Someone (Hemingway?) once said that's the saddest story ever written.

This one's a close second:

http://randomreality.blogwa...

PS--you probably have the drug in your medicine cabinet right now.

PPS--The blogname's just a coincidence; this is from an ambulance driver in London.

It apparently stops bad ideas as well as good ones:

http://www.portfolio.com/cu...

Domino's Pizza owner may be in trouble over Catholic-only development..

The soil of southwest Florida is loose and sandy, and it absorbs rich men's fortunes as readily as the summer rains. Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, has poured at least $285 million into a stretch of rural land about 45 minutes from downtown Naples where he is building a new town and university, both named Ave Maria, which are designed to exemplify his conservative Catholic worldview. What has Monaghan's investment brought him in return? A picturesque vaulted church and a copper-roofed campus for his 600-student school, which espouses an orthodox strain of his faith; attacks by civil libertarians, who accuse him of aspiring to create a veritable papal state at the edge of the Everglades; and so far, after years of publicity and months of intense marketing, just 73 completed home sales—a fraction of the 600 he expected by the end of the year.

One of the most dangerous aspects of Global Warming is the possibility for positive feedback--the more ice sheets melt, for example, the more sunlight gets absorbed and the more likely ice sheets are to melt further, causing more heat to be absorbed...

That fact came to mind when I saw the St. Petersburg Times article on the nation's generally poor grasp of science.  Like the ice sheet metaphor, the more ignorant voters are about science the more likely they are to swallow still *MORE* ignorance  about other aspects of science, whether it's from oil companies stating that global warming isn't man-made, or presidential candidates who disbelieve in the fact of evolution.

And Lo!  we find the perpetuated superstitious beliefs of nomadic goatherders at the root of it again...

http://www.sptimes.com/2008...

I love the guy who compares it to the Civil Rights movement, in that a bare majority of people are going to "have to be carried kicking and screaming over the threshold."  I believe that's the textbook definition of "progress."

By the way, the SP Times earns more than its share of Pulitzer prizes.  It's one of the nation's most respected independent (non-chain) newspapers.