Greetings, persons of great honesty and integrity! We’re certain that you were not part of the thumping truth took in politics for 2009, and did not believe the big political lie for the year about death panels nor the runners-up that didn't win the award.

Out in the world today, lest we think that our problems are ever only in America, there is at least one pastor in the United Kingdom who thinks death for homosexuals is a swell idea. And there are parents who will fly in genital multilators for their children, despite the illegality of the practice in the UK.

More tamely, although perhaps more ideologically interesting, is Benedict moves Pius XII and John Paull II closer to sainthood. JPII, no complaints, but Pius was the Pope during the madman’s reign in Germany and was frequently accused of not doing a whole lot to stop his pogrom against Jews.

And remember, the actions of one madman or group do not change the meaning of a symbol as old as a swastika.

Finally, as expected by this point, Iran pooh-poohs a deadline sset for them regarding a deal to swap enriched uranium for civilian nuclear reactor fuel.

In domestic news, a new Representative switched his party affiliation to the Republicans after indicating his frustration with the way the Democratic Party was running the show and their apparent indifference to the cries of the people. We appreciate any Congresscritter showing honesty and siding with the people they feel are closest to their own ideology.

A suburban chicagho library user believes it inappropriate that another user tagged Ann Coulter's books in the catalogue as "hate speech" and the library didn't immediately remove it. His argument is that it looks like the library itself tagged the books, instead of a user, and thus is making political speech in a place they shouldn’t. Greater deliniation between library and user-generated content is agood suggestion to make, sure. And, as was mentioned, there is no restriction on that user tagging the books with something more positive or with tagging other pundits with negative tags.

Fact-checking the current administrator, despite his denials that he didn't campaign for the public option, a quick scour of the Intarwebs says he did. Lots. Elsewhere on possible health care reform, after the cloture vote passed, with the opposition claiming this was all moving too quickly and Democrats wanted to pass soemthing before the population knew what was in it, there was concern that perhaps the imprecatory prayers had boomeranged onto a different Senator, who was fine, thank ye very much. Nowadays, though, the idea of a bill that's moving too fast, without bipartisanship, without listening to anyone in the medical industries, will reduce choice, institute government control, and raise premiums passed by thuggery and intimidation is the main argument against passage (and they’re not happy that it’s happening right around the holiday break so they’re stuck working when they could be elsewhere), having exhausted just about every other tactic to stop it.

A candidate for governor of Idaho is holding rallies open only to male Mormons, ostensibly to discuss issues that only those who have good priesthood standing in the church would be able to hear and understand. To the rest of the country, though, that looks suspiciously like willingly excluding a significant amount of your possible base to cater to your religious affiliation.

Our dumb criminals file points, laughs, at Ted Klaudt, the former lawmaker convicted of rape of his foster daughter, attempting to copyright his own name so he can demand his permission be granted before news organizations run articles or stories about him. Yeah... that’s not going to go very far.

Furthermore, The WaPo commits a journalism failure by squelching an on-the-scene report made by a staffer in favor of the official police line, despite evidence already available that refutes that line, and later having to correct the errors. Why not just file the report from the person who watched it unfold? Or at least study the already-available material on hand?

Last out, according to The New Republic, our business schools are turning out more financial wizards and asset managers rather than people who are interested in making the manufacturing process and the products they produce better. Thus, even if we went back to a heavy manufacturing base, the article suggests we don’t have the managers to truly take advantage of it.

In technology, Microsoft loses its case, will have to remake Word 2003 and 2007 so as to remove infringing XML-reading code, efficiency technology makes bandwidth nearly 10 percent better, gains of traffic capacity possible from the addition of more computer-controlled cars to the road, and the possibility of using crowdsourcing tools to disguise one's true intent, making an harmless-looking image-matching task into unwittingly identifying dissidents and protesters, for example.

In education, cognitive science helps young children learn things they previously weren't thought capable of knowing, which makes our childhood less of prodigy-ness and more of good teaching, for which we say “w00t.”

