- Rousseau checkmates David Hume in 17 moves? Get out! You can watch Jean-Jacques’s smash in their alleged chess game from 1765. Then check the kibitzers’ comments. They suspect that Rousseau wasn’t a strong enough player to have seen the sacrificial checkmate. For some reason that makes me feel better.
- Troubled by sagging? Need concealment? NRAstore.com has a mesh undershirt if your small revolver is giving you problems. (People who bought this item also bought “tactical pants”–don’t ask–in waist sizes up to 42.)
- Union strategy? Over at Tapped, Ezra Klein calls Chicago’s big-box ordinance “basically useless for the unions (and possibly counterproductive)” on the grounds that it will likely make Wal-Mart “forsake Chicago entirely in order to warn other city councils not to try the same trick. What it won’t do is achieve [store] density in urban areas, which would be the easiest for the unions to target” in an organizing drive.
- Why even go there? The other day Pseudo-Polymath quoted a theologian who foresees the disappearance of Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian denominations, after which time “the churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation [for him, Baptists and Methodists don’t count].” Pseudo responded with the $64 trillion question: “What do we do with that information? Where do we go from here? If the Reformation is to end, what then was God’s purpose in inspiring it in the first place?” . . . [Long pause.] Gee, I don’t know, Pseudo. While you’re at it, let us know his or her purpose in inspiring the Inquisition and the Crusades and the pogroms too, OK?
- Why don’t artificial sweeteners make me thin? Burkhard Bilger’s New Yorker piece explains it so even I can understand: “Like the dream of the paperless office or the superhighway that will untangle traffic for good, [the hope behind NutraSweet] presumes that there is a natural limit to our needs–that humanity’s sweet tooth can be satisfied. Yet our sweet receptors evolved in environments with so little sugar that they may not have a shutoff point.” Read the whole thing here or here.