(CNN) – Occupy activists tossed pipes, bottles, burning flares and other objects Saturday at Oakland police, who responded by using tear gas and smoke grenades and arresting more than 100 demonstrators, city and police officials said.

Now, I have no difficulty believing that at least a few protesters threw things at the police, though we should also be extremely skeptical; they always say that, and it’s at least usually not true (or at least wildly exaggerated). But while I had an obstructed view of those events – and I know what I did and didn’t see – it’s very easy for you, when you read a news article like CNN’s, to not see the most important clause in the article, the last one, “city and officials said.” This indicates for you (or should) that CNN is essentially doing to OPD’s press release the same thing that desperate college students sometimes do with wikipedia articles: copy and paste, and then change just enough words so that it isn’t plagiarism. CNN was not there yesterday, so they only saw what the Oakland Police Department told them to see. OPD wrote this:

Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares.

And then CNN wrote down a garbled version of it. Similarly, they took this paragraph from the OPD press release:

By 12 pm, a crowd of approximately 250 had gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza for the Occupy rally. Just before 1:30 pm, the group started marching southbound on Broadway. As the group of approximately 450 marched, traffic disruptions occurred on downtown streets.

And (slightly) re-wrote it as:

The tension began Saturday around noon when about 250 activists gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza. They were joined later by another 200 people as they marched around the city.

They turned “12 pm” into “around noon” and they copied down OPD’s crowd estimates exactly (ABC7 guessed 2,000; I would have guessed about a thousand), and slightly altered the wording to cover their trail. After that, to their credit, they found the time to copy and paste text from the Occupy Oakland twitter feed and web site. And then they called it a day and went home, apparently; while real journalists were still being arrested while doing their jobs (Susie Cagle and Gavin Aronsen were both arrested, despite having press passes, then later “unarrested”), the good people at CNN were finished putting the imprimateur of “objective” journalism on OPD’s press release, and laughed all the way to the bank.

Pretty much exactly the same thing happened with the New York Times article, which has exactly the same architecture: liberal excerpts/paraphrasing from OPD press release, followed by copied text from activist social media. Even the Oakland Tribune managed to not only paraphrase the OPD press release  – and they’re a terrible newspaper, but still, they’re right there – but also to get the time of the weekly march wrong:

In what has become a weekly march, about 250 protesters gathered around noon at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza for a rally. At 1:30 p.m., the group began marching with a crowd of about 450 protesters. Forty-five minutes later, some of the marchers entered the campus of Laney College, city officials said. That was when police first fired tear gas, a witness said. At 2:50 p.m., marchers began tearing down perimeter fences around the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, city officials said. Police declared an unlawful assembly and fired more tear gas. Witnesses said police fired rubber bullets after protesters began hurling items at them.

That error (the weekly marches happen at night) is so pointless, and yet also such a rookie mistake that it gives the game away. To make that mistake, you have to know almost nothing about what’s going on in Oakland. And the repetition of the same numbers and times should start to feel like what it is, an activity utterly empty of anything like professional journalism. The fact that all of these “journalists” repeat the same ridiculous crowd number, march times, etc isn’t just an indication of their tendency to downplay activist mobilization; its an index of their basic and fundamental worthlessness as news sources. They’re just copying and pasting. Or take the line “some of the marchers entered the campus of Laney College,” another phrase lifted directly from the OPD press release: almost all of the marchers got to the Kaiser center by marching through Laney. It’s not important, but there’s no “some” about it; virtually all of us got to the Kaiser center by marching through Laney and anyone who was there would know this. It isn’t just that there are errors, or that these errors are small and pointless; it’s that the level of non-knowledge required to produce these texts is huge: these articles are what they are as a function of the total distance and disconnect from what actually happened and a total dependence on being told what happened by the Police press officer (and an inability to do anything more than write that down, and slightly change the word order to cover their tracks).

This is a small post; I will write more later. For now, this: I don’t know everything that happened yesterday; I know what I saw and what I didn’t see. But if you only read the NY Times, CNN, and the Oakland Tribune, you won’t even have the benefit of knowing what they don’t know. Which is a whole hell of a lot.

