Linkdump #2.

* Why you're still fat: “The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.” The only real success I've had with weight loss has come through obsessive calorie counting through fitday.com. Nothing else makes a dent.

* Oh, Cleveland. (N.B.)

* More good news from the Obama administration: details of the secret ACTA copyright treaty. Terrible.

* Soviet advertising. More. Still more. Via.

* The New Yorker pushes the vegetarian agenda in a review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

Foer seems particularly incensed by the suggestion that deciding not to eat meat represents a delusion of innocence or, worse still, sentimentality. “Two friends are ordering lunch,” he writes:

One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

'After the Wall: Traces of the Soviet Empire.' Via MeFi.

1989 nostalgia is in full effect. MetaFilter and The New York Review of Books have your opening bids.

Inside the Soviet Doomsday Machine.

Playing catchup with the day's news.

* With Caroline Kennedy officially out of the Senate race in New York, WPIX is reporting that Kirsten Gillibrand will be Paterson's pick. If that's true, I'm shocked—I would have bet anything that Paterson would pick Andrew Cuomo to neutralize his chief potential rival.

* The Dark Knight: Snubbed!

* At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter. Via MeFi.

* Related: Did the Soviets really build a doomsday device?

* Having seen Frost/Nixon, I can confirm the film has serious factual problems.

* I can also confirm that the Phillips Collection is a great (and surprisingly large) collection near Dupont Circle.

* That Guardian list of 1000 novels has some siblings: 1000 films, 1000 artworks, 1000 albums.

Reports from the other universe: imagining Russian cultural hegemony. Via Cynical-C.

I now wish to call attention to another form of addiction, which has not been previously identified. It is more like gambling than drinking, since the people afflicted are ravenous for situations that will cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams. I am persuaded that there are among us people who are tragically hooked on preparations for war.

Tell people with that disease that war is coming and we have to get ready for it, and for a few minutes there, they will be as happy as a drunk with his martini breakfast or a compulsive gambler with his paycheck bet on the Super Bowl.

The late, great Kurt Vonnegut, writing in The Nation about America's addiction to war, and more specifically the addiction to preparation for war. Given the date of the issue (December 31, 1983) and the content of the last few paragraphs, it seems to me that he must have written this in response to the invasion of Grenada:

Suppose we had an alcoholic President who still had not hit bottom and whose chief companions were drunks like himself. And suppose it were a fact, made absolutely clear to him, that if he took just one more drink, the whole planet would blow up.

So he has all the liquor thrown out of the White House, including his Aqua-Velva shaving lotion. So late at night he is terribly restless, crazy for a drink but proud of not drinking. So he opens the White House refrigerator, looking for a Tab or a Diet Pepsi, he tells himself. And there, half-hidden by a family-size jar of French's mustard, is an unopened can of Coors beer.

What do you think he'll do?

The invasion of Grenada, of course, was undertaken because of the fervent Communist desire to disrupt the world's supply of nutmeg and thereby ruin Christmas. Or something like that. An imminent threat. You can see we had no choice. Via MeFi.