AL GORE’S CURRENT TV TERMINATES RELATIONSHIP WITH KEITH OLBERMANN: round up of links from Ed Driscoll; schadenfreude from Ace, and an employment opportunity from the Daily Caller.

UPDATE: “Olbermann now has the distinction of being fired from almost every major cable news channel on television – CNN, MSNBC and now Current. He never appeared on Fox News, but he did work for Fox Broadcasting, and was fired from there.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Keith Olbermann has been fired from Current TV, because he no longer reflects the company’s values, it was announced today. He will be replaced by a man who cheated on his wife with a prostitute.”

Plus this: “His viewer must be devastated.”

And, “One suspects that this might have something to do with the lawsuit involving James O’Keefe, but truthfully that is rank speculation.”

A CAUTIONARY NOTE FROM DEWEY & LEBOEUF: “In simple terms, it appears that Dewey (a) overpaid for M&A both big (firm mergers) and small (lateral partners), and (b) acted like it was making more money than it was, while not fully recognizing liabilities. One key to the Dewey story is the degree to which the wounds are self-inflicted, so the tendency of most folks will be to say ‘Well, there are no lessons there for us to learn, we would never make those mistakes.’ . . . The irony is that law, which should be managing to longer-term time horizons, seems to be more short-term oriented than most other businesses. When the Great Recession struck in 2008, most companies were able to do a “great reset,” re-setting stakeholder expectations by cleaning up balance sheets, lowering short-term profit expectations and making the case for strategic investments. But the folks running law firms don’t seem to feel they have the latitude to fess up that firms need to revamp to focus on client value, not near-term profits. That’s partly because in a cash-basis business they do have less latitude to clean things up, but also reflects deeper issues for which Dewey is an avatar, not an outlier.”

Related: The $60 an hour lawyer?

TOO CLEAN: RISE IN ALLERGIES LINKED TO WAR AGAINST BACTERIA.

“Allergic diseases have reached pandemic levels,” begins David Artis’s new paper in Nature Medicine. Artis goes on to say that, while everyone knows allergies are caused by a combination of factors involving both nature and nurture, that knowledge doesn’t help us identify what is culpable—it is not at all clear exactly what is involved, or how the relevant players promote allergic responses.

There is some evidence that one of the causes lies within our guts. Epidemiological studies have linked changes in the species present in commensal bacteria—the trillions of microorganisms that reside in our colon—to the development of allergic diseases. (Typically, somewhere between 1,000 and 15,000 different bacterial species inhabit our guts.) And immunologists know that signaling molecules produced by some immune cells mediate allergic inflammation. . . .

It has been well known for some time that IgE mediates allergies. But no one knew that bacteria living in the gut may use it to check the growth of immune precursor cells in the bone marrow. The finding might have wide ranging implications and help us make sense of other chronic inflammatory disease states that have also been associated with changes in this bacterial populations. Commensal bacteria might impact these other inflammatory conditions—including cancer, infection, and autoimmune disorders—through this mechanism, as well.

Experts have puzzled over the enormous explosion of asthma and allergies in recent years, and been unable to pinpoint the cause. This paper suggests that perhaps the overuse of antibacterial products could be to blame.

It’s a complex world.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Sell Out To the Man.

FASTER, PLEASE: Life-extending drug without the negative side effects.

It was a bittersweet discovery: a drug that extends life but at the cost of causing diabetes. Now the drug’s dual nature has been teased apart, raising the prospect of a new life-prolonging drug without the harmful side effects.

Rapamycin is regularly given to prevent transplant rejection and treat cancer. Previous studies have also shown that it extends the life of animals, but simultaneously causes glucose intolerance – a side effect reported in humans, too.

Nice to get the upside without the drawback.

FOR MARKETING PURPOSES, I THINK THEY’LL NEED A MORE ATTRACTIVE PHOTO: ‘Cyberplasm,’ a Micro-Robot Modeled After the Sea Lamprey, Could Swim Around Inside You.

AT AMAZON, bestselling Audible Audiobooks.

VIDEO: Health Care Mandates vs Pizza Toppings.

LIZ PEEK: Obama’s Folly: Choosing Switchgrass Over Oil.

FASTER, PLEASE: Lab-Created Cells Could Target Tumors and Deliver Drugs.

SEEN IN THE MARKET SQUARE PARKING GARAGE ON TUESDAY, a bumper sticker for a political ticket I could really get behind!

BOB OWENS: The Appleseed Project: History, Character, and Rifles.

LARRY SUMMERS AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF MONEY. “The penetration of e-commerce and the movement toward IT platforms of commerce is going to have a larger and larger impact on the real economy, simply because high percentage rates from a substantial base make more difference than high percentage rates from a very low base. Amazon, and the fraction of all purchasing that’s taking place online, is having a growing impact. We’re also seeing all kinds of industries that nobody conceptualized even a few years ago, built around social networking in one way or another, of which online games are only one example. And we’re seeing—this gets ahead of us slightly—the processes of commerce changing fundamentally when people are able to store value on their cell phones, when people are able to take payments digitally with minimal friction or red tape.”

ARE STATINS THE REASON WHY FATAL HEART ATTACKS ARE LESS COMMON? “The short answer is yes, but many factors could account for the decline. Indeed, the rate has been going down fairly steadily since 1980 — before the introduction of statins, which lower “bad” cholesterol, a known risk factor for heart disease.”

ECONOMIC THOUGHTS ON female hypergamy.

MORE ON HOW too much sitting raises risk of death.

JOHN RIZZO: The CIA-Congress Wars: A hostile relationship defined by a failure to communicate.

HOW’S THAT ARAB SPRING WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Egypt Gets Worse. “As liberals continue to cede ground to the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s increasingly clear that democracy and liberty in Egypt do not point in the same direction. Mounting evidence suggests that the new Egypt will be less liberal than the old one, especially regarding religious minorities and women’s rights.”

HEALTH CARE AND THE DYNAMICS OF INTERVENTION: “There is an externality problem but it is entirely of the government’s making; it isn’t in any way inherent to the industry. There would be no externality if those who defaulted on their health care providers could be held liable.”

ED DRISCOLL: Re-Engineering Humans: An Old Solution to Climate Change.

YESTERDAY I ASKED if anyone had encountered any Tim Geithner TAX CHEAT bills, and I got this email from reader David Rogers: “I picked this up at Burger King, along with a couple of (disappointingly) unmarked Timmies. And a completely unmolested Hank Paulsen. Enjoy!”

Nice to see that there are some circulating in the wild. Any other sightings?

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, THEY’D BE SHUTTING DOWN RESEARCH IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY. And they were right! U.S. Tightens Reins on Research That Could Be Used by Terrorists.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Health Care Disaster And The Miseries Of The Blue Model. “This is a horrible piece of legislation — as misbegotten and useless to its friends as it is menacing to its enemies. The question is: why? Why did the blues write such a bad law? Why, given a once in a lifetime chance to pass a program that Dems have longed to achieve ever since the New Deal, did they craft a sloppy mess that nobody understands and few admire, and then leave their law so unnecessarily vulnerable to constitutional challenge? The answers tell us much about why blue progressive thinking is losing its hold on the body politic — and why blue methods generally aren’t working as well as they used to.”

BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Merchants Of Despair.

Plus, here’s a YouTube version of my InstaVision interview with Walter Russell Mead.