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Hey, mutants deserve fame, too. And pizza, of course.

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Because I want you all to get arteriosclerosis and die. But happy.

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To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.”

I’m sure she does. How would you like to go through life with a name like ‘Zunshine’?

Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?

An even more fundamental question is, Who the hell cares?

At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift.

Oh, yes, I forgot: Tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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An al-Qaeda death squad dressed in military uniforms stormed homes in a suburb of south Baghdad and killed up to 25 people including women and children, Iraqi authorities said.

And people complain that al-Qaeda don’t wear uniforms….

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A Dutch Moroccan policeman, lionized for his service to the Netherlands and presented as a shining example of an “assimilated” immigrant, turns out to be a spy for Morocco. Under pressure from the land of his ethnic heritage, he agreed to pass on secret information (possibly about fellow Dutch Moroccans) to Moroccan intelligence.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

People tend to forget (because they don’t think that way, and can’t understand how anybody could think that way about something so peripheral as religion) that Muslims are loyal to Islam and fellow Muslims before all else, certainly before whatever Dar-al-Harb country they might be living in for the time being.

In the Good Old Days people used their common sense and realized this sort of thing as a potential problem and, for example, never really fully trusted ethnic German, Italian, and Japanese during World War II. But in these degenerate modern times we are no longer permitted to use common sense but must all do the happy-clappy Diversity Dance, hoping that keep our eyes closed we’ll be invisible to the evil men who live to kill us.

We have a new comic strip link. It’s on the right, beneath Frazz (although only in a positional sense).

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And why ought it? The Bible isn’t intended as history but as moral instruction. One could as pointlessly worry about the ‘discrepancies’ in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables. Either you get the point or you don’t — and, sadly, the Lame Stream Media typically don’t.

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What would you do if you only had half a body? Well, of course you would get all tatted up and dress like a dork. That’s obvious.

Gina Trapani speaks for me.

Next year’s iPad will be faster, cheaper, less buggy, and have better apps and worthy competitors. Let all the deep-pocketed Jobs apostles be your canaries into the iPad coalmine. Give developers time to fix their apps to work well on the iPad. Give Apple a year to lower prices on faster hardware and fill in all the gaping feature holes. (Remember how long early iPhone owners lived without copy and paste?)

Hear, hear.

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A distillation of all the things you know unconsciously but probably never had the inclination to put together. We do these things so that you don’t have to.

Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion.

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A distillation of the Crustian worldview. Usually they aren’t this honest.

What’s wrong with this picture? Air America vanishes into the ether, while Glenn Beck indoctrinates 2.7 million daily viewers with his histrionic brand of right-wing lunacy. Independent news agencies must continuously solicit donations from readers to stay afloat, while hate-filled shock jock Rush Limbaugh makes $50 million a year.

Of course, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this picture in the eyes of anybody who realizes that broadcasting is a business and in that business those who produce content that people are willing to pay for will win out of people who don’t. ‘Progressives’ are champions at refusing to accept this reality and feel moved to make up their own facts to substitute for those that the world hands them. (Anybody who can call Rush Limbaugh a ‘shock jock’ with a straight face has so tenuous a connection with reality that it’s probably a medical condition.)

The Nation and TheNation.com are part of a progressive journalistic community that is challenging the right in every medium.

To massive yawns. That’s what burns their asses the most, and leads to the meme that The People are just too stupid to know what’s good for them. Funny how that works.

Below are ten steps you can take to help keep progressive journalism alive:….

Needless to say, it’s also a great blueprint for resisting ‘progressive’ journalism. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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There’s a reason most of us aren’t Cory Doctorow. We don’t want to open up our devices. We don’t want to hack them. We want them to just goddamned work, thanks, and if gluing the case shut makes that possible, bring on the Elmers.

Hate that as much as you want, old-school corner-cases, but it’s the future, it always has been. It’s called “progress,” the continual refinement of the social contract. And it’s no more a betrayal of something vital than any other decision made in rational self-interest. Make your arguments about DRM and closed systems and “Wal-Martization”, but they still don’t come anywhere close to tipping the scale. The iPad (or something like it) is the future of computing for an enormous slice of the population — despite all its political and philosophical flaws — because it’s a pretty goddamned great future. It’s a future that we want.

There is a not-always-visible tension inside the Avante Garde between people who are self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ politically and socially but who are closet libertarians technologically, and those who carry the ‘progressive’ I-Love-Big-Brother corporatist mindset through to its logical conclusion. This appears to be a rant by one of the latter ripping (en passant) one of the former. It’s pretty amusing, and also very illuminating regarding the practical effects of the ‘progressive’ point of view.

