading the whole internets.

He hates children.

If you have to starve to death, it’s best to do it in a war-torn country.

David Scheffer applauds Kathryn Sikkink’s new book on international justice, kind of.

The Post Office “crisis” was actually made by Congress, and the USPS could save itself if they let it.

Instead of just updating his Facebook status, this photographer told people he was going to be a dad in person – and photographed it.

America is slowly losing its client states.

When it comes to the digital humanities, it’s not the “job market,” but the profession.

Last weekend, Greek students occupied the state television studio to make their statement.

Having trouble finding the time to protest something that you kind of care about? This Dutch company will hire some Africans to protest for you!

The due-process-free assassination of US citizens is now reality.

How important is it that Anwar al Awlaki is dead?

The most racist thing that’s ever happened to me:

Modern racism is a much more subtle, nuanced, slippery beast than its father or grandfather were. It has ways of making itself seem to not exist, which can drive you crazy trying to prove its existence sometimes. You’re in Target. Is the security guard following you? You’re not sure. You think he is but you can’t be certain. Maybe the guard is black, so if you tried to explain it to a white friend they might not understand it as racist, but the guard’s boss isn’t black. Or maybe he is. Maybe what you’re feeling are his ashamed vibes as if he’s sending you a silent signal of apology for following you. Or maybe . . . now you’re looking for the Tylenol for migraines when you all you needed was toothpaste.

And that’s one of the basest examples of racism. That says nothing of the constellation of anxieties that could flash through you when the stakes are high–when you’re applying for a job or competing for a promotion, or applying to a school, buying a house, or asking for a loan. When you’re wondering if the white person who appears less qualified got the promotion because they were actually better than you or because they were better at networking upper management, or someone wrongly assumed you’re not as good because you’re black or . . .

I asked my 105 interviewees, What is the most racist thing that has ever happened to you? The response I received most often was indicative of modern racism: The answer is unknowable. “I imagine it’d be a thing I don’t even know ever happened,” Aaron McGruder said. “It would be that opportunity that never manifested and I’ll never know that it was even possible.” A decision is made in a back room or a high-level office, perhaps by someone you’ll never see, about whether or not you get a job or a home loan or admission to a school. Or perhaps you’ll never be allowed to know that a home in a certain area or a job is available. This is how modern institutional racism functions and it can weigh on and shape a black person differently than the more overt, simplistic racism of the past did.

A brief history of the income tax.

A breakdown of how America is criminalizing poverty during a recession.

What Borders employees finally told their customers.

Why you should definitely not see Machine Gun Preacher.

Officials in the Philippines photoshopped themselves into disaster relief photos.

Mindy Kaling writes about how unrealistic romantic comedies are, including some easy-to-recognize characters:

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

This week, the Daily Cal celebrated 40 years since becoming an independent student paper.

House Subcommittee launches an extensive investigation into Planned Parenthood because an anti-abortion group asked it to.

“I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one.”

Hey, what ever happened to all those Libyan surface-to-air missiles? Oh yeah, they’re missing.

A documentary on Qaddafi’s arms dealing includes startling real footage from the IRA in 1988 a new video game.

Where did Salva Kiir get his ten gallon hat? George W. Bush, probably.

Students and teachers commemorate the first Banned Websites Awareness Day.

Bill Easterly is keeping tabs on the World Bank.

A piece by Ursus Wherli, click for more!

A veteran deals with returning to college life at Georgetown.

How a fellow at Newsweek conned his way to free hotels and flights – and then scammed a tech company.

This is what happens when a female reporter does some polite joking in her sports column, and I am ashamed in Buffalo fans. I’m glad she put it out in public, but these people are horrendously sexist and terribly mean.

Marketing versus branding in the Ugandan elections this year.

Carnegie Mellon professors are protesting their university’s partnership with Rwanda.

I don’t know why there is a flip-the-plane-over-and-dive button in the cockpit, but you shouldn’t press it.

Apparently Amazon is just as bad a giant company as the rest of them, if not worse:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

The supply of temporary workers keeps Amazon’s warehouse fully staffed without the expense of a permanent workforce that expects raises and good benefits. Using temporary employees in general also helps reduce the prospect that employees will organize a union that pushes for better treatment because the employees are in constant flux, labor experts say. And Amazon limits its liability for workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance because most of the workers don’t work for Amazon, they work for the temp agency.