You can read about Occupy Oakland Move-in Day here. The press conference will be at 10:00 a.m. PST and will be live-streamed here, I believe (about an hour from now, when I am); I’ll post a link to any video I find (EDIT: here’s the move-in committee’s open letter to the Mayor) .

Building occupations are becoming more common in the occupy movement, but — unless I’m mistaken — this is the first one that has been heavily publicized in advance of the action itself (albeit with the exception of the location). And while this is an effort to mobilize supporters to defend the action, a way to counteract the force that police have shown themselves willing and able to use against protesters and occupiers, it seems reasonable to expect that the Oakland Police Department will be out in force on Saturday, once the location of the building to be occupied is announced. Somehow I expect that duty rotations have been organized with this weekend in mind.

I have no idea how it will play out, but with all that in mind, this announcement (see also here) seems remarkably timed; OPD has been under federal scrutiny for years now, ever since running completely wild in 2003, and the threat of a federal government take-over of the department suddenly looms:

Frustrated and “in disbelief” by what he called the slow pace of reform, a federal judge on Tuesday ordered Oakland’s top cop to notify an expert overseeing the Police Department about anything that could affect a federal consent decree, including promoting or disciplining officers and changing policies or tactics.

In ordering interim Police Chief Howard Jordan to “regularly consult” with independent monitor Robert Warshaw, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson acknowledged that he was giving considerably more responsibility to Warshaw…

Jim Chanin, an attorney for the civil plaintiffs in the Riders case, said the judge’s order represents “a major sea change from before. Before it was just an option, and now it’s a court order. Every major decision that the chief makes, he has to consult with the monitor. This is radically different.”

You can read the monitor’s quarterly report here, if you like. It’s not a good time for them to be under increased scrutiny, to say the least. Or is it? Oakland city government may well welcome having law enforcement taken off their hands.

Socialism and/or Barbarianism has A Letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises (ht Gtiso):

(Photo poached from here, who poached it from here(and altered it))

• Sh!t the Dowager Countess Says
• Trader Joe’s: Real ethics means paying farm workers fairly
• Gluttony Goes Viral
• The awkward moment when you break the law you proposed
• “If a Pulitzer isn’t a guarantee that, at the very least, you won’t get canned tomorrow, then what good is it?”
• “One of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.”
• Biography Sideways
• MAKE, DARPA, and teens: A match made in hackerspace

Occupy San Francisco gets down to business:

Act II of the Occupy Wall Street movement, San Francisco version, kicked off on a rainy, blustery Friday in the heart of the city’s financial district. Targeting specific corporations like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and emphasizing real, tangible issues like home foreclosures, affordable health care and education as well as broader ones like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, several hundred protesters – the exact number was impossible to estimate – fanned out across the city, snarling traffic, getting arrested, holding sidewalk teach-ins, and generally serving notice that after its brief winter hibernation, the Occupy movement was back and kicking.

Occupiers Close BoA, Hold Off Police for 10 Hours:

‎”It started out small. It was, to be fair, the most miserable day weather-wise in the Bay Area since the Occupy Movement began. Ask yourself this — would YOU get up at 5:00 AM and go out in the cold rain to watch a giant vampire squid and a black blob, or to sit on cold concrete in front of a bank?

By noon there were perhaps 1000 people spread out over the Financial District; by 6:00 PM, there were two or three times that. It was a day of a few rallies, but mostly smaller actions at banks, the courts and federal buildings. Foreclosures and Citizens’ United were the day’s standout villains.”

A Timeline of “Occupy Wall Street West” today, in SF.

Unpacking Homelessness on Occupy Oakland Move-In Day:

On December 28, in the midst of Occupy Oakland’s continuing battle against the city and OPD at Oscar Grant Plaza, another kind of Occupation battlewas taking place in Sacramento, largely out of sight of both activists and media. Homeless campers were experiencing another raid, as police cleared out their encampment. Despite the fact that Sacramento’s shelters are at full capacity already, the city nevertheless used anti-camping ordinances to clear the camp and scatter homeless people to the city’s doorways and park benches. The action by Sacramento’s city government and police parallels the cynical raids on homeless encampments throughout the last decade in Oakland and other parts of the East Bay.

