Today on the Dish, Andrew came back. He asked the big questions about humility and humiliation in religion and politics and extended a hand to Ross to embrace the equality of their respective marriages.

Obama stepped up his game; we remembered the 1990s; and we read the tea leaves of today's political polls. We looked at which party might get to claim the business tax cuts and whether Obama's transportation proposal was any good. Marty Peretz weighed in on the Mosque; Chait volleyed with Conor on what makes a good opinion journalist; and the era of free lunch ended but the GOP didn't want to make a different sandwich.

The algorithm for war didn't get any easier; Afghanistan went on the back-burner; and we assessed Obama's foreign policy legacy. The history of Margaret Thatcher doesn't fit into soundbites; burning Korans could endanger troops;and Stephen Hawking thought philosophy was dead.

Gateway drugs were still a hoax; a college education made cops less violent; and anarchy might break out if corporate speak didn't exist. MHB here; FOTD here; VFYW here; and the winner for the slightly easier labor day VFYW contest #14 here. We closed the accounting book on hip religious music with some final inductees; Craigslist censored their adult services; and we took a trip to red state liquor stores. And the shark may not have been jumped, after all.

–Z.P.

Margaret Thatcher – Religion – Stephen Hawking – Politics – United States

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Re-employed by the CIA as contractors. Not only was there no accountability. There is actual reward. Under Obama.
















United States – Business – Construction and Maintenance – Barack Obama – Government

Popularity: unranked [?]

Mike Meno sighs:

Last week, researchers at the University of New Hampshire released yet another study
discrediting the gateway theory. Their findings, based on survey data
from more than 1,200 students in Florida public schools, showed that a
person’s likelihood to use harder drugs has more to do with social and
environmental factors than whether or not they’ve ever tried marijuana.

“There seems to be this idea that we can prevent later drug problems
by making sure kids never smoke pot,” lead researcher Dr. Karen Van
Gundy, associate professor of sociology at UNH, told CBS News.
“But whether marijuana smokers go on to use other illicit drugs depends
more on social factors like being exposed to stress and being
unemployed – not so much whether they smoked a joint in the eighth
grade.”

University of New Hampshire – Cannabis – Illegal drug trade – Florida – Gateway drug theory

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Melinda Burns sums up a new study:

Weighing in on a long-simmering dispute, a recent study for the Police Quarterly shows that officers with some college education are less likely to resort to force than those who never attend college.

The study found no difference with respect to officer education when it came to arrests or searches of suspects. But it found that in encounters with crime suspects, officers with some college education or a four-year degree resorted to using force 56 percent of the time, while officers with no college education used force 68 percent of the time.

Higher education – Bachelor’s degree – Education – United States – Colleges and Universities

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A reader writes:

I think it's pretty clear that "jumping the shark" was written into Happy Days and turned into a cultural meme solely for use in this scene from Arrested Development (Season 2, Episode 13).

More contemporary shark-jumping here, here, and here.

Happy Days – Jump The Shark – Television – Arts – Sitcom

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