In the opinions, The WSJ complains about the closure of Guantanamo Bay, saying that Yemen is far too terrorist-friendly to accept detainees and Illinois runs an unacceptable risk that those persons would be tried by the court system, while also savoring the idea that the current administrator is now defending policies like that previous administrator’s because he thought and declared rashly. We’re still waiting for the day when someone expresses enough confidence in the legal system to actually try terror suspects.

The WSJ's editors complain about the phasing-out of a voucher program in Washington, D.C., claiming all the benefits gathered by the voucher students that attend a properly funded school will be lost by sending them back to public schools, and blaming the NEA as the reason why the successful program was killed. We’re also still waiting for the day when someone agitates to fund the public education system properly nationwide so that all schools can acces the resources of private schools. Clearly, success is possible. Why aren’t more people clamoring for it?

Not that the President is being assailed only from the right side of the spectrum - disillusionment and anger over broken promises fuels much of the criticism from the left, although one could argue that the President still has a few years to play on that regard. The disappointemnt from all sides leads to circulating postings like a suggested Congressional Reform Act of 2010 that would limit terms and pay raises, dump the Congresscritters into Social Security, remove their Congressional pension, and require them to navigate the rapids of private health insurance coverage like everyone else</a>, which would hopefully result in the passing of real robust health care reform, shore up Social Security, and put in power people who want to work for the people that elected them, while avoiding the generation of a career politician. That it relies on Congresscritters willingly shooting themselevs in the foot, however, dooms it from being anything more than a chain e-mail.

Last for tonight - thankfully, the myth that suicide rates rise in December is still a myth. Oh, and we finally had soemone show some images of the fancomic that genderbends Alan Moore. Good artistic style. Should be interesting to watch unfold.

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Greetings, informed and interesting people. There is something to be said about living in a world where the foundational text of Christianity is often the text most stolen from bookstores, as part of an apparently wider sequence of people stealing from bookstores and author fears that piracy will run rampant on the publishing industry. There are two things to be said about this: first, for all the people thieving books, you do realize you can borrow them from the library, right? (If you steal from us, though, you go straight to Special Literary Hell, where you have to manually re-make every item you stole, using the most primitive technology available.) And second, what does the rash of thievery (and the statistics that say less than half of people buy the books they read and less than 30 percent buy them new) say about the price of a book, whether in print or digital form? Will publishing go through the gutting that should be rightly happening to the music industry, were it not for certain cabals with more money than brains?

Beginning again, as we do, in the world, the old becomes new, and cycles that have happened before repeat - the funeral for a cleric in Qom became a protest against the government in Iran. Agitation for change, with the question being whether or not the government responds with harder crackdowns or hopes that things will go away. Reports from the ground believe that the protest is now about regime change instead of reform candidacy, because regime change is what they want. Others try to paint the President's policies of open-hands negotiation as rebuffed and failures, citing what they see as the buildup of weapons, a lack of any political gesture or diplomacy, and continued support for terror organizations.

In Iraq, if you ever wanted to know how much the military is stretched thin, consider this - a major general in the United States army has made getting voluntarily pregnant or impregnating a female soldier an offense punishable by court-martial. Assault and forced sex cases will not have the female punished, the major general states. I'm sure there's also something that could be said about how the military still resents having women in it, and this is one of those ways that resentment plays out, but all the stresses are on how it's legal and part of a bigger restriction-of-behavior package. Plus, I'm not really versed enough to make a cogent argument about how much this behavior is or isn't intended to hurt women.

Elsewhere in Iraq, the ruling United States-backed power is continuing their outreach to clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr, hoping to bring them into the governing fold instead of staying apart as independent power structures.