The sensational focus on one Occupation, but not the other, borne of necessity, speaks to some of the artificial borders that have been set up in the mainstream Occupy conversation. After all, Occupy is often represented as a movement of middle class liberals, assuming a symbolic “homelessness” to bring attention to a small range of problems that have become the focus of attention in the last decade—the sub-prime crisis, the failure of elected leaders to address this crisis, the lack of substantive creation of job security and the completion of the co-opting of the Democratic party. For this reason, the active participation of homeless people in various Occupy movements—and especially in Oakland—became a cause of confusion and concern in the early weeks of the Occupy movement. Homelessness remains such an integral part of the American economic and social system, that few progressives or liberals even view it as a political issue.

Emmanuel Iduma has three posts on the Nigerian revolution.

Chika Unigwe on Occupy Nigeria.

• Hand jive
• Black Cinema, Red Tails, and Pariah
• The Idiot’s Guide to fighting Dictatorship in Syria (and avoiding foreign intervention)
• Jeffrey Sconce’s sentences are resistant to excerpting and tweeting.
• Women’s versus People
• Shorter Joseph Stiglitz: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit”
• Bambi meets Godzilla: Higher education edition.
• Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Response to the NY Times

When a camera gets in between the cop and the person he’s beating on:

• SMS Holdings: The “Faith-Based,” Anti-Labor Company Behind Oakland’s Private Cops
• The Unholy Alliance of Monetary Expansion and Fiscal Austerity: More for those who have, less for those who don’t
• Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism
• How Reddit went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force.
• Kaneezes and Gholooms. “The history of slavery in Iran is long and complex…”
• The Getaway + Other Videos

SOPA, PIPA, MEGAUPLOAD:

• Digital Culture Wars (SOPA, PIPA)
• There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away
• Sopa and Pipa would create a consumption-only internet
• Internet Regulation and the economics of piracy
• The Internet Should Flex its Muscles More Often
• Megaupload Details Raise Significant Concerns About What DOJ Considers Evidence Of Criminal Behavior

The Workers are Animals. Let’s Replace Them with Robots”:

Among the billionaires at the vanguard of global capital, Terry Gou of Hon Hai (also known asFoxconn) deserves special recognition for his honesty. “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” said the chairman. His company has also begun building “an empire of robots” to replace a whining workforce.

• The Future is Female
• Time-lapse photography over Africa
• Kenya’s ‘Little Italy’
• Sex and Violence in Role Playing
• The Occupations in winter

• The Seen and the Unseen In Pakistan’s Economy
• “How war, markets and judiciously chosen twinsets saved Britain”:PennyRed‘s verdict on The Iron Lady
• Lights, camera, quick backflip: the eloquence of silent films
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on branding, charity, and class in Nigeria’s schools.

Expropriating the expropriated (1983-2009), or, Why It’s the Top 20 not Top 1% That Matter:

Spain’s “Indignados” and the Globalization of Dissent:

POSTSCRIPTS (Since, obviously, the links above are not nearly sufficient, I’ll put all the new links I add today, here, so you can find them in one place if you want to):

• New York Times Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands
• From the Archives: Savage Minds vs. Jared Diamond
• The violence of history: 1971 and the silencing of women
• Paul Simon’s Graceland Reconsidered
• Returning Dignity to Mugshot Victims: Spotlight on Jane Lindsay
• The East offering its riches to Britannia
• “it’s surprising that people haven’t been more surprised by John Ashbery’s decision to undertake a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.”
• Martial Tribes and the Pakistan Army: A response to Aakar Patel
• The Return of Inequality: How the Occupy Movement Shifted Electoral Politics

The library did not close, and the students are still there this morning. Occupy Cal held a general assembly on one side of the space to discuss what to do next — which eventually reached the decision to vote on whether to take a decision now or later, and produced a perfect tie — and that eventually evolved into an interesting discussion between students and Anthropology faculty on what the role of faculty should be. I assume they’re still there. At some point last night a working group produced this statement on their occupation, which I reproduce in its entirety:

We love our libraries and are here to protect them. Libraries are critically important for excellent education for all. We students, faculty, and community members collectively have decided to occupy the Anthropology Library at UC Berkeley to protest the dismantling of the library system on campus and public education as a whole.