This is just a neat video by Amy Walker in which she does 21 accents, including the always-great Transatlantic Accent!

A handy index of rude hand gestures.

Game theory, explained with hotel reviews.

Facebook’s new Timeline feature will be awesome for hackers.

And why one guy deleted his Facebook account.

What exactly did the Irvine 11 do?

In February 2010, as Oren began to speak about the U.S.-Israeli relationship at a campus speech, the students rose one-by-one to object to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. One shouted, “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!” As the offender was removed from the audience, a designated compatriot shouted, “You, sir, are an accomplice to genocide!” And so on. According to an attorney for one of the students, the longest of the interruptions lasted roughly 8 seconds, and the total amount of time taken up by their outbursts—combined—was roughly one minute.

StudentActivism.net ran all sorts of stories on UC activism this week, click away:

• The Irvine 11, in the context of the UC crackdowns
• The College Republicans at Berkeley had an Affirmative Action Bake Sale
• Prosecutions of UC students continue

Why one professor wanted to buy all of the cupcakes at the Affirmative Action Bake Sale.

Tactical thoughts on Occupy Wall Street.

The case of magical penis theft has yet to be solved.

The President visits Washington, California, and a Square State!

Our government pretty much doesn’t function anymore, in which Gin and Tacos expands on David Frum’s piece on CNN about American governance.

Mali is steadily moving forwards to being a full-fledged democracy. Hopefully the international community will help see it happen.

The White House confuses Wyoming with the other rectangular state.

Wait, we don’t give aid to countries because they need it? How about because they like us?

I guess American troops aren’t going to get medals from the Iraqi government.

Weekend Reading

Here’s another edition of weekly reading! I hope you find something worth clicking.

Rachel Strohm has a series of Hipstamatic photos from Ghana, replete with advertising, nationalism, education, and more. Feel free to click the stadium to see the whole series.

A funny and witty critique of the aid dollar naysayers – why you shouldn’t donate your bras.

This is a few weeks old, but it’s worth linking to. The World Trade Center as portrayed in comic books.

A course in U.S. military history reveals the challenges of military life – and the need for better programs and policies for returning veterans.

What these students needed was personal catharsis, but I am not a trained psychologist. What these students craved was the opportunity to express their anger or pain, but my class was not the place to do it.

Student veterans are not a homogeneous lot, and I would never use a broad brush to paint them all as unstable or troubled, but any reasonably observant person could see that beneath their quiet demeanor, politeness, and deference, some were visibly scarred. Students find me accessible, and I listened sympathetically to each one. I feel for these young people and what they have endured. Many shared photos and stories with me, and some showed me their physical scars. My heart goes out to them, but a course in military history is not an appropriate place for a therapy session. Since I foresee no diminution of this problem, and indeed believe it will intensify significantly over the next decade, I have decided that I can no longer teach the course.

My classroom experience suggests that universities must intensify their search for ways to help our student veterans and their loved ones confront their emotional distress rather than leave those tasks to academics who lack the appropriate professional training. I can’t imagine a more important university priority.

Did the native inhabitants of Easter Island really commit ecological suicide? Here’s a busted myth.

How Whole Foods “primes” you to shop (although just about every grocery store does a lot of this).

Mother Jones has a list of some of the gutsiest student newspapers, which has some interesting stories in it.

I’m assuming you’ve read at least one article about children growing up with autism. There’s a great read at NYT about adults with autism.

Esquire has a really interesting profile on Jon Stewart (you should read the whole thing) that has this to say:

Kids who couldn’t sleep at night worrying that their president was a bad guyand that their country was doing bad things could now rest easy knowing that their president was just a dick, and that their country, while stupid, was still essentially innocent. It was like you could get upset about what was going on but still live your life, because there was Jon Stewart right before bedtime, showing you how to get upset entertainingly, how to give a shit without having to do anything about it.

When he protests that he’s a comedian, he’s not escaping from the collective fantasy. He’s feeding it. The collective fantasy, you see, is not just about Jon Stewart, it’s about America, especially liberal America, and its need for redeemers to rise out of its ranks. Jon Stewart’s just a comedian the way gunslingers in old westerns are really peaceable sodbusters who hate all that bloodshed and all that killin’ but finally have to strap on them six-guns and march on into town.

