BPA, a chemical found in like every plastic thing ever made and which you guzzle in your body every time you eat or drink from a plastic container, has been found to make men much exposed to high amounts of it much more likely to suffer erectile dysfunction.

So all those people with their fancy Sigg water bottles were right! Except Sigg water bottles were also full of BPA up until a year ago. Still, look for a dude driving a Volvo with an attached bike rack if you want a good, hard penis.
[Pic: Flickr]

According to TPM, Carville's Democracy Corps polling group conducted a focus group study of "conservative Republicans" and "conservative-leaning independents." And basically conservative-leaning independents are worried about the deficit and quibble with the particulars of congress' health care reform plans, while base Republicans live in a scary alternate reality where Obama has this little goatee thing, see, and health care reform is literally a secret plot to bankrupt the nation so that he can enslave us.

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda' to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

They also view themselves as a minority under attack from liberal elites, and, obviously, Glenn Beck's martyr schtick plays really well. Especially with the ladies!

"Two aspects of the discussion on Beck among conservative Republicans were particularly noteworthy. One was a common fear among the women for his personal safety, a belief that his willingness to stand up to powerful liberal interests was putting his life, as well as the lives of those working with him, in danger. Of course, his willingness to face this danger head on only adds to his legend."

Carville is also trying to get everyone to shut up about race, and he insists that race has nothing to do with their fears of a black planet.

Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters' beliefs - but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson's incendiary comments at the president's joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion - but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.

Right. Carville gave them "full opportunity" to make White House watermelon patch jokes, but, weirdly, in front of focus group researchers, they declined to shout racial slurs, and in fact announced that their hatred of the president had nothing to do with his Blackness!

We cannot ever know how much of a role race plays in making a bunch of white dudes scared of a black man. But race informs it. That's patently obvious, and to declare that it's a non-factor because calling attention to it doesn't "play" well politically (because America is incapable of talking about race without people screaming "DON'T CALL ME A RACIST YOU'RE THE REAL RACIST YOU RACIST") is dumb. Yes, obviously any Democratic president was going to have to deal with crackers hating him or her, but that is because any Democratic president would've represented an America of black folk, gays, and uppity ladies that these people don't recognize as legitimately American. So, there is your race card.

In conclusion: there's no "reasoning" with these people and honestly the best we could possibly hope for is that the people lying to them constantly come up with slightly less deranged and dangerous lies.

British experts studied more than 17,000 children born in 1970 for about four decades. Of the children who ate candies or chocolates daily at age 10, 69 percent were later arrested for a violent offense by the age of 34.

Related: If your parents give you candy or chocolates daily at age 10, they have bigger problems than you and your incarceration.
[AP. Pic: Flickr]

Here are the findings from a new survey of binge drinkers which makes me scoff:

The researchers focused on 14,000 "binge drinkers " - people who said that at least once month that they had five or more drinks on a single occasion. About 12 percent said they had gone driving within two hours of their last bout of heavy drinking.

Uh huh. So nearly 90% of binge drinkers went out and got drunk and then did not drive. Amazing. Instead of asking drunk to voluntarily reveal how reckless they are, try this, scientists: 100% of binge drinkers, minus the % living in big cities and likely to take mass transportation, minus the % with designated drivers, minus the % willing to call a cab and leave their own car parked at the bar, equals the drunk drivers.

So roughly 68%.
[Pic via]

But this is scarier than you think, secretly-desperate-drunk-joke-maker, because it proves that alcoholics who don't even drink any more have already ruined their ability to tell whether that look on your face is one of muted appreciation or one of mocking me for something, you dirty lying whore. Abstinent alcoholics "register less intensity in the amygdala and hippocampus" when trying to read facial expressions than nonalcoholics do. Although scientists admit that they're not sure whether drinking makes you a flinty, suspicious bastard, or whether being a bastard drives you to drink!

Related: Old people are mad drunk.

Test scores of the public relations professionals were compared to the scores of 19 other groups whose members had taken the DIT test in the past. Seminarians and philosophers are the runaway winners on the moral development scale as measured by the test. After that come medical students, practicing physicians, journalists, dental students, nurses and public relations pros.

Lower than journalists? You people should be fucking ashamed.

