Per aspera

This would explain why I smelled smoke when I came up from the train at South Station today:
60K pounds of lobster lost in Boston fire
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — A fire destroyed a landmark seafood business on the waterfront early Friday, snarling rush hour traffic and raising fears the building would collapse into the harbor. There were […]

Today’s sign of the impending apocalypse:
Monkeys control robots with their minds - CNN.com
This can lead to no good.

This is fair.
Tangentially: why are well-done imaginary dialogues so funny?  Seriously, few things are so reliably likely to make me laugh.
(via)

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to Jim Henley’s finest post:
So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite […]

Jesus Christ.
(via Unqualified Offerings)
UPDATE:  Robert Farley at LGM has a slightly longer and more thoughtful response than I:
Long story short, it’s quite likely that an invasion would cause a lot more people to die than are likely to die sans intervention.
The idea of a threat of an invasion in order to force SLORC compliance with international […]

I’ve heard a disturbing number of people, all of whom I know to be otherwise sane, tell me that they think John McCain would make a good President, or even tell me that they might vote for him. This is nuts. He would be an awful President. Of course, you wouldn’t know […]