What matters is that even when Stewart’s a dick, he is never the dick. It is Stewart’s unique talent for coming across as decent and well-meaning when he’s bullying and hectoring and self-righteous. And this is because his talent is not just for comedy and not just for media criticism or truth-telling; it’s for being — for remaining — likable.

Three days before a crucial election, Jon Stewart had stood in America’s most symbolic public space and given a speech to two hundred thousand people. The speech wasn’t about his need to be a player or his need for power or his need for influence. It wasn’t about getting out the vote or telling people to vote in a certain way. It was about Jon Stewart — about his need for another kind of out. For years, his out had been his comedy. Now it was his sincerity — his evenhandedness, his ability to rise above politics, his goodness.

In Somalia, al Shabab had a contest for kids with prizes including AK-47s and hand grenades. Thelatest scary fact about al Shabab.

An analysis of some the museums of Vilnius, Lithuania.

The Santa Cruz Police Department is using algorithms to predict crime. Could give a whole new meaning to “wrong place, wrong time.”

The recession and how it hits community colleges.

Charles Larson, on Right-Wing Terrorism in the U.S.:

Tax cuts, unfunded wars, lax oversight of banks and Wall Street, the massive redistribution of wealth in the country trickling upward (against gravity) from the middle class to the upper class (particularly the super elite)—all these events combined over several decades have done significantly more damage to the United States than the terrorism on 9/11.  Even the three thousand plus deaths on that day cannot equal the suicides of traumatized veterans and of the newly poor, the havoc brought to a generation of children living in broken homes, in families where jobs have been lost, and the tens of thousands of people now living in sub-standard housing or on the streets.

Apparently if you charge $1 for non-patrons to use the restroom,you’ll end up in a fight and getting arrested.

I’m glad somebody else noticed the utter lack of women writers at the Emmy’s.

And also why we should keep talking about why there aren’t more women in Silicon Valley.

One of Ten Myths about Affirmative Action:

As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America’s top schools are white students who failed to meet their university’s minimum standards for admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. These kids are “people with a long-standing relationship with the university,” or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy alumni and politicians.

According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited from affirmative action.

Weekend Reading

Here’s your weekly edition of links in no particular order.

Why are carrots orange? Because of the Dutch.

Also, ugly fruits are making a comeback in Europe.

Where is the densest urban environment in the world? You’d be surprised.

What happens when a taxidermist who has never seen a lion tries to stuff one? Hilarity ensues, that’s what.

What did Martin Luther King, Jr. really do? And what did he and his colleagues in the Civil Rights movement really achieve?

This is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished.  Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing “The Help,” may not understand what this was all about.  But living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea.  Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them.  You all know about lynching.  But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running.  It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

So what did they do?

They told us: — whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it.  Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.

Go ahead sit at that lunch counter.  Sue the local school board.  All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.

If we do it all together, we’ll be OK.

They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad.  They taught black people how to take a beating — from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses.  They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating.  They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.

Photos of the construction of the US Capitol, via How to Be a Retronaut

Is the freelancing trend as big as the Industrial Revolution?

Did Americans have British accents in 1776? Or did the British have American accents?

Twitter loves you for who you are.

I don’t know what this says about the glory of the internet, but you should watch this video. And if you are a least bit amused, watch these parodies. I sure can’t promise you’ll be glad you did, but I know I am.

Here’s the latest on why teachers are still under-appreciated and underpaid.

Also from Gin & Tacos, why we should learn from past tragedies instead of just “never forgetting” them.

A rite of passage for world leaders, for example, is the pilgrimage to Auschwitz. And people the world over know that the Holocaust is not to be forgotten. But what lesson do the solemn-faced presidents and Popes and prime ministers take away from their tour of the camps? What is it that we Don’t Forget about the Holocaust? For most people the lesson of the Holocaust is not to vote for anyone covered in swastikas and wearing a cartoon villain toothbrush mustache. The lesson is that if anyone proposes herding people into cattle cars, trucking them to a rural area, gassing them, and putting them in crematoria, we should do something to stop it. We have learned those rather useless lessons very well. What we haven’t learned, of course, is anything about the root causes and warning signs of fascism, the gruesome result of taking socio-political scapegoating and segregation to its logical conclusion, or the consequences of failing to accept our fundamental equality on the most basic human level. We learn that Nazis are evil and go back to railing against the immigrants or the fags or the poor or the dark people or whoever else we see as our social inferiors. It’s not just possible to remember something without learning anything from it – it’s remarkably easy.

