Stickybuffalo.com

stop giving this man money to make movies.

ok, i’ll admit it. i often rush to the defense of rural areas, especially the midwest, when they’re portrayed in the coastal media as white-bread, red-state backwaters devoid of cultural life and populated more or less exclusively by nativist mouthbreathers and bible-beating hicks. it’s one of my most cherished hobby horses.

but you’re on your own, nebraska.

CHICAGO — Residents of a small city in eastern Nebraska voted Monday to banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes, defying an earlier decision by the city’s leaders and setting off what is all but certain to be a costly and closely watched legal challenge.

In Fremont , a meat-packing town of about 25,000 people, unofficial results from The Associated Press late Monday showed that 57 percent of voters approved a referendum barring landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and obliging city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the new law, including some business and church leaders, had argued that the City of Fremont simply could not afford the new law, which is all but certain to be challenged in court. In a flurry of television commercials and presentations by opponents in the final days before Monday’s vote, opponents said paying to defend such a local law would require a significant cut in Fremont city services or a stiff tax increase — or some combination of the two.

these dumb cornhusking fuckers — a solid 57% of them, anyway — are perfectly happy to mortgage what little public infrastructure they have in one of the more virulently tax-phobic regions in the country, and apparently even prepared to pay more taxes (!), just to make a point. which is, in a nutshell, “we don’t like brown people.”

incidentally, even here in the midwest we’re not immune to the the east-west hierarchy that implicitly informs the condescension news organizations like the NYT bring to reporting on the flyover, on the rare occasions when they deign to do so (notice, btw, the chicago dateline — fully 500 miles and two states away from the story was as far afield as they could stand to go). as far as most of my wisconsin inlaws and sub-chicagoan students are concerned, the mississippi river might as well be the outer edge of a pre-columbian nautical map, a nether realm infested with sea-monsters and dribbling water off the edge of the world into eternal cosmic nothing. as much as that attitude grates here on the iowa side of the big muddy, if we’re being honest we feel pretty much the same way about nebraska, kansas and south dakota — why would anyone ever want to go there, except to buy fireworks? hell, here in latte-sipping, volvo-driving iowa city we could do without just about everything west of I-35. it’s the kind of territory that would be rife with auto malls and megachurches, except that it doesn’t have the kind of population to sustain even those things. truck stops and tumbleweeds, mostly.

so, full disclosure: is my own contempt for nebraska and the politics that hold sway there tinged with regional prejudice? probably. am i still a little sore about the whole Big 12 thing? perhaps. have i spent enough time in places like fremont, nebraska to have a pretty decently informed idea about what a vote like this says about the community’s attitudes and values? yep. and these are some hateful, dumbass crackers right here. fire away, east coast liberal media — for once i won’t complain.

the astronomical prices being charged for academic journals isn’t exactly news, but university libraries refusing to pay them is.

university of california libraries said “fuck that” when the Nature Publishing Group decided to quadruple their license fees in the middle of a budget crisis: the UC says it’ll drop all 67 of its subscriptions if the publisher doesn’t back off.

that’s a serious punch to the grapes for Nature — $23.4 million in online journals alone. the UC system is huge, and it’s about time they flex some of that economic muscle. but that’s only part of the leverage big universities have over academic publishers.

Using NPG’s own figures, an analysis by CDL suggests that UC articles published in Nature alone have contributed at least $19 million dollars in revenue to NPG over the past 6 years—or more than $3 million dollars per year for just that one journal. Moreover, UC Faculty supply countless hours serving as reviewers, editors, and advisory board members.

…[U]nless NPG is willing to maintain our current licensing agreement, UC Faculty would ask the UC Libraries to suspend their online subscriptions entirely, and all UC Faculty would be strongly encouraged to:

• Decline to peer review manuscripts for journals from the Nature Publishing Group.
• Resign from Nature Publishing Group editorial and advisory boards.
• Cease to submit papers to the Nature Publishing Group.
• Refrain from advertising any open or new UC positions in Nature Publishing Group journals.
• Talk widely about Nature Publishing Group pricing tactics and business strategies with colleagues outside UC, and encourage sympathy actions such as those listed above.

uh oh! looks like somebody figured out that publishers benefit a lot more from the work of academics than the other way around. this could make things very, very unpleasant for Nature.

the last bullet point is especially exciting. i want to see this become a nationwide movement — in my fantasy, it leads to the foundation of some kind of academic commons. faculty already know that commercial publishing is a terrible model for disseminating their work and staying current in the field, and one that’s obviated by the web. they’re not making money publishing their work in journals (most of them, anyway), though they’re obligated to publish for purposes of tenure and career advancement. administrators, meanwhile, have been jolted out of their complacency by the deluge of red ink and are suddenly open to ideas they wouldn’t have entertained not so long ago. the time is right for bold action against IP monopolies, and public institutions of higher education have the resources to make some big changes to the way we circulate and share knowledge.

go librarians!