This is a scary story. Man beats snot out of prostitute, claims he was sleep-walking, court buys it. It’s scary either way. Either he got away with a violent assault or he was capable of carrying one out when he was asleep (which experts say can happen extremely rarely). Automatism freaks me out something major.
Speak of healthcare, could information save $300 billion. That number sounds big but within an order of magnitude.
There were a number of cracked’s old-timey ads that gave me the facepalm.
This is one of the best article written about steroids and the drop in offense in MLB. I think he’s right that what has changed is not so much PEDs but the thinking about them in management circles.
Political links:
Texas passes tort reform. The usual suspects are screaming but I can tell you that the malpractice environment in Texas has produced a healthcare system that may not be cheaper but is massively more responsive than tort-happy Pennsylvania.
This sort of thing happens every day in our ridiculous War on Drugs.
I don’t know what depresses me more about this story: that New Jersey passed an ill-considered law mandating decals on cars drive by teenagers; or that people succumbed to a baseline Predator Panic as a result.
The FDIC fantasizes that they could have prevented the financial crisis. Funny. And about as realistic as me fantasizing that I really could have scored with the prom queen back in high school.
Expect to see this on Maggie McNeil’s site. I don’t think there’s no sex trafficking in the UK. But this is a solid piece of evidence that the problem is severely overblown. And it could, of course, be better addressed, if we redirected resources away from consenting adults.
The latest from the porn front: women are increasingly watching it. So the experts tell us this must be some addiction depersonalization OMG thing, not just … you know … women liking porn. And the LA libraries make some sensible decisions when it comes to privacy vs. filtering.
Two from Glenn Greenwald today on how our President has, as I feared, decided that the November elections were not a call for reigning in government, but for expanding its reach. He’s now limiting Miranda rights for terror suspects arrested in this country and appointing the chief psychiatrist who designed the torture regime to a position of power.
For once, I’m going to disagree with Veronique De Rugy, who claims that nuclear power can’t compete with fossil fuels. This is true, technically. But fossil fuels have a massive cost — pollution, death and global warming — that is not being charged to its consumers.
It’s not a good idea to have very few IPOs on Wall Street. It means more of our economy is being controlled by fewer people. Blame Sarbanes-Oxley.
Hugo Chavez, probably joking, says capitalism killed life on Mars. It would be funny except that communism, like the kind he supports, killed tens of millions right here on planet Earth.
The best thing about Barack Obama’s turn against civil liberties, embrace of War on Terror excesses and starting of an unapproved war in Libya is that it has exposed many of Bush’s critics for the partisan shills that they were (while also highlighting those who had genuine principles). The worst thing about it is that it has caused Bush’s minions to gloat about how right they were, even as every day that passes proves how wrong they were. Obama had a chance to change the course of history; his decisions have instead sealed in place the dumb decisions that Bush made. In my book, that’s almost worse.
Resilient Japan. The stats on Bangladeshi cyclones are amazing.
The latest travesty from the eminent domain files.
Now Obama is turning the IRS loose on medical marijuana. Great. Just great.
Just a reminder that TARP lost money and lots of it, no matter what spin doctors say. The biggest losses to our bailouts were, of course, for political entities like the automakers and Fannie/Freddie.
At some point, the Supreme Court is going to have to rule that free speech applies to the internet as well.
Shit like this is why Newt will never be President.
This kind of stuff can drive you nuts. Yes, the government should sell off some of the land it owns. But it will bring in $1 billion. That’s not how we’re going to balance the budget. And since it isn’t, why prioritize it?
Another dispatch from Lenore Skenazy on the over-protection of kids.
A UVA study says drunk driving fatalities among college kids are off by a factor of 10. Guess which figure will be cited by the media?
An interesting look at how X-rated became synonymous with porn. Our inability to find a workable “adult” movie rating is shameful. Eyes Wide Shut, to cite one example, should not have been edited to get an R. It should have been released as NC-17.
Cracked has your movie prequels and your bad logos. The latter reminds me of one of the fundamental indicators of a pending recession: when businesses are changing names and logos, a recession is nigh. Because, apparently, they don’t have anything else to spend their money on. This was primary harbinger of the 2001 recession.
This post argues that forcing people to buy car insurance the way we do is like refusing to let people by pizza by the slice. Of course, with healthcare, we just passed a bill forcing people to buy pizza by the hogshead.
Residual casualties of the 80’s/90’s sex abuse hysteria. I defy anyone to read it and not get enraged. Somehow I doubt that Kasich will find the courage to end his absurdity. I can think of very few governors — John Slaton comes to mind — who have that kind of courage.
Andrew Breitbart is getting sued over his sliming of Shirley Sherrod. Good for her.
Honestly, I sometimes think a least a third of the people in his country need to be kept away from policy, blogs and heavy equipment.
Non-political links:
Megan McArdle has a great post up about the AOL-HuffPo thing. What struck me was when I clicked through to see AOL’s internal business plans and documents. It was so opaque and filled with such jargon, I felt an awful confusion that harked back to my days in quantum mechanics class. It’s no wonder American business in general and AOL in specific are struggling. Further reading here about just how dumb corporate culture can be.
Dear Failblog/Funny or Die: while I found Aguilera’s mess-up of the national anthem amusing, you posted the wrong clip, including the wrong subtitles. Epic fail, assholes.
A nice graphical fisking of the latest hysteria. This one targets Fox News, but really it could be anyone. No one does any reporting anymore before they hit the panic button. If it bleeds, or could bleed, or may have bled, or was near something that bled — it leads.
The latest craze in Washington: try to figure just WTF Sarah Palin is on about.
I find this breathless post about how the Muslim Brotherhood wants to take over America hilarious. These guys can’t even take over Egypt and I’m supposed to be worried about them taking over America? I find that as realistic as revolutionary Marxists on college campi planning to trash the system, man.
And yet more breathless panting about third-hand smoke. I love how they say, “we’ve found nicotine in the urine of children” and make no mention of what level they’ve found it at. Trace amounts of chemicals are no necessarily dangerous.
McArdle makes the case for eliminating the corporate income tax. She’s right, but there’s no chance it would happen while Democrats (and some Republicans) still exist. Too easy to demagogue.
An interesting article about some of the Christians standing up to Fred Phelps.
This is one of the chief reasons I’m nervous about the GOP taking power and am not prepared for them to win the White House in 2012. When a party is uniformly disputing fairly solid science, that’s disturbing. And anti-conservative. They are essentially saying they’re willing to bit our entire future on the idea that global warming is a myth.
You’re Full of It Watch: what is it with Paul Krugman? So much of what he writes is simply factually wrong. Does he think that winning a Nobel precludes him from checking his fantasies with data?