We chose to occupy this space because the Anthropology library is a recent victim of extreme service cuts. The hours of operation are being cut from the previous, already slim, 9am-6pm to the current 12pm-5pm, because the university has not taken the necessary steps to sufficiently staff the library. The multiple attacks on campus libraries are a reflection of privatization and the devaluation of the public education system.

We are here to reverse this process. We call on the administration to take immediate action to hire another full-time librarian to ensure full access to this valuable resource.

The administration may claim that there are insufficient funds, but in reality these resources exist, but their allocation by UC administrators and the state does not adequately reflect the values of excellent public education. Why have the UC Regents continued to approve 21% increases in administration salaries, while students are being denied access to their libraries? Why are the taxes of the 1% so low while essential social services are being cut across the state and country?

We stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement as a whole and the protestors at UC Riverside who were met with violence in their attempt to protest the austerity policies of the UC Regents, Sacramento, and Washington D.C.

Defend our libraries and schools. Occupy together.

— The Anthropology Library Occupation
January 19, 2012

Was this a symbolic protest? Was this a “real” occupation? What was accomplished? Was it a success? Perhaps the real measure of this particular occupation’s potency is that none of these questions are answerable. There  was a tent, and by the looks of it, someone was going to sleep inside of it. It is unclear whether this will be an ongoing occupation, or whether this was the first shot in a drawn out library campaign; much discussion last night centered on whether to make the anthropology library a focused encampment, ongoing, or to regularize a kind of roving library occupation in a different library each week. The problem is university-wide; as administrative salaries continue to bloat, library staff have been cut to the bone, to such an extent that when a single staff person took another job in December — as was explained last night — the Anthropology library had to cut its hours from 9-6 to 12 -5. But the severity of the Anthropology library’s situation is mirrored across campus, by design, where the administration is using natural attrition to cut personel, waiting for staff to leave and then declining to replace them. It’s the same story as everywhere else on campus, but as worthy a place as any other to fight encroaching neoliberalization of the campus. And there’s precedent; two years ago, Cal student protesters liberated this very library, in protest against the same kinds of cutbacks, and eventually got the funding replaced. And in many respects (as the organizers of that action have pointed out to me), that’s where the language of “Occupy [place]” first came from, albeit building on a long tradition of occupations elsewhere. However modest a victory it may have been — and may be — big things come from small places, and this semester is till young.

At the general assembly three days ago, a student spoke out in favor of the library occupation (one of the students who brought the initial proposal, I believe), by comparing it with Occupy Oakland’s upcoming occupation of a large building space — scheduled for the 28th of January — and argued that Occupy Cal would be part of setting a new trend in turning towards occupying buildings. We’ll see about that; Occupy Oakland’s plan “to occupy a large, vacant building and convert it into a social center,” will almost certainly be met with massive police violence, since occupying buildings has been a clear red line for local municipalities so far, and OPD has already established how they will respond to such things. Lots of occupiers have talked about turning away from occupying public spaces towards reclaiming buildings and houses (foreclosed and otherwise), but it’s still unclear to me how that will work, if it does; we’ll see what happens on the 28th. Occupy Oakland has a schedule of events posted for the 29th, but that feels a bit like a “the boys will be home by Christmas!” kind of optimism to me; I hope they will, but I’m not holding my breath either.

