Unqualified Offerings

In which a blogger clears his browser tabs:

* Via Kung Fu Monkey, web series The Sanctum. It’s superheroes (and villains) in an addiction support group. And yes, there is a plot, that develops pretty trickily over the half-dozen episodes so far. New episodes seem to come out every month or two. They are reaching the point where it will be very tricky to move the story forward with no special effects budget, so that’s an extra layer of suspense.

* “Twilight of the Elites,” by Chris Hayes. Puts the meretricious in “meritocracy.”

* As an animal-rights fellow-traveler, I have more sympathy than Jeremy Clarkson does for the concept of requiring a license to own a dog. In practice, though, I don’t trust existing political structures to produce a licensing regime that would reliably increase animal welfare. All you’d end up with in the United States is the equivalent of Texas textbook activists mandating that we all train in the Koehler Method. Overall, though, Clarkson is massively and urgently correct about the bizarre things we now take for normal.

* 10 uncluttering things to do every day, or any day, by Erin Doland.

* I agree with Dean Baker that “skills mismatch” as an explanation for high unemployment is bullshit. Whenever there’s a genuine boom, meaning a genuine demand surge that businesses need to meet, companies hire whomever seems like a reasonable fit for needed openings and train them. And I haven’t seen any demonstrations that current labor niches are in fact more specialized and exclusive than heretofore. “Skills mismatch” is a way for the clowns Chris Hayes discusses above to pretend that they’re not the ones who broke the country.

* Tyler Cowen makes one funny. The unmade one is that the phenomenon he discusses perfectly explains the course of the Global War on Terror since 2001.