* Sounds like fun: “With its sex-obsessed young heroine, “Turn Me On, Dammit!” goes where few movies have gone,” and it sounds like the rare movie that actually goes where other movies haven’t. See also Slate’s coverage.
* Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place. And we’re highly unlikely to do anything about that.
* I’ve long wondered about a book I remember reading around age 12 or 13, in which people above a certain age are capped by a mind-control device, but I’ve never been able to remember anything else about it until I read this, From The New Yorker: “John Christopher’s ‘The White Mountains,’ in which alien overlords install mind-control caps on the heads of all those over the age of thirteen, tore through my own sixth-grade classroom like a wicked strain of the flu.” That’s it.
* $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners. Wow.
* Maybe we can get rid of the MPAA, which will, I suspect, be viewed one day with the same caustic eye as the Hays Code.
* “As Julie Berebitsky points out in Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire, sexual relationships—consensual or not—have long been considered a threat to productivity and morale . . .” I sure hope so.
* Affordable housing and hilarious cognitive dissonance.
* The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish.
* Tyler Cowen: “I’m a blogger.”
* Roosh “can’t help but notice a lot of changes in how our beliefs are being perceived.”
Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It’s all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.
The major advantage that young people retain, however, is that they (we?) have more vibrant sex lives, which is still a pretty sweet deal.
One can also see this in academia: the gap between professors who got tenure before 1975 and people graduating in the last ten years is medieval.
* Tyler Cowen: “What Export-Oriented America Means.” See also “Tyler Cowen on America’s Export-Oriented Future.”
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