Peter Frase

Back by [popular demand](http://twitter.com/#!/zunguzungu/status/143167557971615745):

- The big Occupy news this week is the kickoff of [Occupy Our Homes](http://www.thenation.com/article/165024/occupy-wall-street-your-street). I can't describe how stoked I am about this, and I hope it continues and gets much bigger.

- Other, head-exploding Occupy news: [Occupy Wall Street occupies "Occupy Wall Street"](http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/breaking-ows-occupies-movie-set-replica-itself-real).

- Voting for the [3 Quarks Daily semifinalists](http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/the-nominees-for-the-2011-3qd-prize-in-politics-and-social-science-are.html) ends tomorrow. I'm quite pleased that among the top vote-getters are me, Corey Robin, Aaron Bady, and [Lili Loofbourow](http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-livestream-ended-how-i-got-off-my-computer-and-into-the-streets-at-occupy-oakland), whose excellent essay on Occupy Oakland I neglected to highlight earlier.

- The renewed attention to my "Anti-Star Trek" post comes at a good time, because that post was sort of a preparatory sketch for my essay in the forthcoming *Jacobin*, in which I extend the argument and embed it in a larger theoretical framework.

- In Anti-Star Trek Watch-related news, the Supreme Court is threatening to legalize some [truly insane patents](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/oblivious-supreme-court-poised-to-legalize-medical-patents.ars) on medical knowledge. Elena Kagan, in particular, is revealing herself to be a really awful appointment.

- Newt Gingrich, [Whining electron orgy](http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1020).

- Sam McPheeters [wrote a novel](http://loomofruin.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-ive-written-novel.html). It will probably be really funny.

- One of the big problems with earnest policy-wonk liberalism is that it insists on treating every right-wing claim as though it were an empirical proposition to be taken seriously. Case in point, the argument that raising taxes on capitalist "job creators" will cost lots of jobs when they start slacking off and hiring fewer people. This is transparently ridiculous when CEOs [don't even know how much they pay in taxes](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/jp-morgans-ceo-doesnt-know-what-tax-rate-he-pays/2011/08/25/gIQA1JDGfO_blog.html) and even the business lobby itself [can't come up with any of these rich people who will stop hiring if their taxes go up](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/where-are-the-millionaire-job-creators-npr-does-the-big-hunt)

- Is it finally time for [Euro-doom](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/12/09/europes-disastrous-summit/)? I'm concerned, if only because I'm about to return to the US. I missed the Occupy explosion while I was in Luxembourg, so surely I'll miss all the Euro-insanity when I'm back in America.

- Steelworkers are striking against [Luxembourg's biggest company](http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12382/trans-national_steelworker_strike_underscores_plight_of_industrial_labor_in/).

- Daniel Little discusses some [interesting historical evidence](http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2011/11/beyond-divergence.html) for my previously-discussed belief that cheap labor can cause technological stagnation.

- This is sort of an [odd essay](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n24/jenny-turner/as-many-pairs-of-shoes-as-she-likes) about modern feminism, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in it, particularly the parts about Selma James.

- No big deal, just a Reuters business columnist calling for [debt jubilees and handing out free money](http://blogs.reuters.com/james-saft/2011/12/08/dont-fear-the-death-of-excess-debt/).

- I've posted a lot of Ice Cube videos in these link roundups, but this one is something different: