Django Django were students together at Edinburgh Art College, but have now moved to London, a city, one of them explained to the journalist, that is ‘noisy, dirty, consumerist,’ – but also ‘richly multicultural.’ It didn’t occur to him, apparently, that the pop music of which he is a purveyor is one of the consumerist causes of noise.

This Pajamas Media piece from July relates the results of a Lancet study on dementia among those over 65 in poor countries:

As in richer countries, the chances of developing dementia were lower among the better-educated. The particular protective factor was found to be literacy, not number of years at school, because in some countries literacy is not necessarily the outcome of prolonged schooling. We in the west know all about that.
 
If literacy protects against the development of dementia, ask the authors, why is there no epidemic of dementia in countries with aging populations but low literacy rates among the elderly? They answer that it is probably because those who are demented die disproportionately in such countries. However, they have not shown that there is no such epidemic; and furthermore, there is no proof that the statistical correlation between illiteracy and dementia is a causative one.

For the moment, however, the prevailing orthodoxy is that reading (and other such educated activities) create a “cognitive reserve” that protects against the development of dementia. The educated do not show signs of losing their mind because they have more of it to use, just as very rich people rarely suffer poverty.
 
It seems a good plan, then, to continue to read. Personally, I was planning on it anyway.

A renewed dedication to thoroughness has led your skeptical bloggers to the stunning realization that we have been missing quite a number of Dalrymple pieces. Namely – gulp – 37 of them. In particular, a change in the British Medical Journal’s website caused us to think Dalrymple was no longer writing there, and so we missed an entire summer’s worth of his BMJ pieces. So we’ll be doing some catch-up and will post a few per day so as not to inundate our email subscribers’ inboxes all at once.

It is for them now to accept their part in the material damage that will be caused, and in every building burnt, every person attacked or killed, their responsibility will be involved.

As far as Hassen Chalghoumi is concerned, then, you can have any freedom you like—so long as you don’t exercise it.

The mother of the pupil… no doubt considered that it was an outrage that any offspring of so important and irreproachable person as herself should be criticised as having been imperfect in some way. This was an attack on her inalienable right to self-esteem that, other than that to freedom from consequences, is the most basic of all human rights.

Was Pam Posnett thinking of her electoral chances when she said this, calculating that there were at least as many criminals in Melton North as ordinary householders, and that therefore it was advisable for her not to come too firmly down on the side of householders against burglars?

Even more alarming, however, was the manner in which she expressed herself. It was thoroughly representative of the moral and intellectual degeneration of public life in this country. At the same time, of course, I have personal sympathy for Pam Posnett: it must be terribly boring to have to live with thoughts such as hers.

As personal incomes and government revenues suffer from the ongoing economic malaise, the rich are increasingly discredited and even hated. As Dalrymple points out in a piece for the Library of Law and Liberty (h/t Mary Catelli), they are unique in this regard:

In this medical piece at Pajamas Media, Dalrymple identifies some possible explanations of the recent increase in rates of whooping cough, concluding that, “The reasons for this are more complex than you might think.”

The survey found that the richest people tend to be the happiest, the least anxious and most fulfilled in their lives; poor people the least happy, the most anxious and least fulfilled in their lives.

…this is bad news for Mr Cameron who commissioned the survey for he will no longer be able to argue (if the economy does not improve), that it does not really matter because increased wealth does not make people happier anyway.

In trying to find a non-economic means of measuring our wellbeing he was almost certainly trying to excuse himself in advance for any possible failure in the economic field.

It is extremely unlikely that this would wash with the public – and the public would be right.