Occupy Cal’s library action is much more modest, of course, and by general consensus is meant to keep the library open for those who would normally use it, effectively by substituting Anthropology faculty volunteers for library staff. During the new “normal” operating hours, the library will operate as usual; only during the “liberated hours” will you see scenes like this (from BAMN’s post on the event):

I’d say about a dozen students were really studying the whole time I was there, but that’s also a not-inconsiderable number; it was a symbolic protest in one way — since most of the occupiers were not using the library as a library is normally used — but an impressive number actually were; the library is divided into two natural sections, and while one was filled with political discussion, general assemblying, and s forth, the other was filled with quiet students quietly working.

The library action was peaceful, though, at least in part because of its modest size and faculty intervention. In UC Riverside yesterday, student protesters were presented with the usual UC police violence, and we’ll see that again at Berkeley, I predict; the administration doesn’t like pictures of its police beating students, but it likes student protesters even less. Last night, though, there was none of that. The administration sent the chair of the Anthropology department a statement to read to the students, trying to make clear that the only reason they weren’t being subject to the usual police violence was the “supervisory” presence of the Anthro faculty, who are, in all likelihood, not going to be there forever (nor, some students argued, should they, except as protesters themselves). And so it will be interesting to see what the faculty do next, if they quietly recede into a non-presence as they have before.

Maybe they won’t, but we’ll see. These faculty were roundly thanked for their presences — and their mobilization was both quick and impressive — but their presences as “supervisory adults” was also not exactly in perfect harmony with the spirit of the action, and won’t be sustainable in the long term anyway. No actual administrators would come to read the administration statement themselves, after all — though they did send several completely conspicuous spies to observe and report on what was happening (conspicuous by their cloud of contempt and refusal to communicate with people round hem) — so Anthro faculty had to speak for the administration, an arrangement the administration no doubt enjoys. Act Two of this will be telling. As of now, though, nothing is happening… nothing except students occupying a library, reading, and being students.

UPDATE (Saturday, 1/21): via, the Kroeber Study-In Resolution declares:

Whereas, The George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library hours were cut this semester by close to 50%; and

Whereas, a policy of attrition is eroding all of our libraries and other vital student services; and

Whereas, the loss of resources and services has a detrimental effect on educational opportunities for students at this campus; and

Whereas, the University’s stated mission “is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge;” and, finally

Whereas, the University cannot fulfill this mission, or maintain its status as a premier learning environment, without the full functioning of, and access to, its exceptional libraries as they are pivotal in providing space for the sharing of knowledge and the free exchange of ideas; and

Be it resolved, we demand the restoration of the Anthropology Library hours to their Fall 2011 schedule; and

Be it further resolved, that we demand the proper staffing, funding, and foresight in order to maintain full operational capacity of all campus libraries; and

Be it finally resolved, that while you remain unwilling to maintain the normal operations of our library, we will keep the Anthropology Library open until our demands are met.

Learn more from Wikipedia. From the Electronic Freedom Foundation. From Google. From Boing Boing. From Reddit. From Mashable. From Craigslist. From Threat Level. From MIT Media Lab. And We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

• A Country’s Frustration, Fueled Overnight
• Nigeria: country tense as Jonathan accedes to some of fuel protestors’ demands
• Nigeria fuel strike ends with soldiers in streets
• Governor Fashola Condemns Deployment Of Soldiers In Lagos
• Soyinka Calls for ‘Immediate and Unconditional Removal’ of Soldiers From Lagos Streets
• Show me the Money
• ‘Nigerian Spring’ Here to Stay
• Wristwatch designer, other govt cronies got fuel import allocation
• Nigerian subsidy crisis opens window of opportunity
• Fuel Subsidy Removal: Nigerians Speak Ill
• Decolonising the Nigerian Constitution
• The Butchers Of Nigeria
• The Nigerian Strike: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• It is More than Just Subsidy

What was the Bad Thing? It doesn’t matter; it’s an arbitrary and senseless hand of God that enters the narrative and makes things shitty. Fire came and burned the father up, in point of fact, but he could as easily have drowned or been hit by a meteor or killed in the other Bad Thing that will happen later; the fire doesn’t matter in its particularity, any more than it matters why The Great War happens, or any of the other Bad Things that happen. A Bad Thing simply happened and then life got really scary and desperate.

