I just graded 99 papers about a baseball!  Now on to mortgages.

Free to good home if you take ‘em all: Jack of Fables 1-16, Anita Blake 1, The Stand: The Night Has Come/Hardcases/No Man’s Land.

Distressing analysis of the US's military situation in Afghanistan.

Jay Smooth: “You've never paid dues, you barely pay taxes.”

( modern slave labor, corporate espionage, Bayes' theorem )

Phoebe Tonkin in a Miles Fisher video: okay!

( Fair use, temporary lawyers, Hedy Lamarr the inventor, the Civil War of 1812, Henry Jenkins essays, population control, Jon Krakauer on a scam nonprofit )

Thanks to talitha78 for the holiday card!

Via Naked Capitalism:

Nietzsche… has a description… of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. … When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he… has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)

( Adrian Johns, Ashley Mears )

Good point: If women don’t “do” visual, please to be explaining to me girls who have their bedrooms plastered with posters of Justin Beiber. Because last I checked, pictures are a visual medium.

The Euro bailout explained. Ha ha ha sob.
( Secret lives and the open secret of American corruption )

Including mention of some by me!

Dear law review: ( This is my life! )

Good review of a book on the border states of the pre-Civil War US.

( Errol Morris on photography; another book on statistics )

1. The new US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking feedback on how to make mortgage disclosure forms more understandable. If you have a few minutes, go and vote for the alternative you find easiest to understand.

2. I am seriously amused that Patrick Stump’s song This City, now free on iTunes, includes a lyric using the word “gentrification.”
( Civil War, understanding comics, economics and economic collapse, funky numbers )

Random promotion: I love Dropbox. It just saved my hide when I turned out to have deleted some very important footnotes by allowing me to go back about forty versions and nearly a month to find an older file that had the footnotes. If you’re looking for a convenient cloud backup service, I recommend it highly. And if you join using this link,  I get extra space and so do you (250 mb to add to your free 2 gigs; they continue to give you the extra if you pay to upgrade, as I do). (I checked out Amazon’s cloud drive and just didn’t get it. As far as I could tell, you couldn’t upload whole folders that weren’t music folders, and then there didn’t seem to be automatic backup. If you just want to store stuff that you don’t alter, maybe it’s a good idea? But if you’re constantly revising files, and if you want to move whole folders around, it didn’t seem that easy, though it’s possible I’m just used to Dropbox. I have not tried Apple’s service.)

( ignoring the obvious, the dead hand of the past, fan fiction and the law )