A smart critique of millennial social culture:
The Innovation of Loneliness from Shimi Cohen on Vimeo.
Month: July 2013
The Beards Of Popular Music
A helpful and exhaustive guide to some hirsute rock rebels.
Don’t Take Your Vitamins?
Professor of pediatrics Paul Offit reviews studies that cast doubt on the benefits of various dietary supplements. For example, individuals who take antioxidant supplements have been found to be less healthy:
How could this be? Given that free radicals [harmful atoms] clearly damage cells–and given that people who eat diets rich in substances that neutralize free radicals are healthier–why did studies of supplemental antioxidants show they were harmful? The most likely explanation is that free radicals aren’t as evil as advertised. Although it’s clear that free radicals can damage DNA and disrupt cell membranes, that’s not always a bad thing. People need free radicals to kill bacteria and eliminate new cancer cells. But when people take large doses of antioxidants, the balance between free radical production and destruction might tip too much in one direction, causing an unnatural state in which the immune system is less able to kill harmful invaders. Researchers have called this “the antioxidant paradox.”
Whatever the reason, the data are clear: high doses of vitamins and supplements increase the risk of heart disease and cancer; for this reason, not a single national or international organization responsible for the public’s health recommends them.
Your Friday Cry
Back In The GDR?
Scott Horton dismembers Chuck Lane’s moral relativism when it comes to surveillance. Lane’s view is that anything is legit as long as the US does it – because our good intentions trump the actual facts.
Why Is China Missing So Many Women?
The one-child policy (OCP) alone doesn’t account for the shortage of females in the country’s population:
[A]n NBER working paper by economists Douglas Almond, Hongbin Li, and Shuang Zhang makes the case that the roots of the gender imbalance go back farther than the OCP. Specifically, they argue that it was the pro-market land reform policies and breakup of collective farms following the death of Mao Zedong that drove the trend in rural areas — 86 percent of the country’s population at the time. For rural couples, who were allowed to have two children and generally preferred at least one of them to be a boy, the second child was 5.5 percent more likely to be a boy after land reform was introduced in a given area. The introduction of the OCP, which happened around the same time, had an effect as well, but the authors find that it’s almost entirely eliminated when you control for the effect of land reform.
Why exactly land reform had this effect is less clear. The authors consider a number of possibilities including gender bias in land distribution, increase in the demand for male labor, increase in demand for old age support, and the collapse of the rural medical system, but don’t find empirical support for any of them.
More Dish on the state of the one-child policy here.
Christianism Watch
“When you worship God, you are not just doing the right thing in terms of your relationship with God, you are doing your patriotic duty. It is your patriotic duty to worship God in order that we may have a prosperous and flourishing economy” – Bryan Fischer.
A brief reminder of what Christianity actually is (from Luke):
And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God … But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.
The religious right is one of the major forces against Christianity right now in this country.
Gold, Silver, Bronze, Green
The International Olympic Committee has changed its drug-testing policies to disqualify marijuana smokers for “in-competition” use only. The new threshold for testing positive, 150 nanograms per milliliter of blood, is 10 times higher than the previous version, leading NORML’s executive director to remark that only a “pretty dedicated cannabis consumer” would reach that level on game day. Jess Remington comments:
The goal of the new rules is to catch marijuana users who are competing under the influence, rather than those who smoked days or weeks earlier. In other words, the [World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which regulates the Olympics] is now treating marijuana like alcohol.
Following suit, the UFC changed their marijuana rules to match the WADA’s just three weeks later. In response to these changes, state athletic commissions have met to discuss raising the marijuana threshold for combat sports. “My personal feeling is that I would much rather focus on obvious performance-enhancing drug use like steroids and blood doping,” Nick Lembo of the Association of Boxing Commissions said. “If I was a trainer, I would much rather have my fighter fighting someone who took marijuana than someone who’s blood doping.”
Quote For The Day
“America no longer is a functioning democracy. The invasion of the private sphere has gone too far. The claims of secrecy have clearly been excessive. Snowden has done a great service in informing the public of this,” – former president Jimmy Carter, re-translated back from the German (and so paraphrased) because no US news outlet covered the actual remarks.
The Dish 