[Pic of a PR pro by Dan Lacey]

Ass-covering fineprint from the study (PDF):

All data presented here are from the wildlife-watching section of the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (FHWAR). It is the most comprehensive survey of wildlife recreation in the United States. Overall, 11,300 detailed wildlife-watching interviews were completed with a response rate of 78 percent. The Survey focused on 2006 participation and expenditures by U.S. residents 16 years of age and older.

In 2006, there were 48 million birdwatchers or birders, 16 years of age and older, in the United States-about 21 percent of the population. What is a birder? The National Survey uses a conservative definition. To be counted as a birder, an individual must have either taken a trip one mile or more from home for the primary purpose of observing birds and/or closely observed or tried to identify birds around the home. Thus, people who happened to notice birds while they were mowing the lawn or picnicking at the beach were not counted as birders. Trips to zoos and observing captive birds also did not count.

Backyard birding or watching birds around the home is the most common form of bird-watching. Eighty-eight percent (42 million) of birders are backyard birders. The more active form of birding, taking trips away from home, is less common with 42 percent (20 million) of birders partaking.

Blogger Brendan Nyhan conducted the study with students from Duke. His hypothesis: a negatively phrased correction ("he is not a Muslim") would be less effective than a positive one ("he is a Christian"). But, hah, neither one was remotely effective at convincing participants that the President is a Christian. Until they added... a black person!

However, our hypothesis that the corrective affirmation would successfully reduce misperceptions was only supported when a non-white experimental administrator was present, suggesting a strong social desirability effect on the acceptance of corrective information. In addition, three-way interactions between the corrective affirmation, race of administrator, and party identification suggest that social desirability effects were more prevalent among Republicans.

But when fellow typical white people tried to convince Republicans that Barack Obama is a Christian, it "caused a backfire effect in which GOP identifiers became more likely to believe Obama is Muslim and less likely to believe he was being honest about his religion."

So, you know, cheers to The Washington Times and Fox.

Here is the boring conclusion from this Bringham Young professor, that is kind of obvious: "Blog readers still get most of their news from regular news sources, but they are concerned that they are not getting the whole side of the story there," and so they read the news, and then they read political blogs to get context and analysis. Breaking!

This is the "surprising" bit that right-wing blogs will pick up and push so hard that will eventually bleed onto Fox:

Davis also queried more than 200 journalists to learn how they use blog content in their coverage of political news. Most journalists were aware of influential blogs on both sides of the political spectrum, such as Daily Kos and Talking Points on the left and Michelle Malkin and Instapundit on the right. Despite equal awareness, journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.

For example, more journalists know about Michelle Malkin than Talking Points. Yet twice as many journalists actually read Talking Points than read Michelle Malkin.

Oh no! Journalists have liberal biases and so they only read liberal blogs and so therefore all the opinions of those terrible bloggers will bleed into the mainstream media or something!

Here are some things, though: back when political blogs became a "thing," that "real journalists" had to check, they were only checking "warblogs," which all became famous and celebrated and then they killed Dan Rather. This, sadly, made a certain kind of sense: Conservatives were in power, and so you checked those blogs for the Conservative message. What liberals thought about things didn't matter. It just didn't! Guess what? Now the opposite is true, and the heavy-duty liberal policy wonk blogs are relevant, because they can be a window into what the sort of liberals who are running everything think about important issues. (Also, just a thought: are you counting Drudge as "a blog"? We would imagine all the journalists would cop to checking Drudge, still, even though he's gone off the deep end.)

But honestly that argument is sort of a cop-out: the more important difference is in the actual content. Look at this sentence again:

For example, more journalists know about Michelle Malkin than Talking Points. Yet twice as many journalists actually read Talking Points than read Michelle Malkin.

Talking Points Memo features original reporting and analysis from a liberal perspective. MichelleMalkin.com is the crazed rantings of a racist psychopath. This is like saying "twice as many journalists read The Weekly Standard as pay attention to the Black Hebrew Israelites who hang out in midtown."

According to new figures from a UK police group which you should believe as much as you believe police groups, Brits are paying more than ever, for crap:

Prices per kilo have risen from £39,000 in 2008 to over £45,000 (50,000 euros), but street prices have remained stable.

