The downside to kooks diluting real conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) is that, over time, the public will regard the quackery as the real thing.   PTSD has now gone from being a rare condition suffered by soldiers in battle to being a blanket diagnosis for anyone who feels traumatized by anything.    

Now, we are supposed to believe a person who hears about stories of people who suffer PTSD will somehow catch it.    

Mac McClelland, a civil rights 'reporter' obsessed with sexual violence, was working for Mother Jones when she accompanied a Haitian victim of sexual violence to a hospital and the woman saw her attackers and went into shock.

Maybe fantasy baseball scouting will start to list eye color along with which side players bat from and how their home park is configured - lighter-colored eyes, it seems, don't absorb light the way darker eyes do, and in a precisely game like baseball where milliseconds matter, the impact can be substantial.

The clarity of a player's vision, called visual acuity, is not the only important quality to track for baseball players. So is contrast sensitivity.  Dr. Keith Smithson, the team optometrist for the Washington Wizards, Washington Nationals and D.C. United, measures this in order to interpret "a ball player's ability to pick out a white target, a baseball, against different backgrounds."

Twice as many people have recently died in Europe from eating organic food than died in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan - combined. 

If this were Monsanto doing the killing, there would be Enron levels of Congressional hearings but instead it's organic food and, gosh, it just must be better because it's, you know, organic, so few people are stating the obvious.

Namely that it's time to regulate that stuff.

Does a police officer really need a four-year degree?   Or a plumber or a journalist or a musician?  The 'college is a right' experiment in America is now two decades old and it has led to ballooning costs, a result of unlimited money being thrown at a finite number of colleges.   Has it led to a better life?

To be sure, college educated people have higher lifetime earnings, though no evidence shows it is a result of college - if a police officer retires after 25 years on the job, did the degree make them successful?  

Why do nations rise and fall?   Historians and anthropologists can usually make an educated hypothesis but some instances are nothing more than guesses.   Here are 10 that disappeared and maybe it was due to global warming or global cooling or famine or flood, but no one knows, including the Minoans, the Anasazi, the Indus, the Nabateans and six more.

Top 10 Civilizations That Mysteriously Disappeared 

Writing in Media Psychology, Markus Appel discusses a study where 63 Austrian college students who read a short about someone stupid then did worse on a test than a control group - they became more stupid - but the effect did not occur when the readers had to outline how they differed from the stupid character.    The stupid character was in "Slow on the Uptake," about a hooligan named Meier, and students either summarized the story or underlined passages where Meier differed from them.  A control group of 18 read a story with a protagonist who didn't do something stupid like go to a football match, get drunk, get into a fight and miss the actual game he attended.

From The Blogess, whose husband apparently has the patience of Job:

This morning I had a fight with Victor about towels. I can’t tell you the details because it wasn’t interesting enough to document at the time, but it was basically me telling Victor I needed to buy new bath towels, and Victor insisting that I NOT buy towels because I “just bought new towels“. Then I pointed out that the last towels I’d bought were hot pink beach towels, and he was all “EXACTLY” and then I hit my head against the wall for an hour.

When TIME recently ranked Darth Vader #3 on their "Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers" (what we call link bait, since people love numbered lists and you have to scroll through each one and see an ad each time) they did so because he was the ultimate deadbeat dad.   Not only was he never there for a single "Life Day" celebration (1), but when he does finally show up, he expects some kind of relationship and then cuts the kid's hand off.

Jose Antonio Vargas has a good story - he is an educated, literate man with a flair for writing.  But he is also an illegal alien who, despite being 30 years old, could never figure out how to become a legal one.

Is the process that hard?  Well, no, the problem, as you will see if you look at his story objectively, is that his grandfather was trying to take shortcuts, buying him an illegal green card, falsifying data to get him a Social Security number, encouraging him to lie so as not to endanger the chances of other family members - none of that is due to American immigration policy, it is due to wanting to circumvent the process millions of others went through.  In short, it is selfish.