The recent release of Avatar in other countries leads to an interesting story about subtitle re-positioning and the censorship offices in Egypt, where it takes family connections just to be seen after an ugly standoff with censorship security. And that's just over moving subtitles to the bottom of the screen (and re-editing in a "sex" scene, but mostly the subtitling). Definitely nice to know that films here don't have to pass a board with any more power than the MPAA (which is voluntary, I believe, but can sink a film if it rates it NC-17)

Last out for today, Israel admitted to harvesting organs from the dead without the consent of their families for much of the 1990s. While there are arguments to be made about whether organ donation should be the default instead of the exception, to do so without the consent of the dead or their surviving relatives (assuming the dead weren't organ donors) is not good.

On the domestic fronts, as health care bills make it to final passage, we find right-wing bloggers and Senators alike wishing that a Democrat, any Democrat, would have been unable to make it to the chamber to do their vote, so that the sixty-vote caucus would be broken by absence. This is not a new trend necessarily, witness tee shirts and other paraphernalia advocating, jokingly or otherwise, for the death of the current President, including the recent Psalm flap, but it is climbing up fairly high into the ranks of the government, which we would normally expect to be above that kind of talk or posturing. Other tacks taken include accusing the government of "seed Chicago politics" as an insult to the process and the President, or trying to pump up the populace to get their states to invoke nullification on whatever gets passed by the federal government, spinning it as the only way to get real change done, instead of wasting time with federal politicians, claiming the bill will be a death knell for Democratic politics, with the moderates being sacrificed to enact the dream of a welfare state the liberal elements and President Obama apparently want, and delcaring that the bill as noted won't actually achieve its ends.

On the other side of the coin, the compromise resulting in special treatment for Nebraska has earned flack for the way it was done, including the Governor who was concerned about budget stress from another federal mandate.

In the end, however, nobody should lose sight of who it's being done for - people like Sierra Cooper, a 21 year-old with muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, ineligible for life insurance (and probably most medical insurance) who is soliciting donations for her own funeral expenses, keenly aware that her time left on Terra is limited.

Some welcome news about open government - The Obama Administration is getting ready to issue an executive order requiring review of the classification procedures of each agency, as well as setting up an institute to process the severe backlog of documents ready to be declassified at the end of the year. Hopefully, that center can then keep putting the screws on government agencies to release their classified data at an improved rate.

In technology, designs unveiled for a lush Singaporean garden that captures some of water and solar and other natural resources to feed itself, hope that climate change agreements will help reverse the acidification of the oceans, an effect not talked about much in climate change arguments, a robot got very close and personal pictures of a violent deep-water volcanic eruption, including the formation of a lava previously only found in samples millions of years old,

Starting with opinions, Ecocosmology, the belief that every intelligent lifeform on a planet close enough to a star to be destroyed by it is being tested to see whether they will overcome their limitations and achieve independence of destroying stars before their stars expand to engulf them. Certainly frames the cosmic clock properly - if we can avoid destroying ourselves through our own hands, we still have to get far enough away from Terra so that the eventual death of Sol does not consume all of humanity.

Mr. Michaels claims that the East Anglia e-mails were the exposure of an already known conspiracy by scientists to shut out dissenting voices from peer-reviewed journals, with disastrous results for official policies, a conspiracy whose pressure he experienced firsthand as it became more difficult for him to be able to publish anywhere, and now he fears the effects of what the EPA has decided about CO2.

And out of opinions, Ms. Noonan suggests that America is feeling things are going the wrong way not just because of economics, but because Americans feel their values and their children are under constant assault by the cultural left, with the Adam Lambert performance on broadcast television as a recent example of that attack. Ms. Noonan is almost correct. People are concerned that their children are being subjected to violence and sexualized images on television, which does happen on broadcast television at more intervals that sport programs and music award performances, like sitcoms and crime dramas and reality television. They're also under constant siege by marketers with commercials attempting to turn them into consumers that will get you to spend $50-100 USD on a piece of easily-breakable mass-molded plastic that doesn't do anything like what the commercial said it would do. Some of them feel religious values are being demeaned, too, by the programming that's on. To accuse the "cultural left" of being behind these changes, however, is to fire an arrow in the wrong direction. Marketing departments for large corporate conglomerates are not composed exclusively of New york or Hollywood liberals. The executives that approve those campaigns are certainly not exclusively cultural liberals. Performers all across the political stripe tap into the energy in their work and their stage presence. What they are doing is playing the culture, which is well-tuned and responds to their efforts. Sometimes strings break, which usually results in public outrage over a wardrobe malfunction or Mr. Lambert's performance bringing out into the open what the cultural conservatives would like to see stay in the back of the closet, but for the most part, he culture feeds on it and generates a lot of revenue from it. "Pop Princesses" make albums full of sexual songs, put to video where they wear revealing costumes and gyrate their hips and tops in sexually suggestive manners. Rap talks about the violence present in a lot of places and of making one's money any way one can, whether legally or not, to live the good life instead of the slums. Change the skin color and put a suit on them, and that could describe a lot of CEOs. The culture approves of sexuality and violence in its marketing and performances - Sarah Palin and the NRA for two on the conservative side of the fence. What it does not approve of is when the sex, sexuality, or violence is obvious and can't be explained away behind one of many fig leaves put up. Then, the last-ditch fig leaf appears, the children, the immature, the people who supposedly can't handle the marketing blitz yet grow up to prove themselves savvy consumers and people who understand the messages really well before they even get past the legal requirements of age. The mythical past is just that, mythical, but if one really wanted to try and put the brakes on this perceived cultural slide, they'd have to manage to stop up commercial success using sex appeal. Far easier (and probably more Taoist of them) would be to instead push in the direction the water is flowing - get kids to understand the nature of sexuality with frank conversation, to understand what kind of sexual advertising is going on, the differences between real and fantastic violence, all of that - if we educate early, age appropriately, and constantly, then perhaps we can lessen the taboo power that sexuality and violence have on kids and teenagers and break the ability of marketers to use that as effectively. To many of the Mythic History defenders, though, if we do that, we've thrown ourselves headlong into the abyss and abandoned all of our core principles, so it's not likely to happen any time soon.

Mr. Fitzgerald examines what he sees as the trend moving evangelism away from anti-intellectual feelings-based ministry into a more intellectual mind, a return to the time where the religious theology mixed, mingled, and debated with the contemporary philosophy, concluding that the move is a good one and will make evangelism better, although the progress toward it is quite slow.

Last for tonight, the year in band names, proving that we're pretty good about coming up with all sorts of names for our musical groups, and a study confirming that some people experience physical sympathy pains when viewing other people in pain.

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Greetings, fans of sport, of theater, and of other things important and trivial. We're in full VEWPRF season, and one of the things that means is there's some new Doctor Who. This time around, there's more buzz than usual, as we know that there will soon be a new Doctor on the scene. For David Tennant, it's been quite a ride, and he seems to have escaped whatever curse may have followed his predecessors about being able to find work outside of Doctor Who. (Plus, mental note, figure out a way to see the Hamlet on BBC2 that has Tennant and Patrick Stewart in the same company.)

Congratulations on making it past another darkest night of the year - I hope that your ceremonies of warmth, light, and seasonal change were all wonderful.

In the gift-giving department, this should seem obvious, but giving gifts that imply someone needs self-improvement, without them requesting those kinds of gifts... well, let's just say it's a bad idea.

A reminder to parents before we begin - please have you child vaccinated. Things like mumps should not be having outbreaks at all, but they will be more likely to, the more people listen to wild claims about vaccination.

Internationally, The Holy See has declared copyright on the Pope, the Papal Seal, and other Pontiff-related phrases. We'll see how well that works out for them.

Much more cruel than this, attempting to revenge himself on his wife, a man drugged and then stuck needles into their two year old son, several times a week. There was also the four year old, beer in hand, who was taking presents from the neighbors and the fetus under the Christmas tree. It's a weird season, the winter. And just because someone is in prison doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to complain about inhumane conditions. The NYT Editorial board pushes for removal of a requirement that says physical injury has to happen for prisoners to be able to bring suit about their condition.