The Borders African History Paradigm exists across the Atlantic too.

David from PhD Octopus has been traveling through Eastern Europe, which has led to some pretty good blogging, including posts on the history of towns and the history of family.

Internet is faster in Rhode Island than the rest of the country.

Car drivers don’t hate mass transit as much as they thought they did.

Chapati Mystery has a pair of posts on anti-Turk, anti-Muslim sentiment in Berlin, with startling anecdote.

Speaking of anti-Muslim, apparently the FBI thinks pious Muslims are more likely to be violent. And here’s a photo of one of the slides.

Apparently UC Irvine thought it was necessary to run anti-occupation training on campus.

Weekend Reading

After what turned into a few weeks’ hiatus, here are a few things worth reading for the weekend. I started off with some contemporary pieces of news I’ve been digesting, but the further you go the more likely you are to notice that I’ve been running through my backlog of favorite’d links from the summer. Either way, I hope you find something interesting.

Last week was Labor Day, but labor has all but disappeared from the public discourse:

In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital — resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point — and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.

The colors of Crayola, from 1903 to now, with a pretty chart.

That Groupon deal for tuition in Chicago? It’s just another marketing scheme for a school that sold its name to the last big donor.

Welcome to Booker, Texas! Unless you’re Al Jazeera.

From McSweeney’s – A Post Gender Normative Man Tries to Pick Up a Woman at a Bar:

Crazy news about the first female African head of state and Liberia’s sitting president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, huh? Announcing her candidacy for 2011 so soon! Wow. What do you think of her chances? I think she’s a shoo-in, but I’m admittedly a bit concerned about Prince Johnson making some last minute strides, especially amongst the Gio people in the Nimba region. I’m thinking of launching a letter writing campaign on behalf of EJ-S or at least cold calling potential Nimba voters over Skype.

Oh, how gauche of me! I’ve just been chattering away incessantly like some kind of boy or girl who talks a lot. I haven’t even properly introduced myself. Although, one often gets the uneasy sense that patriarchy dictates a learned and ultimately damaging order of events with men taking an unearned lead. My name is Terri, with a heart over the i, instead of a dot. I have a heart, is what that says, and I’m not afraid to wear it on my sleeve.

So what do you think? Would you like to take me up on my offer for you to buy me that drink?

If you would like to respond, that would be wonderful. Of course, if you would like to continue to sit here silently, staring at me with that powerful gaze, which both breaks gender constructs and also scares me a bit, that would be fine as well.

Texas in Africa recently interviewed Zachariah Mampilly about the release of his new book, Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War.

What Teachers Really Want to Tell Parents.

In case you didn’t hear, the United State Postal Service is close to shutting down completely.

The “visible hand” of Google, both metaphorically and a literal hand in a Google Books page, on the book industry:

In such circumstances, the failure of public institutions gives rise to the circular logic that dominates political debate. Public institutions can fail; public institutions need tax revenue; therefore we must reduce the support for public institutions. The resulting failures then supply more anecdotes supporting the view that public institutions fail by design rather than by political choice.

[…]

Google officials, promoting their effort to scan millions of books purchased with public money [e.g. University of California, University of Michigan —N.C.] and donated by shortsighted universities, claimed they were trying to preserve libraries and perform an essential public service—just the sort of service that our great university libraries could have been working toward had they been allowed to succeed. Publicly supported institutions fail, so we leap into the arms of the private actor, ready to believe its sweet nothings.

The hand–always the synecdoche for the worker (the mediator between the head and the hand, we learn in Metropolis, must be the heart)–is inserted literally into our view of the text, disrupting for a moment our sense that Google Books are, quite simply, books that have been “put online,” as if books themselves could simply leap media and enter a disembodied realm. The intrusion of the hand shows us that these are photographs (of a sort) and that someone must have made them.