It is important to notice this fairly simple fact, because this is what the narrative is about. The fact that the Bad Thing is arbitrary and senseless is not beside the point; it is the point. As Event, it signifies “arbitrariness.” And while it’s a clumsy bit of writing – deus ex machina being the cheapest form of authorial intrusion there is – that is also precisely the point. Arbitrary does not mean “random,” but something more like “subject to authorial will.” And this isn’t just a badly written movie (though, good lord, it is that); this is a movie that quite explicitly wants to elevate arbitrary authorial spectacle over the complex and contingent ambiguities of human existence, to quite nakedly and directly demand that we revere the Voice of the Author[ity] over the nuances of character. After all, this is a movie whose perverse dramatic climax is when the Director gets the Lifetime Achievement award, and we are meant to believe that Hugo would risk his life to help him do it (or, rather, to overlook the fact that he never would). It’s a bold move to write your Oscar acceptance speech into the film itself – casting Ben Kingsley to play you – but Scorsese, it appears, is a bold auteur: his characters are there to serve him.

It might be too much to call Hugo a fascist movie, in this sense, but I like the way the word feels on my tongue, here, the kind of association between spectacle and authority that it evokes (and consequential contempt and crass instrumentalization of those who are weak enough to be used). In any case, I hope the slippage in my language – between auteur, author, and authority – suffiently indexes the way this movie wants to make the author both the object of the spectacle, the master of the spectacle, and the primary subject of love and sympathy. For in doing so, it wants to make us forget people’s whose precariousness – whose subjection to the whims of the powerful – would make them not give two fucking shits about an old man’s battered ego, much less risking their entire existence to give it one last pump.

After all, something bizarre happens between the beginning of the movie, when we are watching Hugo try to survive in a desperately precarious place, and the end, when we are watching Hugo watching movies and a moviemaker. How on earth has the movie gone from the paradigmatic orphan plot to a Behind the Music documentary? How have we been tricked into thinking the real tragedy of the Bad Thing was that it hampered a director’s career?

Let us go back to where we start, and where we end: Hugo’s existence – post-Event – is profoundly ruled by arbitrary fate. He is contingent, utterly dependent on the unpredictably vaguaries of chance, etc. Hugo isn’t just metaphorically an undocumented worker. He’s actually quite literally an illegal alien, as Millicent pointed out to me; he may have blue eyes and the palest of pale skin – in yet another Parisian nostalgia film where brown people don’t exist – but let us add up the details: existing on the margins of official society, he keeps the machinery running without anyone knowing, lacks a secure right to exist or assurance that his job will continue, his livelihood is illegal (in that he must steal to live), and the police question his presence on sight and will arrest him if the truth is discovered. He is, in other words, the very embodiment of precarious life, a person whose ability to exist is so radically contingent on the visissitudes of random fate that his existence can’t have any independent meaning or coherence; he will simply be, but be fundamentally dependent for life on random chance, until random chance destroys him.

The reason this happened – the thing that caused him to be cast out of meaningful society, a permanent outlaw whose life can have no reliable or secure meaning – is itself essentially meangingless. No one started the fire. He’s not a Harry Potter whose parents were murdered. It just happened. And the result of that senseless event is: to be cast into a world of senselessness.

But at this point, there are two points to make. On the one hand, we’re at the level of very basic universals: Hugo’s Good life went away because of a Bad Thing, and that Bad Thing could happen again, at any time, and take away what little he has left. All that bullshit about movies and clocks and machines and magic tricks haven’t entered into the picture because they’re all essentially compensatory. Why is Hugo into movies? Because he and his father used to watch movies after his mother died. Why is he so into machinery and the automaton? Because it’s his connection to his dead father. The plot – a splendid and incoherent minefield of machines and clocks and movies and magic tricks and all sorts of great MacGuffins – is nothing more than Hugo’s attempt to deal with a reality defined by the absence of everything that is universally good, his effort to bring about a state of being where his life will be not bad. In other words, we have to reduce the movie down to its crude essence: Good Things and Bad Things. Drama! Loss! Pathos!

