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Land O Links

"We don't know all the answers. If we knew all the answers we'd be bored, wouldn't we? We keep looking, searching, trying to get more knowledge" -- pioneering TV workout guru Jack LaLanne.

* This list has a bunch of conventional-myth-challenging stuff, but let's focus on No. 5 -- police car chases aren't great at keeping the law-abiding safe:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19937_the-6-most-popular-crime-fighting-tactics-that-dont-work.html

* Richard Florida at Atlantic Cities does some charting and analysis of gun deaths in the U.S. One interesting finding: "Images of drug-crazed gunmen are a commonplace: Guns and drug abuse are presumed to go together. But, again, that was not the case in our state-level analysis. We found no association between illegal drug use and death from gun violence at the state level." Michigan, by the way, is somewhere in the middle on firearm death rates:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/

* Let's aside the terms "climate change" and "global warming" for a moment and consider more prosaic questions: Is it a good thing for Michigan's weather patterns to be hotter and drier than what was the average in the 20th century? Why or why not?:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/105172/petermann-glacier-iceberg-greenland-warming-climate-change

* Of course, if this study has relevance, it's now impossible for us to actually view even the weather outside of an ideological/partisan lens:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/07/ideology-clouds-how-we-perceive-the-temperatures/

* "The case against cooling, like certain other pillars of hipster sanctimony, stands on a foundation of half-formed ideas and intuitions.":

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/air_conditioning_haters_it_s_not_as_bad_for_the_environment_as_heating_.html

* "There's been a growing body of research that suggests that urban farming and greening not only strengthen community bonds but also reduce violence." Bridge has covered movements in Detroit to reclaim land and farm it.: 

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/07/chicago-food-desert-urban-farming

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