In which aspiration get followed down a dark alley by reality

and wakes up with a headache hours later in dumpster without their wallet, watch, cell phone or pants.









People wonder why reporters have a reputation for becoming cynical drunks...I wonder why more of us don't end up pouring scotch on our corn flakes every morning. Hell, even the New York Times isn't what it used to be.

A tip of the hat to lensman clzoomer for pointing us to this.

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Wow.

Talk about a perfect time for a Nobel Prize for Paul Krugman. Dr. K has been prophesying and predicting and critiquing and proving the mis-, mal- and other feasance of this US administration and its ideological drivers since he took the columnist spot at the New York Times in 1999. Perhaps the most unlikely but necessary victory was to lend his economic expertise to creating consistently engaging and memorable columns, studded with great puns and data in equal measure.

And now that the temple is falling not just in the USA but around the world -- can you think of a better moment in time to earn an award renowned worldwide as the pinnacle of scientific and academic achievement?

Of course, the detractors are sharpening up their pointy sticks, one calling this prize the worst choice ever. If they attack the prize itself, they may have a little problem, my guess is they will go the geezer route and shake their canes, crying "The kids these days! Handbasket! Lawks, me poor old feet!"

Never mind. Paul, ya done good.

Noni

With God on their side

And frankly, they can have him/her/them/it. While we may or may not be locked in a "Clash of Civilizations," it certainly isn't the Christian West vs Muslim East one that the right imagines it to be. It is the clash between the secular, logical, reality-based world and the fundamentalist, unreasoning, faith-driven supernaturalists. Personally, I'll take the scientific side - we don't know everything, but we can learn and at least we are willing to live and let live. The other side, eh, not so much.

The creationists sometimes try to pin the massacres, holocausts and pogroms of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot on atheism and their own misinterpretation of Darwin's theories as a justification of "survival of the fittest" -- when the real cause of these horrible events, and indeed most of the evil that men do, is the "true believerism" the notion that one is righteous that brooks no doubt, no reconsideration in the face of evidence that one's thesis is not airtight. It is that sort of inability to admit errors or tolerate dissent that leads to everything from the Iraq war to religiously driven fatal child abuse and deadly neglect.

And lest you think I am only picking on the Jesus-addled variety of superstitous dumbassery, consider this marvelous little episode and tell me blind belief in obvious chicanery does no harm.

(hat tips to Cat, the General, MJS, and David)