Which brings me to my second point: someone did start the fire. It was Martin Scorsese. All that bullshit about clocks and magic tricks is there to hide the simple fact that Scorsese’s movie has built us a perfect orphan, with a perfect orphan story, using fire and spectacle to do it. But this is purely functional necessity. For while the movie ends with the important rich director saving him – just as the important rich director put him in this mess in the first place – it turns out, obscenely, that the plight of this orphan was, itself, mere spectacle for us to enjoy feeling sorry for, and the real question in the film is whether we’ll remember that spectacle is the most important thing. Because somewhere in the middle, what is at stake in the narrative suddeny, seamlessly, becomes the question of whether important rich guy will get his proper due from society as an important guy. Martin Scorsese expects us to believe that the most marginalized and vulnerable member of society imaginable – Hugo – would suddenly, for no apparent reason, decide that what he truly needs to do is help an old man who has been, uniformly and without exception, cruel to him. He doesn’t just expect it; he takes for granted that in a movie which starts off being (essentially) about an undocumented alien trying to stay out of an ICE detention center, what we really need to be concerned about is the question of whether a great filmmaker will get lauded and praised for being great.

Underneath all of this, I want to suggest, is the realization (and repression) of the fact that “Martin Scorsese” is profoundly irrelevent to the world today. By putting him in quotation marks, I don’t mean Scorsese himself; I mean that “Famous Director Obsessed With Blurring the Boundaries Between Film History and Real History” is tremendously out of step with a world now defined not by glorious luxury, but by precarious workers whose lives are being destroyed by senseless Bad Things. We are (or he is afraid we are) the people who came back from the Bad Thing and stopped giving a shit about wonderful daydreams, a la the soldiers who came back from the Great War and stopped watching The Director’s movies. And by making Hugo’s narrative about this tragedy and its resolution – about the terrible fact that this is the case, and then building a dream world in which we look away from a terrible reality and fluff his ego as dream-maker once more – is it too much for me to note and to abhor how he has decided to put the focus on himself?  Is it too much to scramble around for the worst words you can find to describe a movie that starts with an incredibly powerful evocation of the fear, loneliness, and terror of useless and discarded life — the pain of being disallowed even to be a cog in the machine — and apply them to the filmmaker who would make that movie, ultimately, about how great it is to be on top of the pyramid, and how sad it is to not be on the very top any more? And then put himself back on top?

Fotoshop by Adobé:

• A Video Interview with Juan Cole on Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Tunisia
• Goodbye Ibrahim Aslan
• The afghan cameleers
• Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Unspoken Tragedy of Natalie Wood
• Sennett Bathing Beauties, 1915
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• The Unlikely Rise of Al-Jazeera
• Occupy Tampa to celebrate anniversary by targeting for-profit university
• So Say We All: Race and Battlestar Galactica
• Real isn’t Real
• A New Metaphor for Student Debt Burdens: Faculty Taxes

Vinay Lal, “The West is No Longer the Motor of History”:

Some lost correspondance between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson:

My Dear Thomas,

Greetings from Massachusetts! Weather here is pleasant enough, and the family is in excellent health. It is still most tremendous to think of the tireless work we committed to the building of this great nation. What young men we were, and what lofty dreams did we capture. On a separate note, I have enclosed several random Renderings. Many are of dogs. Some are of infant newborns. Yet more are of these very infants dressed to resemble dogs in costume. And still others depict small children dressed in dogs’ apparel.

