Mike Franklin

One British study found that over the course of four generations, the distance that eight-year-old children in one family (the Thomases of Sheffield, England) were allowed to roam from home had shrunk from 6 miles (for great-grandfather George in 1926) to one mile (for grandfather Jack in 1950) to half a mile (for mother Vicky in 1979) to 300 yards (for son Ed in 2007). Another study reported that, on average, today’s children are two years older than their parents were when first allowed to do things like use public transportation, sleep over at a friend’s house, or babysit for a younger sibling.

Asked whether a $2,800 charge is reasonable for about 30 minutes of anesthesia, he said, “You bill a high fee to negotiate with an insurance company.

[N]o signs of the coming apocalypse.

What people confuse is that ‘carnivore’ really means animal eater, not muscle-meat eater,” said Dr. Buffington. “In nature, they’re eating all the guts and the bones and the rest of the animal, all of which supplies their nutrient needs. That’s confused more commonly than one might imagine.

Romneycare’s record really is impressive. The main goal of the reforms was to make sure more people have access to health care and fewer people struggle with the costs of care bills. The evidence suggests it has accomplished both goals.

Most of us evangelicals in Canada, regardless of personal beliefs about homosexuality, can admit that since same-sex marriage has been legalised in Canada, our society has not gone to hell in a hand basket, nor has traditional marriage, or our families been under attack. Scare tactics and wild-eyed fear-based rhetoric rarely turns out to be true. In actual practice, our society has become “live and let live” which is actually a rather tolerant and comfortable place to be.

For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than mutual attraction. It was a way of forging political alliances, sealing business deals, and expanding the family labor force. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty. For others, it was a privilege, not a right. Servants, slaves, and paupers were often forbidden to wed, and even among the rich, families sometimes sent a younger child to a nunnery or monastery rather than allow them to marry and break up the family’s landholding.

The redefinition of traditional marriage began about 250 years ago, when Westerners began to allow young people to choose their partners on the basis of love rather than having their marriages arranged to suit the interests of their parents. Then, just 100 years ago, courts and public opinion began to extend that right even to marriages that parents and society disapproved.

In the 1940s and 1950s, many states repealed laws that prevented particular classes of people—including those with tuberculosis and “the feeble-minded”—from marrying. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for states to prohibit interracial marriage. In 1987 it upheld the right of prison inmates to marry.

A 2009 study by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology found that while producing a plate of peas requires a fraction of the energy needed to produce the same number of calories of pork, the energy costs of a pea-burger and a pork chop are about equal.

While ruining a good thing for the sake of convenience seems uniquely American, canned coffee was actually invented by the Japanese.

In a story that sounds worthy of a political thriller (or a Bourne film), CEO of the London bid committee Sir Keith Mills says that the team planted GPS trackers in each of the IOC evaluator’s vehicles, planned their routes through the city, and followed them using London’s infamous CCTV system to make sure that they were not hindered by traffic. The operation took place in the London Traffic Control Center and “when they came up to traffic lights… we turned them green.

Scour Romney’s record for a single example of real political courage — a single, solitary instance, however small, where Romney placed principle or substance above his own short- term political interests. Let me know if you find one … His campaign has been an exercise in feeble appeasement.

According to Germany’s Der Spiegel, German police shot only 85 bullets in all of 2011, a stark reminder that not every country is as gun-crazy as the U.S. of A. As Boing Boing translates, most of those shots weren’t even aimed anyone: “49 warning shots, 36 shots on suspects. 15 persons were injured, 6 were killed.” …

Meanwhile, in the U.S., where the population is little less than four times the size of Germany’s, well, we can get to 85 in just one sitting, thank you very much. 84 shots fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, another 90 shot at one fleeing unarmed man in Los Angeles. And that was just April.

After 9/11 MIT was one of the few colleges in the city that didn’t have Muslim students leave because they were afraid.