In an inversion of our usual intuition that images are less mediated than text, these hands make us realize that Google Books made us feel as though digital texts were unmediated–were the books themselves. In contrast, the awareness that the digital object is an OCRed image of text–a photograph of its own scene of production, complete with visual evidence of the hand that wrought it–forces us to acknowledge the strange backwards ekphrasis (text to image to fallen, “corrupted” text–OCR is a silent diplomatic edition) in a Google Book, the labor by which it was created and uploaded, and the person who labored, now knowable only through the operative, synecdochal appendages that both create and corrupt the digital object.

What happens when you celebrate your birthday on facebook three times in one month?

I’m assuming you heard about the college student who joined the Libyan rebels for fun.

From April, The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

Weekend Reading

This is supposed to be my third installment in weekend reading. Instead, it’s a measley few links and it’s already the end of the weekend. Read if you’d like, and definitely follow through that last link to a massive link-dump that should carry you through the next few weeks. There probably won’t be a reading post next weekend, as I’ll be roaming the Capitol. Without further ado, read!

Mike Cosgrave takes a look at how to use Twitter in research as a historian, with the Arab Spring as an example.

Tired of everyone with a PhD telling you not to go to grad school? Jsench is, and he put together a brilliant post, chronicling why he’s happy with his decision. While I barely finished my undergrad, I feel some kind of connection with his view on why he went to grad school. It’s a long read, but it’s well worth it.

After protesting a land auction in 2008, Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to 2 years in jail and a $10,000 fine. If you want to read a little more into the action, there is a good summary at Politics Outdoors. What’s really worth reading – and you should take the time to read the whole thing – is DeChristopher’s closing statement in court:

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice.  Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code.  I know Mr Huber disagrees with me on this.  He wrote that “The rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.”  That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience.  Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice.  The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.

And that’s about it. In closing, you should spend the rest of your weekend perusing ZunguZungu’s Sunday Reading – let’s be honest, I would have plucked a fair few readings from there anyways.

Weekend Reading

Trying to keep to my commitment, here is a second edition of weekend reading. First off, a link to NYT’s slideshow of same-sex weddings that happened on Sunday, the first day marriages were legalized in that state.

A piece on Norway after the 22nd, that has a really powerful message and a tiny glimpse of Norway.

By now, you have probably heard about the mother who crossed a street illegally and how her son was killed in a hit-and-run. And about how she was charged with vehicular homicide. If you haven’t, that’s an incredibly shortened version of the background for a critique of urban planning.

As our economy continues to teeter (and maybe collapse, thanks to the debt debate), there’s a good argument for what our real unemployment looks like, including a few important clarifications:

Through the neat accounting trick of reclassifying the long-term unemployed (6 months or more) as no longer part of the workforce is based on the quaint notion that anyone unemployed for half a year has stopped trying to find a job. The official rate, then, masks a shadow population of long-term unemployed that, if counted, would likely double the official rate.

The never-reported U6 unemployment rate, which accounts for long-term and “discouraged” unemployed, is currently hovering between 16% and 17%compared to the official (U3) rate of about 9.5%. An honest economist will tell you that even the government’s U6 rate is understated, as there are a greater number of long-term unemployed (including some who have never been employed) floating around outside of what we define as the labor force. If we could really count everyone – unemployed, part timers who can’t find full time, discouraged workers who have stopped trying, etc. – we’re probably looking at something like 1 in 5 adults who could be working but are not.

Consider this unremarkable, back page news item about automaker BMW’s distribution center in California. It is being closed and outsourced. Were it outsourced to a foreign country, its employees would probably end up in the unemployment statistics eventually (for a short time, if nothing else). It isn’t heading to Mexico, though. The distribution center is being outsourced to a contractor that will operate the warehouse with the usual perks of subcontracting – namely a high turnover, $9/hr workforce – instead of the 20+ year veteran BMW employees.

The unemployment numbers over which we all obsess do nothing to capture what happened here, and what happened here is more damaging to the macroeconomy than plain old unemployment. There’s no net job loss. It’s merely a transition from 75 good jobs to 75 shit ones, from 75 people who are productive in the economy to 75 who live paycheck-to-paycheck as the working poor.

And on top of the unemployment crisis – we’re in a wage crisis too. Despite companies having huge profit margins, labor wages are at a 50-year low relative to company sales and national GDP.

