Potpourri for 300, Alex

1. Confession of a former religious-right icon.

   And that strategy was simple: Republican leaders would affirm their anti-abortion commitment to evangelicals, and in turn we’d vote for them — by the tens of millions. Once Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, “we” would reverse Roe, through a constitutional amendment and/or through the appointment of anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court or, if need be, through civil disobedience and even violence, though this was only hinted at at first. In 2016, the dream we had will become a reality unless America wakes up. The Republicans are poised to destroy women’s rights. They have a majority on the Court to back them up.

   Frank Schaeffer, Salon, via AlterNet
    
2. Not that American anti-intellectualism is news, but it's extending to not reading what you slam.

   There are a number of factors at play in the current rash of controversies. One is a rather stunning sense of privilege, the confident sense of superiority that allows someone to pass sweeping judgment on a body of work without having done any study at all. After the Chronicle of Higher Education published an item highlighting the dissertations of five young PhD candidates in African-American studies at Northwestern University, Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote that the mere titles of the dissertations were sufficient cause to eliminate all black studies classes. Riley hadn't read the dissertations; they're not even published yet.

   Patricia Williams, The Guardian, via AlterNet
3. Scientific article fraud.

   Last month, Retraction Watch published an article describing a known and partially-related problem: fake peer reviews, in this case involving 50 BioMed Central papers. In the above-described article, Seife referred to this BioMed Central discovery; he was able to examine 6 of these titles and found that all were from Chinese authors, and shared style and subject matter to other “paper mill-written” meta-analyses.

   Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism
   
4. Norman Spinrad with some recent economic American history.

   The Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment rates triple those at the peak of the Great Recession, with a stock market crash that famously had wall street mavens jumping out of windows, with no such thing as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and so forth to cushion it at all, was such a catastrophe that it could only result in one kind of revolution or another, meaning a discontinuity, violent or not, democratic or not, a Communist revolution which was a real fear at the time, a Fascist revolution ala the replacement of the Weimar Republic by the Third Reich, or, as fortunately happened, something like the New Deal.