Because you're more likely to buy unhealthy food:
[T]he more nourished we are the more rational we tend to be. Similarly, our irrationalities increase the longer we go without food. This helps us explain our grocery store tendencies better: a hungry brain has a hard time focusing on the healthiest and cheapest options because doing so requires mental energy it doesn’t have. The opposite happens when we shop on a full stomach; a glucose rich brain has a much easier time seeing what is best.
I don't trust the pollster in general elections, since its sample is so skewed toward white, older, Republican voters. But that's also why Rasmussen is a good way to look inside the GOP base. Right now, just when you would think Republicans would be rallying behind their likeliest nominee, Romney, they remain deeply ambivalent about him. In fact, the latest data shows Obama taking hs first daylight lead over Romney in Rasmussen's polling since the summer: by 6 points.
Against a generic GOP candidate, Rasmussen finds Obama behind by 3 points. So Romney is underpolling a generic Republican by nine points, according to Rasmussen. Ditto with Gingrich. Cain is behind by 10 in Rasmussen, while Huntsman, surprisingly, does almost as well against Obama as Romney and Gingrich.
Kathryn Sikkink explains why it's hard but important for a country to confront the injustices of its past:
The interesting question is whether the lack of criminal accountability for higher-level U.S. officials will eventually lead to more attempts at foreign criminal prosecutions. With the exception of the case in Italy, foreign prosecutions against Rumsfeld and other officials have not succeeded, in part because foreign judges have accepted claims that the United States is making efforts at accountability. Two civil cases against Rumsfeld for torture are now moving ahead in U.S. courts, so I think they will be very important in establishing whether some form of accountability for higher-level officials is possible in the U.S. judicial system.
Studies indicate that police tend to escalate non-violent situations simply by having pepper spray available:
In one analysis, criminologists found that police use of force rose by 33 percent in Concord, North Carolina following the approval of pepper spray as a law enforcement tool. After an arrestee died in custody after being sprayed, pepper spray use was restricted; use-of-force incidents then fell by 57 percent, even though arrest rates rose by almost 4 percent.
(Image via the tumblr Pepper Spraying Cop)
"Along the coast, it was the sort of morning one can describe only as “Homeric.” You know what I mean: rhododactylic Dawn rising from her loom to spread her shimmering gossamers over the shadowy mountains and echoing sea, dark-prowed fishing-barks drawn up on the milky strand and caressed by the golden foam, the distant thunders of enosigaean Poseidon and argikeraunic Zeus vying above the wine-dark waves, and so on. Or so I imagine. I was actually a few hundred miles inland, in a montane grove of loblolly pines and mixed deciduous trees, awash in flickering sunlight, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. But I had Homer on my mind just then, for various reasons, and so was in a somewhat epic mood: overflowing with an unwonted sense of animal vitality, the world about me all joy and power, terror and fluent beauty, I was Diomedes upon his day of glory . . .
Such moods are fleeting, alas," – David Bentley Hart, First Things.
"Decide," just in time for Black Friday, helps you learn whether the price of a product is about to fall:
How does it accomplish this magic? The five Ph.D.’s on its staff don’t hurt. Together they’ve created an algorithm that predicts a gadget’s future price based, among other factors, on the historical price data of other gadgets in its class. Along with a suggestion of whether to buy a product now or wait for a better price or new model, the app supplies a confidence score, a price and model history, and new-product rumors from around the web. So far, CEO Mike Fridgen says it has predicted price with 77% accuracy.
It’s time:
The Iowa Rollercoaster, via TPM.
"Thanksgiving revelry reaches far, wide," – USA Today headline.
The Dish 