Events

My previous entry, about Kansas University Professor Paul Mirecki's beating by religious extremists, may not have hit the correct note of irony and outrage. I've just read the reports from Mirecki's local paper, the Lawrence Journal-World. The essential sequence of events was this: Mirecki wrote in an online forum that his upcoming course, "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and other religious mythologies," would be a "be a nice slap in [the fundies'] big fat face by teaching...

From today's Chicago Tribune: Creationism-as-myth professor beaten LAWRENCE, KANSAS—A college professor whose planned course on creationism and intelligent design was canceled after he derided Christian conservatives said he was beaten by two men along a rural road. The Lawrence Journal-World has a long series of stories about this. For my money, I'm hoping there are enough rational people in Kansas to prevent them blowing up statues and the like.

My friend Danielle is finishing up her tour with the Peace Corps. She's been in Kiribati, where the temperature never seems to get below 30°C (86°F). Danielle, if you have a chance, you may want to check the weather here before getting on the plane. It's supposed to go below -18°C (0°F) tonight.

From yesterday's column from Paul Krugman (reg.req.): Over the last few years G.D.P. growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared. But that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans. So where are all those corporate profits going, I wonder?

It was on this day in 1933 that Prohibition ended. Shortly afterward, marijuana was criminalized, in no small part because the alcohol lobby has always been more powerful, and in the 1930s popularly associated with a different ethnic group, than the marijuana proponents. I was going to provide links to scholarship to support this point, but there isn't a lot of it out on the Web right now. Even the relatively de-politicized National Institutes of Health and the Journal of the AMA have a dearth of...

We got about 10 cm (4 in.) of snow last night, so this morning Anne and I went out to shovel.

It was on this day in 1818 that my native Illinois became the 21st of the United States. Tangential question: Why does the History Channel put this tidbit in the Old West category?

Anne and I attended the taping last night of Wait Wait — Don't Tell Me!, the NPR News Quiz. It airs Saturday. If you don't listen to the show, tune in, and find out how to get Aerosmith and Kenny G to play the same gig, among other things. Note: You may have seen this post earlier. In a continuation (recurrence?) of earlier problems, Das Blog ate the post about an hour after it went up. Grr.

From the National Hurricane Center just a few minutes ago: ...EPSILON BECOMES YET ANOTHER HURRICANE IN THE RECORD BREAKING 2005 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON... Epsilon, the 26th named storm in the Atlantic this year, is now its 14th hurricane. See the complete public advisory. Hurricane season ended Wednesday. Apparently Mother Nature didn't get the memo. Update, 20:53 UTC: Forecaster Stewart at the NHC added this comment to the latest Hurricane Epsilon discussion: GOING BACK TO 1851... HISTORICAL RECORDS...

North Carolina executed the 1,000th person since the U.S. reinstated capital punishment in 1976, putting us 1,000 ahead of our friends and allies in the contest to become the most barbarous democracy on earth. I don't have time at the moment to go over the problems with the death penalty, except to note that the Jeanine Nicarico case is back in the newspapers in Chicago. The man most likely responsible for Nicarico's murder is finally on trial for it 20 years after a man who couldn't possibly have...