Juan Cole on why the ideology of the terrorist in Norway isn’t surprising at all.

Here is a review of Somewhere in America and a thorough look at poverty in contemporary America:

Since at least the 80s, Reaganite economic policy has created a growing underclass of Americans, who have largely seemed invisible to American society. For a brief moment in 2009, Mahardige remembers, journalists were interested in the tent cities springing up outside of cities in California and Florida. But they wanted to hear about people who had just lost their jobs. In fact, most of the residents had been struggling for years, even during the supposedly good times of the 90s. The Crash simply broke the camel’s back.

In some ways its an underclass whose lives seem familiar to us: the men and women who ride railroads, sleep under bridges, squat in abandoned factories, hover outside of overcrowded breadlines, and drift from town to town drawn by rumors of work seem all reminiscent of Woody Guthrie songs and John Steinbeck novels. But it also deeply alien to see it today, which is why many of the most jaring photographs juxtapose images of 21st century American consumption (a Kenny Rogers ad, a faded Office Depot sign, a Wal-Mart, etc…) next to images of 21st century poverty, to familiarize us with a phenomenon we were told doesn’t exist anymore. Suburbanization and the creation of highways has, to a large degree, pushed this poverty out of sight. The poverty rate in the suburbs, where poverty tends to be much less visible, has been skyrocketing.

True poverty, Maharidge points out, takes some time to kick in. At first, when people lost their jobs in Youngstown, they survived. Some found new jobs, others accepted lower pay. Many drifted on unemployment or disability. But eventually these supports dry up, and the longer you’re out of work, the harder it is to get new employment. You are evicted or foreclosed, your family or friend gets sick of you crashing with them, and you move on. Maybe you hear about an opportunity a couple of towns over, but can’t afford a hotel room or a deposit on a rental. So you begin sleeping in your car. Gas and maintenance becomes too much, so you hitch or walk. Many sell blood or begin scrounging food from wastebins, at first in moments of despair, later as an everyday activity. The embarrassment and stress gets to people, who begin abusing drugs or alcohol. Many are victims of theft, murder, or rape, and rarely do the police investigate.

As the Great Recession continues (and it is continuing for most people…) the middle class is falling into the lower class, the lower class falling into the poor, and the poor falling off the social map into the informal economy of scrounging, subsistence farming, petty thievery, homelessness, prostitution, and the like. There are almost certainly more Americans who live like this then, say, Americans who watch the Daily Show. Mahardige and Williamson introduce us to “Edge men,” people who have completely given up on the prospect of employment, and squat or set up tents outside of cities, to live permanently outside of society. With years of high unemployment, and millions of so called ‘99ers approaching the end of their benefits, we better get used to seeing these people.

Is Obama the Democrats’ Nixon?

The House GOP use a clip from The Town to get votes. Ben Affleck is as confused as I am.

The funniest parody letter from The Rainbow Shiek to Americans. Seriously. Read it. It has this in it:

I GOT 99 PROBLEMS AND GETTING MY NAME INSCRIBED IN MY OWN PRIVATE ISLAND AIN’T ONE.

Ever since Airminded used the Google Books ngram viewer, I have become intrigued. Expect more use in the future, but in the meantime, from Airminded: what did people call the 1914-1919 war in Europe?

And last but not least, a piece in the New Yorker about Rwanda’s cycling team.

Weekend Reading

There are a handful of blogs that provide some “Sunday reading,” and I’m thinking about joining the fray. That said, one day is not always enough to do all of that reading! So, I’m introducing something that may or may not become commonplace on this blog. I’d like to provide a few links to help you fill your otherwise-empty weekends. And so – feel free to click ahead and read on!

A Northeaster goes to a medical center in Fresno:

It became clear to me that as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care. The staff there don’t spend much time working up a more nuanced picture on initial evaluation because they don’t want one. They don’t efficiently discard the cases of people who’ve left the facility because they’re stalling the remainder deliberately.

The basic problem faced by this hospital and many others is structurally serious and requires a strong nationally consistent solution. Given that one political party struggled to formulate a fussy, detail-strangled series of half-measures to address the problem and the other party apparently thinks there isn’t any issue in the first place, I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life.

This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition isdecline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been seen more quickly in similar facilities in both Africa and Europe.

