by Zoë Pollock
James McWilliams makes an unusual argument against free-range meat:
The confined animal lives a mercifully short life of brutality and is dispatched; the free-range animal lives a much longer life full of relative freedom and is dispatched. From the perspective of happiness lost, the latter scenario is more tragic.
by Conor Friedersdorf
Zachary M. Seward reflects:
Lifelogging has been around since at least Benjamin Franklin, but digital technology transformed the practice, allowing obsessive types to record, store and visualize every detail of their lives, from sleep cycles to eating habits. The goal? Ultimate self-awareness and reflection. “We’ve arrived at a time when the memory of machines creates ideas we’ve never considered,” Clive Thompson declared in a cover story about lifelogging for Fast Company in 2006.
I dig that notion but would never wear a Fitbit (to track every step I take) or use a service like Moodscope (to log my emotions). I just want to do my thing while passively self-quantifying.
Go here to see the information he has assembled about himself in the course of the year, including a heat map of his movements.
by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
This is a great list. Might I suggest a couple additions?
"She Won't Be Home" by Erasure
"Christmas Every Year" by Frazier Chorus
The first is a powerful lament from the perspective of an LGBT adult unable to go "home" for the holidays because of an unaccepting family. The second is a vicious skewering of the holiday, trashing the materialism of the modern celebration as only Frazier Chorus can.
Another writes:
What? No "Fairytale of New York"?
It was in our original post featuring the Pogues but the video was taken off YouTube. Another:
Some friends of mine and I keep what we call "The List." It's a list of depressing things, often shown to children. "My Girl," "The Velveteen Rabbit," "Where the Red Fern Grows," and "Old Yeller" are near the top of the list. ("The Christmas Shoes" is on it, too.) This year, "One Last Christmas" has been added to The List.
The music video, featuring home footage of a boy with cancer, is truly moving (as long as you can ignore the singer). Another sends the YouTube above:
"Christmas in the Trenches" is one of my father's favorite songs. I suppose it's a song about a depressing situation (WWI trench warfare) with an uplifting message. It still gives me chills.
Scott Horton interviews Eric Metaxas, author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, a biography of German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who participated in an attempt to murder Adolf Hitler:
The question for Germans in the 1930s is the same question we face today. … [Bonhoeffer] said there were three ways that the church must behave with regard to the state. First, it must question the state. In a sense it must call the government to account, and be a voice that speaks out if and when the state is not behaving legitimately. Second, if the state is harming anyone, it’s the role of the church to help those whom the state is harming. And thirdly and most radically, if the state is behaving wrongly, it is the role of the church to directly oppose the state. That’s where he lost a lot of people. They couldn’t believe a good Lutheran German would say such a thing. But Bonhoeffer was a Christian first and a German second.
by Chris Bodenner
In response to that mother-daughter duet, a reader sends the above supercut:
Didn’t you know that Mariah was festive?
by Conor Friedersdorf
A concerned citizen exposes them:
An anonymous 50-year-old airline pilot is in hot water with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after posting on YouTube a behind-the-scenes tour of what he says are security flaws at San Francisco International Airport.
While airplane passengers go through security screening — such as with metal detectors, full body scanners and pat downs — the pilot shows in one of several video clips, recorded with his cell phone, that airport employees at SFO simply swipe a card to go through an unmanned door.
According to sister station ABC7 in San Francisco, the disclosure resulted in federal air marshals and sheriff's deputies showing up at the pilot's home — an event the pilot, a deputized federal air marshal, also recorded — to confiscate his federally issued handgun.
by Chris Bodenner
The Dish is on the record against fast zombies, but this Christmas Eve mashup is a worthy exception:
(Hat tip: TDW)
by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
These folks aren't just racists. By indulging themselves in this behavior, in company, when they know that's frowned upon and simply impolite, reveals what they're really up to: they get a kick out of shocking you. What I have done for many years is simply to "pull a Colbert" (before there was a Colbert): out-do them in their absurd rants, take it up to 11, be even more outrageous, in any way you can. Admittedly, not everyone can pull this off. It takes a slightly demented personality, a very good sense of humor, you have to have the gift of satire, be willing to get theatrical. But if you can pull it off you will genuinely scare these people and they'll never try to get your goat again. It also invites your audience – the other family members – to laugh at these people, rather than to waste time trying to refute them. Holiday parties aren't seminars, and racists don't go off at them just because they're in error – they do it because they want to make a scene. Take away their toy.
Kathryn Clancy explains the science behind a "normal" but not so common 28-day menstrual cycle and how it's influenced by the amount of food consumed, exercise and even psychological stress:
Most young girls just getting their period take years to achieve regular cycles like the one I described above: this is the main characteristic of the reproductive functioning of adolescents. Yet this normal variation sets us up for a lifetime of checking our cycle, counting days, doubting that we’re like other girls, and feeling bad about ourselves, because of that early information that we should be achieving twenty-eight-day cycles regularly. …
If responding to our environment is adaptive, then variation is adaptive, and variation is the real norm. The better we understand how our lifestyle and environment impact our cycles, the better we can forgive a little variation, and thank our bodies for knowing what to do, sometimes better than we do.
by Conor Friedersdorf
Radley Balko draws our attention to this absurd training regime for new police officers. Here's the description:
From the darkness, a knife-wielding attacker lunges at them. A few draw their guns and fire. They live. Most freeze, pull their Tasers or do any number of things besides pull their guns. For the purposes of the exercise, they die. Then two men circle and attack with shield-like pads, pounding the recruits as they try to fend them off with batons. Most spend more time on their backs than on their feet. Then the men with pads smother the recruits with all their weight, only getting up so another man in fighting gloves can mount them and punch away. By then most of the recruits, exhausted and worn out, have no chance. They lie on the ground, cover up and take the punches to their heads, backs and ribs.
"You're just going to lay there and die? You know you're better than that," officer Bill Brewer screams at Eugene Yanga, the first recruit to take the pummeling. After watching the first few recruits give up the fight, Brewer storms out. "That was a mess," he says. "That was disgusting." When the exercise ends, the staff is furious. Brewer calls it one of the worst performances by a class he's ever seen. Some of them were defeated the moment they walked into the room, he says. "What we're measuring is your heart," he said. "Some of you gave up." On the streets, that lack of heart will get them killed, says Dean Leslie, the officer in charge of Class 6-09. "Some of you in here don't have any fire in your gut," he says. "If you can't do it in practicals, you can't do it in real life, and you're going to be dead."
The problem isn't drills that simulate violent scenarios. It's the idea that "fire in the gut" is an attribute that out to be tested for and encouraged, as if police officers are dying when under attack because they're insufficiently passionate about fighting back. Skip down to the bottom of thr story, and we get this from one of the trainers:
They'll always be on guard — carrying a gun on duty and off, checking out fellow shoppers at the grocery store, thinking about those worst-case scenarios while having dinner with the family. It's like a switch that flips on and never turns off, Germosen says. But on the front lines in the fight against crime, it's a matter of survival.
"I believe every single recruit here, when they put that badge on, they are warriors," the former Marine says. "We're fighting a war."
Would you want an officer with that war mentality checking you out in the grocery store?
The Dish 