• Spring is on the way, with mosquitos to follow shortly after. Here’s a reminder that a lot of the stuff sold to fend off mosquitos doesn’t actually do anything.
Your best defense is still a big ol’ fan for the front porch or patio. The little nasties don’t like flying into a headwind.
Oh, and speaking of selling stuff that doesn’t actually do anything, here’s news of yet another study confirming that “homeopathy” is bunk. It’s water.
• “I know we’re going to get a lot of backlash. We’re going to get hammered. … But we have given it an awful lot of thought, and, based on the evidence we’ve been given, we believe this is a significant and true event.” Paging Dr. Scully.
• So, OK, how many oil trains need to blow up before we start getting really worried? Is it going to take one big, deadly (non-Canadian) catastrophe? Or will it just happen due to a long list of slightly less-deadly, smaller catastrophes?
• Blogger Mickey Kaus … is apparently still alive. Who knew?
Kaus was once an interesting guy. He wrote a book in 1995 called The End of Equality, in which he offered a neoliberal plan to replace many forms of “welfare” with guaranteed employment. No more cash payments, but everybody who can work is guaranteed a job. Most “welfare” goes to people who, by definition, cannot work — the elderly, small children, people with disabilities. But still, it was an intriguing argument. The idea of guaranteed employment was appealing.
Kaus became far less interesting once it became clear that only half of his plan was politically viable, but that he seemed perfectly fine with a one-legged stool. If cash payments couldn’t be replaced with a guaranteed job, then he was quite happy to just get rid of all cash payments and replace them with nothing. The fact that this completely undermined the central thesis of his book didn’t seem to bother him at all.
After that, I stopped paying attention. Rumor has it he went on to be something of a pioneer in the field of click-baiting punditry. And something about goats. Whatever.
• Here’s an interesting discussion of Peter Gardella’s new book on American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred. Civil religion, Gardella says, is built on two foundations: “biblical monotheism and Roman civil religion.”
“Gardella asserts that the Roman model is perhaps more prominent in American civil religion than biblical monotheism,” John Wilsey writes. I’m not convinced. Seems to me if that were true, then our roads, bridges and aqueducts ought to be in better shape.
• “He is the only man in history to be classified as both a dwarf as well a giant.”
• It’s all about the Benjamin. In addition to all that still-can’t-quite-believe-it-was-just-one-guy stuff in that list, there’s also this — Ben Franklin invented Net Neutrality:
Franklin was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia by the British Crown Post in 1737. Newspaper publishers often served as postmasters, which helped them to gather and distribute news. Postmasters decided which newspapers could travel free in the mail — or in the mail at all.
… [Franklin] was named joint postmaster general for the Crown on August 10, 1753. Franklin surveyed post roads and Post Offices, introduced a simple accounting method for postmasters, and had riders carry mail both night and day. He encouraged postmasters to establish the penny post where letters not called for at the Post Office were delivered for a penny. Remembering his experience with the Gazette, Franklin mandated delivery of all newspapers for a small fee.
Oh, and he also introduced tofu to the New World, because of course he did.
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