Does Hooters know about this?

Ronald Reagan once quipped, "They say hard work never killed anyone, but I figure, 'Why take a chance?'"

I feel the same way about the study linked above reporting that starring at breasts reduced the risk of heart attacks: skeptical, but willing to play it safe. Here is a list of heart healthy movies for your cardiovascular improvement. (The original post is on instapundit)

Stuff you can't make up

Welfare debit cards allow you to see easily where money is being spent. Turns out that some of the money that Missouri residents spent was spent in Florida and Hawaii. Anyone care to make a freedom of information request for Mississippi?

Para military weirdness

I was just in Pizza Shack and a mass of police dressed in para-military garb walked in. They were perfectly polite and as quiet as such a large group could be, but it was quite off-putting nonetheless.

There is something about having people walking around in military equipment in a civilian setting that is just un-American as I see it. The police aren't some separate entity, they are citizens, like us. There is something unsettling about it. Something not right.

I don't remember this sort of thing when I was a kid. We had planes in the sky and soldiers--unarmed--in our town, but the idea of sworn law officers moving about in mass with all this amour and iron hanging off of them was just unthinkable to us. A lot of it seems to have arisen from the war on drugs and the tactic of trying to take down big dealers and raiding houses without knocking on the door, etc. The old English Common Law never contemplated a "no-knock" raid--another reason that it isn't just conservatives that should care about the original understanding of the Constitution.

We put together these quasi-military forces and they eventually become part of the landscape. We accept it as normal. The organizations find ways to justify their existence by finding more and more things to do. Gradually we become less citizens and more subjects of the mandarinate.

Its Not Corruption If We Do It

The link goes to a story detailing a group of Harvard academics that received hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from Khadafy. They argue that they were helping him bring about change or something. When corporations do business with a dictatorial regime they are greedy capitalists, when Harvard academics give intellectual cover and PR flack to a vicious anti-American, terrorist supporting regime it is somehow ok, they are reaching out and being non-judgemental. When our noble profession does it it can't be immoral.

Update: Instapundit links to a guy that mocks the pretensions of an institution that was unwilling to be associated with the US military but had no trouble taking money from a vile dictator.