Otto von Habsburg, the very last heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire passed away this month, and he lived a pretty busy life that’s worth reading about – including working to open the Iron Curtain and serving as a member of the European Parliament.

The writing habits of some famous authors, including Capote, Hemingway, and others.

Millicent has an in-depth article on Hairpin about the history of how women lived in the 17th century (without bras).

HNN has a post that took the words right out of my mouth: “Why Teaching For America is Not Welcome in My Classroom”, which mirrors my thoughts on the program, albeit more eloquent:

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially-conscious person can make.  Nor do they encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career; indeed, the organization goes out of its way to make joining TFA seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher-paying professions.

Three years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.”  The message of that flyer was “use teaching in high-poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.”  It was not only profoundly disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America—other than its contempt for lifetime educators—is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged in the rapidly expanding educational-industrial complex, which already offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well-connected.  An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

A  slideshow of the top ten “Let them eat cake” moments in the current recession, including “shut up and cope with it.”

A passionfruit at 32x magnification. Click the photo for other up-close shots, including an Oreo!

The California prison system’s hunger strike against Pelican Bay is rounding out week three, with prisoners refusing medical care on top of refusing food. But, of course, earlier this week the Department of Corrections seems to think that gangs are the root of the problem and not their atrocious policies, including solitary confinement as a means to extract information. Strange, that.

The Retronaut gives us a glimpse of New York panoramas from the dawn of the twentieth century.

Tim Burke, like some others, gets sick of tinkering with liberal politics (and the debt-ceiling debates), with some great critiques of liberal discussion and this great summary of the current debate:

In terms of the debt ceiling issue in specific, I feel like this is sort of the Cuban Missile Crisis of my middle-aged life and you know what? At this point I almost just want them to get it over with and fire off the policy nukes. Just go ahead and wreck it all, because if we’ve come to the point where there’s a significant political faction with real social foundations that so thoroughly hates its fever-dream boogeyman vision of “government” that nothing else and no one else matters, we’re just going to be stuck right at a perpetual blockade line, a permanent schism. Taken in isolation from the larger story of the last two decades, this moment alone is completely WTF crazy. You have one side in a negotiation whose primary policy objective they’re pushing for is, “Not allowing an almost certain meltdown of the global financial system in the next six months” and the other side saying, “If you want to get your narrow-minded policy objective, the prevention of a major global catastrophe, you’re going to have to eliminate most of the federal government and re-establish the gold standard and maybe resign from office too if we decide to really stick it to you. Hey, that’s what bargaining is all about, you gotta give some to get what you want.” It’s as if the opposition had told FDR he’d have to make major political concessions before they’d allow him to declare war on Japan after Pearl Harbor.

And a look at why Obama should stop comparing his compromises to Lincoln, from Wiz at PhD Octopus:

But these are minor squabbles. The meat of Obama’s argument is that the Emanciaption Proclamation was a compromise from Lincoln’s lofty ideals, but he (like Obama) was willing to make it because he would achieve the Good rather than fail at the Perfect.

Here’s the problem: The Emancipation Proclamation was not a compromise for Lincoln. He had neverpreviously stated that he could or would abolish slavery in the Southern states. When he ran for president, he was clear that he would not abolish slavery. In his first Inaugral Address he said:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

The Emancipation Proclamation, when he signed it, was a move to the left for Lincoln, not a compromise on fundamental principles. In response to abolitionist pressure, the “General Strike” of runaway slaves, and the general revolutionary logic of the Civil War, Lincoln moved slowly to the left over his presidency.

On the other hand, when faced with a situation when he was called upon to compromise the core principles that he had run on, he showed a remarkable backbone. Before the war actually started, when hardline southerners had already seceded, there were numerous calls- from Seward among others- to pass some sort of compromise which would placate the South and avoid war. This movement coalesced around the Crittenden Compromise, which if it had passed, would have, among other things, guaranteed slavery below the 36° 30′ line for perpetuity (It’d sure be interesting if Los Angeles was a slave city, huh?). It was sort of the master “Grand Bargain” of the day.

Lincoln had ran on the platform of Free Soil, and so he took an admirably hardline stance on this issue, refusing to endorse any compromise that might end secession in return for the extension of slavery.