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The president, who promised in both word and style to usher in a “new era” of Washington “responsibility,” routinely says things that aren’t true and supports initiatives that break campaign promises. When called on it, he mostly keeps digging. And when obliged to explain why American voters are turning so sharply away from his party and his policies, Obama pins the blame not on his own deviations from verity but on his failure to “explain” things “more clearly to the American people.”

But, really, he’s so clean….

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The eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle famously castigated economics as “the dismal science.” The epithet first appeared in his 1849 screed, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” — in which the “humanist” attacked free-market economists for their role in the anti-slavery movement. For Carlyle and “progressives” such as John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, economics was dismal because it sought to replace hierarchy with democracy.

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The anti-capitalism view is an ideological fixture of our education systems at every level, from grade to graduate school.  We could call it orthodoxy if it were not so much like boilerplate.  It’s not so much argued as assumed.

Capitalism doesn’t have heroes.  It doesn’t have people called to higher motives.  It doesn’t have noble sacrifices for the good of others.  It doesn’t, usually, have daring action on a public stage.

No, capitalism is just has some guy who owns a handful of dry cleaning outfits in a small town in New Hampshire.  He works hard, supplies a service, pays off his loans, coaches Little League, goes to church, gets his kids through college, and spends his very few disposable hours on the golf course.

Script!  Casting!  Some one call the studio!   This is appalling.  It doesn’t matter that out of these mundane activities in lots of towns big and small, played out by millions of people across the US, something remarkable will come.  This just isn’t a story anyone wants to listen to.  So no one much wants to tell it.  Not Hollywood.  Not our mythmakers.  Not our story tellers.

Highly recommended.

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Apparently ace werewolf-story writer Carrie Vaughn is in the SCA.

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As is true in most times of structural change, those who figure it out (or stumble on the right answer due to a happy accident, which happens far more often – go, Darwin) will make money and survive, and the rest will fall off the cliff yelling on the way down, ‘But he doesn’t know the territory!’

Ian Murray turns over the rock.

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report  into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.

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Whatever the new problem, environmentalists always end up back at the same old ‘solutions.’ No matter how many times green gloom is discredited, lapsing into the old eco-fundamentalism is just too irresistible.

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But it’s off-Broadway, so nobody cares.

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Texas has strict rules on home-equity lending, relative to other states, and this has helped to prevent ratios of loan size  to home value from rising as high as they have elsewhere. This is certainly worth thinking about in considering potential changes in the regulatory environment. A word of caution, however—it’s very easy to underplay the importance of both the relative strength of the Texas economy and the advantage of not having a significant housing bubble.

A lot of it’s just being a red state.

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If you think about it for a moment, you’ll figure out the source of this seeming paradox (although this simple insight did not occur to anyone before Feld published his paper in 1991).  You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends. There are 12 people who have a friend who has 12 friends, but there is only one person who has a friend who has only one friend.  And, of course, there is no one who has a friend who doesn’t have any friend.  Yet there is actually only one person who has 12 friends.  So “12” gets counted only once when you compute the average number of friends that people have, but it gets counted 12 times when you compute the average number of friends that their friends have.  Hence the seeming paradox that your friends have more friends than you do.

Happy to be here, dragging down the average for everybody.

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I’m looking forward to one that can iron shirts.

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As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie.

The Other McCain overturns a rock.

Drew M. at Ace of Spades says John Cornyn is “starting to go wobbly,” which involves the wholly unwarranted assumption that Cornyn was ever steady to begin with.

Over and over, we have seen recently that Republican “leadership” in Washington is a joke, their cowardice exceeded only by their incompetence.

Preach it, brother.

Disgusting.

Another of the reasons I never practiced law.

Heh.

Getting your comeuppance in internet time. This is a great time to be alive.

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One of the reasons to have hearings on legislation is that so people who comb through it can point out hidden traps, ambiguous language, unintended consequences, etc. But large parts of the Senate bill on health care that went into law were written behind closed doors. And it shows.

Quelle surprise.

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This is one of the silliest SWPL debates I’ve ever seen in print. Read it for a laugh. Then weep for our culture. (Then take a nap if you can find a proper bard to finish the set for you.)

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Most people want cheap. Some people can only afford cheap. Walmart helps people maximize the return from their financial resources and all it gets is crap from the Crust.

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Just sayin’.