"Rape Case Unfolds on Web and Splits City."

Steubenville, Ohio.

"Corporate America has its own religions, and one of them is Myers-Briggs."

Yea, even as there are 12 signs of the zodiac in Astrology, there are 16 personality types in Myers-Briggs.

Academics would contend that... Myers-Briggs... [is] about belief much more than scientific evidence. And it’s administered by leadership coaches who, by and large, have no formal education in the science of psychology. 

“People like it because it reveals something they didn’t know about themselves or others,” says [Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School]. “That could be true of a horoscope, too.”

Even Katharine Downing Myers concedes that “psychologists had no use for the indicator; they felt that Jung was a crazy mystic.”

And yet the psychological community has been reticent to speak up too vocally against it. The fact is, many psychology professors do lucrative side work as organizational consultants. And as taboo as it is to praise Myers-Briggs in U.S. academia, it’s equally taboo to disparage it in corporate America.

Maybe if it were understood to be more of a religion/religion substitute, corporate America could overcome its embarrassing dependency on this pseudoscience.

"Nine young and impoverished Afghan girls lost their lives..."

"... in a land-mine explosion Monday while they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan."

"What we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, 'The Appification of Everything.'"

Says Anthony Wing Kosner:

This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents — a Wikipedia of Wikipedias — we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces.

"There's no way. There's no way he could have gone for a gun. He hated guns. He was afraid of guns. He was scared of guns."

"I'm sure he was drunk... A lot of people get drunk in Madison."

I was a UW student. I saw how people can drink downtown and stumble home. And people will stumble around and be confused and stupid and drunk but they don't get shot. They don't get shot by police officers, but they could. It could have been anybody....

"I hope the community will never forget this.... And I hope that they will remember this every time that they have to call the police."

"And there's even some evil mothers/They're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt..."

"... that women never really faint/And that villains always blink their eyes/And that children are the only ones who blush/And that, life is just to die."

A Velvet Underground lyric.

Are you one of those evil mothers that tell you women never really faint? I kind of am.

"A new reality TV show has revealed the underworld of the seemingly modest Amish community of Pennsylvania..."

"...  complete with prostitutes, blackmail and assault rifles."

The Discovery Channel's 'Amish Mafia' follows Lebanon Levi and his fellow thugs as they attempt to maintain order in the insular religious community of Lancaster, beneath the veil of the supposedly idyllic lifestyles.

Sounds like a fictional comedy show... and I feel like I've seen this before in a Weird Al video. (Video after the jump.)

"Restoring continental divide in Chicago would be costly, complex."

"If 110 years ago, from an engineering and financing standpoint, we could dig this huge canal and reverse (the river), 110 years later, with all the advances in technology, we certainly could undo what we have done."

"The founder of Domino's Pizza is suing the federal government over mandatory contraception coverage in the health care law."

"Tom Monaghan, a devout Roman Catholic, says contraception isn't health care but a 'gravely immoral' practice."

"3 Books To Read Before The End Of The World."

On the theory, presumably, that it's still amusing to talk about the Mayan apocalypse, NPR picks out some reading material, beginning with "literature's first and perhaps best answer to the question of what to do while waiting to die." The answer is: "Stay up all night, tell stories, make jokes and ignore what's coming."

Whether we're imagining the coming death in apocalyptic form or not, it's good advice and it's the advice most people seem to follow (even if they mix in some religion).

"Virus rebuilds heart's own pacemaker in animal tests."

"They used a virus to infect heart muscle cells with a gene, called Tbx18, which is normally active when pacemaker cells are formed during normal development in an embryo."

"The mother of the loner who massacred 26 pupils and staff at a US primary school may have played a major part in his catastrophic mental breakdown..."

"Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse."

She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.

Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ – so called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society – who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot....

Lanza’s aunt Marsha said Nancy was ‘self reliant’ and that they talked a lot about how she was preparing for the economic meltdown....

As for her son, he was described yesterday as a ‘ghost’ – an autistic genius, according to former school fellows, but also a ‘deeply disturbed’ young man who was so withdrawn that even many of his closest relatives hadn’t set eyes on him for years.

"How at 6 1/2 years old can you be that smart, that brave?"

"I think it's impossible outside of divine intervention. She has wisdom beyond her years."

At the Wisconsin Dinner Café...

... in Darkmonth, we're eating light.

***

A whole dead month in the dark,
A dawn in the mists that o'ercome her
Stifled and smothered and sad—
Swift speed to it, barren and bad!
And return to us, voice of the lark,
And remain with us, sunlight of summer.

"[P]eople who want to take care of people and can’t stand doing work that doesn’t relate to that should probably be parents."

"There are very few jobs that are truly just taking care of people. And most of them pay very poorly, if at all. So you may as well do it for your own family, where the pay is not so important. It’s ridiculous that we don’t think of taking care of a family as a career path. That’s a good path for some people. Just like earning a shit-load of money is a good career path for other people. In fact, those two types of people should marry each other."

Penelope Trunk writes the smartest thing I've read in a long while. The post is titled "Secrets of successful yoga studios, and tactics to examine ideas that suck."

Anyone want to talk about football?

Packers... Giants... who's your team?

Joe Lieberman on censoring pop culture and reporting "troublesome" young people.

On "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace got Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman talking about the Sandy Hook massacre, specifically the question of violence in video games, movies and TV. Lieberman said violence in popular culture "does cause vulnerable young men, particularly, to be more violent," and "We’ve got to ask the entertainment industry, what are you going to do to try to tone that down."

Wallace asked whether this would be voluntary, and Lieberman said:

In our society we try to do it voluntarily. But I think we’ve come to a point where we have to say, if not, maybe there are some things we can do to tone it down.

So, in other words, not voluntary! Having let his authoritarian side show, Lieberman shifts to talking about "the mental health system" and says:

I think we really have got to ask ourselves, first, off, this is like the slogan that we use in Homeland Security -- see something, say something.

See something... like what?

We’ve got to ask parents, friends, school officials, if you see a child, a young person, that really looks like they are potentially... real troublesome, get them mental health help and we have to ask ourselves, as a society, is there enough mental health help available for these kids?

Troublesome! He should have said troubled, if he meant to talk about mental illness, and he paused before he said the word. A fascinating slip. Troubling!

Mayor Bloomberg: "Well, I don’t know that-- you keep saying control. I think that’s a-- a bad word. What about regulations?"

Funny the way the word "control" troubles the proponents of gun control!

That was on "Meet the Press" this morning, where I also notice this remark by David Brooks:

Can-- can I just say one thing about the-- the debate we need to have?  This has become-- one of the problems for this debate is it’s become a values war.  It’s perceived as urban versus rural... And frankly, it’s perceived as an attack on the lifestyle of rural people by urban people.  And I admire Mayor Bloomberg enormously--there’s probably no politician I agree with more but it’s counterproductive to have him as the spokesperson for the gun law movement.  There has to be more respect and more people frankly from rural and Red America who are-- who are participants in this.

"Sometimes conduct is speech (think of burning a flag) and sometimes speech is not 'speech,' as strange as that sounds."

"In this instance, for example, the speech involved in talk therapy is, for all practical purposes, analogous to electric-shock therapy. It is a method of therapy, and it is the method, not the speech as such, that is being regulated. This is a common phenomenon. The state can regulate bribery, threats, conspiracy, and many other forms of 'speech' because, in context, what is being regulated is not the speech as such, but the underlying course of conduct, of which the speech is but a part."

Says lawprof Geoffrey R. Stone, cautioning against a "too literal... understanding of the constitutional guarantee of 'the freedom of speech."

"I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother.

"I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness."

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime....

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people.