Cheap Blogging Crutch 10.13

Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?
Malcolm Gladwell looks at concussions and degenerative brain conditions in regards to the NFL. In it he runs the gamut from scientific efforts to study brain injuries and the unknown effects of concussions to whether or not these injuries are an avoidable or unavoidable part of the game. It's a nice little way to damper your love of America's most popular sport...at least until you start amping yourself up for Sunday's match-up.

Gag on Guardian reporting MP's Trafigura question lifted
A story on how recently the Guardian was not permitted to cover Parliament questions as a result of a gag order in a lawsuit brought about by oil traders Trafigura over a Guardian report on an African pollution disaster. A news organization couldn't cover news because of a lawsuit. Thankfully, for the basic tenets of free speech, the gag order was dropped. Can't the UK just use our example? Oil companies do something illegal-> most news organizations ignore it-> most Americans ignore it. It works well for us, plus no messy lawsuits. Ill-informed delusion; you might want to try it.

Don’t Fail, or Reward Success
Looks like everything is back to normal. Goldman-Sachs is set to hand out $23 billion in bonuses. But don't worry, that's all OK because they're going to give out a charitable donation of $1 billion....maybe. It's a shame they can only convert to a bank holding company and not to some sort of money printing organization. Makes little difference anyway. I'm just glad they're reaping the rewards after providing sooo many useful services over the past few years.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
You know what's just as effective as medicine? Tic-tacs that someone in a lab coat swears are medicine. You know what's a better than a white anti-depressant? The same anti-depressant, only painted yellow. Wired looks at the pharmaceutical industry and just how strong the placebo effect actually is. It turns out that in a lot of cases a sugar pill is as effective or more effective. Just as long as you didn't import that sugar pill from Canada.

Nearly One in Four Persons on Globe is Muslim
1.5 billion Muslims. Not only that, but the Muslim population will swell to 1/3 by 2050. *dusts hands off* Well, that ought to keep most of the right wing pundits and media personalities fully in business until 2050. I'm not sure but I think you could get Pat Buchanan to explode into bloody pulp if you combined this information with an appropriately sized pie chart and perhaps a prognostication from a fortune teller that we'll have a latino President after the black one.