Friday March 5, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday March 5, 2010)
(1)- EGGHEAD NERDS -- The contempt for professors is one of our cherished national pastimes and is that rare thing—bipartisan. There's an easy assumption of a license to scorn. Almost no group is more safely maligned and mocked.

(2)- MUSIC -- Steven Pinker lays down the evolutionary-psychological law of music. "Music is auditory cheesecake." For those who avoid cheesecake, administered orally or aurally, music is "a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest…

(3)- MIGRANT LABOR -- Does the astonishing volume of global remittances redeem the moral ambiguities of migrant labour? In camps, hospitals, beauty parlours and under doormats, John Gravois watches the money move.

(4)- SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN – reports Fantasizing about sex boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

(5)- PROHIBITION – Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. The federal poisoning program killed 10,000 people.

(6)- PROPERTY LAW -- The idea of a thing belonging to a person is fairly clear when the thing is an automobile or a pair of pants. It is less clear when the thing is a piece of land. What rights does my ownership give me?

(7)- PLASTIC PLACE FOUND -- Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates. The region is said to compare with the well-documented "great Pacific garbage patch."

(8)- ADVICE FOR PREGGER WOMEN -- For pregnant women with depression, a couple months of acupuncture might help reduce the severity of their symptoms, a small study hints. But while the findings are promising, questions still remain.

(9)- GERMANY – What is going on from Saarland to the hinterland of Saxony is the takeover of Germany by the Left. If America became enraptured with the global-capitalism gospel of the past two decades, Germany has experienced the opposite.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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