I have the Honor to be &c

J. Adams

Amoun Sleem is one of the Domary, the Gypsy community of Jerusalem. As director of a local community center, she fights to help the women in her community to obtain education and economic independence:

• 6 Horrible Aftermaths Implied By Movies With Happy Endings
• The Image and the Imagined: On Why We’re not Allowed to see Detainee Abuse
• Crazy Great French Street Art
• How the Most Lopsided Trade in NBA History Explains the World
• My Life is True
• The Evil Economics of Judging Teachers
• Why You Should Never Talk to the Police : ”in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.”
• “I Was Shitting You People”: A Message From Ayn Rand
• In Praise of Footnotes (Polar Bear Cub/Anything But The Republicans Dept.)
• Seven essential qualities of open source
• “Rock” Raines and The Good Doctor
• Cairo’s City of the Dead
• Interview with Toumani Diabate
• The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: Vintage Arsenal of Masonic Pranksters
• President Obama, Where Is My “Half Glass”?
• The Passion of Tiger Woods
• Growing Up in the US
• The Best MLA I Didn’t Attend: Tweeting the Conference
• “Two years after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, where did the aid money go?”
• Out of the Tents and Into the Chambers and OPD Arrests Protesters for Lynching

Corporate Campuses:

The climate of mutual suspicion that the corporate contours of the university has produced reminds me of the late Erving Goffman’s notion of the total institution. In total institutions, human needs are under strict control — the university’s rules, regulations and administrative practices, which tend to be bureaucratic and impersonal. In total institutions individual autonomy is restricted and creativity can be seen as out of institutional bounds. In total institutions power is exercised hierarchically; it is not shared. On our corporate campuses frustrated professors have been beaten down. Most of us are grunts in a system with fewer and fewer intellectual payoffs. In the gloom our students, who deserve to be better educated, move from class to class hoping to earn enough credits to graduate with a bachelors degree in four, five, or perhaps six years. Have our university institutions prepared them to be informed citizens who will contribute positively to society?

• 30 years after The Distinction
• The Selling of Occupy Wall Street
• Cruise Control
• Recent thinking about scientific explanation
• Credit card firms don’t just steal from cardholders
• The Arabic Script in Africa
• The Economic Illiteracy of Economists
• Foxconn workers threaten mass suicide
• Dante: Near and Far
• Five Questions with Jack Balkin
• How to Spend It, and the economics of the useless
• An Interview with Josh Kosman on the Embeddedness of Private Equity in the Tax Code
• Fly By Night Journalism
• What Rick Santorum Doesn’t Know About Sex (But Was Afraid To Ask)
• Facebook Gives Politico Deep Access to Users’ Political Sentiments
• Current Political Situation in Libya: An Interview with Ali Ahmida
• Caring: A Labor on Stolen Time
• WikiLeaks for Appalachia

On Academic publishing as a suicide bombing mission against the academy:

This system can’t last forever (though its pernicious effects might). The big four will eventually see revenues drop as they squeeze the last drops of blood out of the world’s universities. But even as they undermine their own business model, they will destroy the power of universities to generate knowledge for the betterment of society. (Yes, I’m old-fashioned that way.) Meanwhile, universities, governments, corporations, and ordinary citizens will turn to other sources of information – which they can get for free, or at least affordably – undermining the relevance of public scholarship.For-profit academic publishing is a suicide bombing mission against the academy. In pursuing their doomed business model, the big publishers risk turning the work we do as scholars into a giant echo chamber. Students take on a lifetime of debt, partly to pay for journal subscriptions that enrich a few corporations. Scholars are turned into serfs who must feed the beast new product for it to sell, or risk losing their already tenuous livelihoods. Institutions bankrupt themselves paying for ever more expensive journals without which they cannot compete. Fewer and fewer people can read the rapidly increasing number of scholarly articles.

Bit Brigade plays Mega Man:

• On colonial slavery, Islam and the origins of Afrikaans in Cape Town.
• 100 Most Powerless New Yorkers
• Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? and The TSA Proves Its Irrelevance
• Shockingly Sexist Ads That Are Allowed Today (in Pakistan)
• Google Search is Dead (As We Know It)
• Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda
• Why the NDAA will substantially reduce, if not eliminate altogether, international cooperation with respect to counter-terrorism.
• Cruise Control
• Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale

Emails between OPD and Oakland officials:

In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources.

When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week ofOctober, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan’s advisers. ”Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.” Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.

In all of the emails there was not a single one written by Quan. Her office told KTVU she prefers face-to-face communication.

The $441,728 college diploma: