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.

The pacific northwest is becoming ground zero for anti-science hippies who are willing to believe anything if it fits their world view.   Their vaccination rates are shocking for people who claim to be so literate.

Now they have a new reason to go on a bender about nuclear power.   An article at CounterPunch.org by Janette D. Sherman, M. D. and 'epidemiologist' Joseph Mangano claims that more babies are dying due to...the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - 35% more. 

When the National Institutes of Health first opened in 1887,  it was called the " Laboratory of Hygiene" and was staffed by one man, 27-year-old Joseph James Kinyoun.  Mission: collect blood and stool samples from the sick in order to culture pathogens in the lab. 

Here is the entire NIH of that period.  One room at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York.

Abortion is barely a controversy in America these days.  Most people, men and women, are against it for themselves but it has been the law of the land for two generations.   Crazy politicians like Barbara Boxer of California still campaign on abortion by insisting if a Republican beats her in a Senate race they could somehow overturn it but for the most part it is a non-issue outside zealots.   It isn't going anywhere.

Did Pres. Obama sign a questionnaire supporting same-sex marriage or not?  His aides said he didn't.  Until he did.  Basically, even the White House doesn't seem to know.

I am sure gay groups, who likely voted 90% for him, are concerned about being told things like it has been "very clear that his position is evolving."  Well, no, there is nothing clear at all about that sentence, much less his position.