The Dish

William Easterly is upset that, according to the Huffington Post, aid groups “canvassed the Akobo community [in South Sudan]…searching for the hungriest children” during or prior to a photographer’s visit:

An equivalent procedure would represent New Yorkers by the most horrific images possible of the homeless. But we don’t do that because we don’t have the stereotype that typical New Yorkers are homeless.

Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal have seen this before:

The truth is that, even in the areas of the country stricken by famine, outright starvation is the exception. Most deaths are the result of disease. The great majority of people will survive-largely due to their own efforts. International food aid is much less important than food grown by local farmers, the maintenance of animal herds, having roots and berries to eat and charity of relatives and friends.

The most respectable excuse for selectively presenting images of starvation is that this is necessary to elicit our charity. But famine relief experts concur that the total impact of our charitable giving is less than what can be achieved if the stricken people are enabled to help themselves.

Caleb Crain watches the traffic go by:

On the streets of Park Slope, the most dangerous driving seems to occur when drivers are in the throes of the illusion that they are "catching up." If a driver feels that a safe and pleasant speed on a residential street is 15 miles an hour, but an obstacle (such as a double-parked delivery van) temporarily forces the driver to slow down or even stop, he often responds, once he has passed the obstacle, by "catching up." That is, he suddenly accelerates to thirty miles an hour, and holds that speed for half a block or more. What he is "catching up" to is where he thinks his car would be if he hadn't been forced to slow down. It wasn't his choice to slow down; it was (and I am rankly indulging here in a fantasy of driver's psychology, which isn't such a stretch for me because I, too, drive) somehow unfair that he had to slow down. By revving the engine, he expresses his anger at this injustice and recovers for himself the timespace that the universe, in the form of a double-parked delivery van, had tried to take from him.

If only all pop stars would mature this way.

"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia," – Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican's Secretary of State who is also dubbed the Deputy Pope.

For the record, the Pope himself has distinguished between child-rape and homosexual orientation.

Can you guess which country gets a pass?

Dawn at Feministing reviews Smiley Face, a stoner flick starring Anna Faris:

I have noticed, over the years of tickling my cannabanoid receptors, there are very few stoner flicks starring women. Actually, there are very few stoner flicks featuring women who are um, STONERS. I suspect this has to with enforcing traditional gender roles and perpetuating negative stereotypes about cannabis users. Women are caretakers, not stoners. Women are "fun-killers," i.e. wives, girlfriends, and mothers who unfailingly look down on the infantile, lazy, unintelligent potheads with their dead-end jobs and ratty couches. When the stoner flick features teenage protagonists, the few girls who do smoke weed are minor characters and typically "unattractive" or "slutty." This seems to prove a point about females cannabis users – if you in fact exist, you're not normal and we wanted to make sure you knew that.

Brown’s manifesto, now in animated form: Paul Waugh highlights another Labour ad, after the jump:

Waugh:

Looks and feels more like an ad for a global insurance giant. But then that’s probably the point. Still, could the advert possibly have been influenced by this [Johnnie Walker ad starring Robert Carlyle]?

A new study suggests that near-death experiences are caused by high levels of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. A caveat:

How carbon dioxide might actually interact with the brain to produce near-death sensations was beyond the scope of the study, so for now "the exact pathophysiological mechanism for this is not known," Klemenc-Ketis said. However, people who have inhaled excess carbon dioxide or have been at high altitudes, which can raise the blood's CO2 concentrations, have been known to have sensations similar to near-death experiences, she said.

Ryan Avent notices several upbeat economic articles, including Daniel Gross's Newsweek cover story. After writing that confidence "is a key ingredient to recovery, and if Americans are convinced that it's once again ok to spend and invest, then the confidence boost to the economy may take on a life of its own," he warns:

[O]ptimism could be dangerous if it leads the country to underestimate its continued vulnerabilities—to new financial shocks, to new shocks to household budgets (as from rising resource costs), to new deterioration in housing markets, to continued drag from an unemployment problem that remains very serious. At this point in any recovery, complacency is the enemy. All observers want this to be 1983, but it very well might turn out to be 1937.

Reihan goes through the Gross column point by point.

Greenwald marks the death of Dawn Johnsen's nomination to head the Office of Legal Counsel:

[V]irtually everything that Dawn Johnsen said about executive power, secrecy, the rule of law and accountability for past crimes made her an excellent fit for what Candidate Obama said he would do, but an awful fit for what President Obama has done.