However, new figures obtained by the BBC suggest almost a third of police seizures are now less than 9% pure, the lowest recorded purity level.

Investing in coke and wasting 90 cents on the dollar on baking soda is even worse than finance stocks.
[BBC]

How would your opinion of Van Gogh change if you learned that instead of "cutting his own ear off because he was crazy" it turned out that his buddy Gauguin cut Van Gogh's ear off with a sword during an argument? You would think, "wow, that is pretty badass, actually," right?

Gauguin, an excellent fencer, was planning to leave Van Gogh's "Yellow House" in Arles, southwestern France, after an unhappy stay.

He had walked out of the house with his baggage and his trusty épée in hand, but was followed by the troubled Van Gogh, who had earlier thrown a glass at him.

As the pair approached a bordello, their row intensified, and Gauguin cut off Van Gogh's left earlobe with his sword – either in anger or self-defence.

He then threw the weapon in the Rhône. Van Gogh delivered the ear to the prostitute and staggered home, where police discovered him the following day, the new account claims.

This version of van Gogh's life is much more in keeping with our idea of the man, which is based entirely on confusing that Kirk Douglas movie about him with basically every other '50s Kirk Douglas movie, most of which were about shirtless men fighting.

It's because all those cutbacks at Newsweek give Americans fewer chances to learn about The Historical Jesus.

The *average* person spends 8.5 hours a day in front of some sort of media screen. That's more than the average person sleeps! An hour of that, one full hour, every single day, is ads. And 99% of our video-watching is on TV. Fuck you, Tube! Demographically, we're all drooling brainwashed playthings in our own special ways:

The data shows that 18-to-24-year-olds - generally college students and new entrants into the work force - watch the smallest amount of live TV of any age group (three and a half hours a day), spend the most time text messaging (29 minutes a day) and watch the most online video (5.5 minutes a day).

Slightly older viewers, those ages 25 to 34, spend the most time of any group watching DVD or VCR videos. People ages 35 to 44 spend more time on the Web than other groups, 74 minutes a day on average. The next demographic, 45 to 54 years old, spends the most time on e-mail. Consumers over the age of 65 watch the most live TV, according to the research.

And meanwhile, who's overtaking us in double dutch? The Japanese. [NYT]

In one experiment, Dr. Nelson, along with Tom Meyvis and Jeff Galak of New York University, had 87 undergraduates watch an episode of the sitcom "Taxi." Half watched it as it was originally broadcast, with commercials for the Jewelry Factory Store and the law office of Michael Brownstein, among other ads. The other half watched the show straight through, without commercials.

Um, who wouldn't like a show better when it had the goofy, old school, big lapel commercials in it? That is what hipsterdom is all about! And you're asking undergrads here! Duh on this one.

The scientists say that the findings hold across the board, though: humans enjoy things more when they're forced to pause during them, which they hypothesize has to do with our natural ability to set any experience as a default, rather than as something to be enjoyed more than usual.

The effect wasn't limited to watching TV; interrupting a massage also heightened people's enjoyment, one experiment found.

Or it could just be that scientists like hand jobs. [NYT. Pic via]

A new study involving nearly 1.3 million middle-aged British women — the largest ever to examine alcohol and cancer in women — found that just one glass of chardonnay, a single beer or any other type of alcoholic drink per day increases the risk of a variety of cancers.

As long as women sit around masturbating while men get drunk everything will be fine.

[WP. Pic of high-risk cancer demographic via.]

[Psychology researchers at Berkeley] videotaped 100 undergraduate students who didn't know each other, and studied their body language during one-minute gaps in conversation.

The results were clear: Students from a higher socio- economic background were more likely to be rude during the silence. They would doodle, fidget or start grooming themselves. Less-privileged students made far more effort to engage with the other person, making "I'm interested" signals such as laughing or raising eyebrows.

In short, the richer people were a lot ruder, while the poor were a lot more polite.

The researchers think this is an evolutionary trait, because the poor are weak and need to "ingratiate" themselves to the rich, who are the strong. Also, it's much easier to pick someone's pocket when they're distracted by your smile. [Bloomberg via Cityfile]