Iraq accuses Iran of invading and occupying an Iraqi oil well right near the disputed border between the two nations. Oh, look, tensions rising. If this were the previous administrator, I would wonder whether that wasn't the opening he would need to invade Iran. It being the current administrator, however, I don't know whether that will be his conclusion.

Following on an earlier story, the sign stolen from the Auschwitz camp has been found, restored, and will be a bit more secure the next time someone wants to try and take it off. According to reports, the suspects are four or five men who evaded the current security set up and cut the sign between the words to dismantle it and carry it off. There are no political leanings thought to be involved in the theft.

Last out, slightly over 50% of the UK self-identifies as Christian, continuing on a 25-year downward trend for that particular monotheism. Most of the population leaving that zone still consider themselves religious/spiritual but do not identify with one specific faith or philosophy. Perhaps this is why the Century of the Fruitbat marches on, with Mexico City joining the list of places where homosexuals can be married and adopt children.

Domestically, the President is trying to positively spin the health care bill and non-bindnig climate change accord in the face of opposition from both left and right about the bill's effectiveness and the accord's non-bindingness. Got to boost the numbers somehow, because they sure aren't improving. (It's like the President enjoys his Rock and a Hard Place position, where he gets assailed for not compromising enough with the opposition tht doesn't like him and assailed for not leaving the opposition in the dust because they won't negotiate in good faith.) Considering what's coming out of what Mr. Reid gave away to achieve the consensus needed to overcome filibusters and the other Democratic senators, the President is probably trying to make a pile of dung look and smell like a dozen pleasant flowers. The whole thing can really be looked at logically if you take the premise that politicians are looking out for corporate interests instead of yours, because they have to court those corporations for the donations they'll need to be re-elected, as true and work from there. At that point, it no longer is a shock that we're getting what we're getting.

a teenager in Wisconsin has been required to pass any potential heterosexual dates past his probation officer for three years after fleeing the state with a young woman. As far as we know, any homosexual dates will not have to go through the officer.

In another story involving a policeman with no apparent sense of humor, after his hummer was pelted by snowballs, a detective drew his gun and got out of the vehicle, threatening the flash mob of revelers.

And one involving orientation, a state Senator for South Dakota threatened to pull funding for the Rapid City school district if they passed a policy that would add the words "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to the list of things the school will not discriminate against students or staff for. The board eventually decided to add sexual orientation, but not gender identity. Still, Gordon Howie, one of the worst persons in the world, for that kind of threat, regardless of what the board was discussing.

Last out, Seattle's new mayor is apparently in favor of legalization and taxation of marijuana. Too bad there are all those pesky federal policies that will make it more difficult for him to achieve his ends.

In technology, what kind of government would we have where most of it was truly on the record, recorded by citizens, either with intent to flatter or to demonize, uploaded and available on YouTube for all to see?

Furthermore, some flap over whether $19,000 USD is too much to pay someone to develop a website and keep it content-updated for a school year, with the response resembling the response to what people say about librarians having advanced degrees. We think the 19,000 was a bargain, especially if the school district is very active in what it does.

Additionally, Yelp walks on the Google deal, HP heads to the drawing board after one of their face-tracking cameras doesn't recognize darker-skinned faces, a research review indicating that the categories of visual learner, auditory learner, and the like are not borne out by the results, meaning, well, back to the blackboard on that, and some suggestions on what kind of propulsion could replace chemical rockets for interstellar travel.

Last out, Lingt, which aims to make learning a new language like playing a game, complete with achievements and tailoring the difficulty level so that the words that give you the most trouble show up more often than those you know. This, if it pulls throuh on the promise, will be AWESOME.

Opinion time, where Mr. Harsanyi accuses he President of inventing unanimous consent and consensus where there is none to try and get his bills passed. Mr. Harsanyi also has disparaging words for those bills, like the "impressive impotence" of the first stimulus bill and his assertion that the health care bill is about insuring the uninsured and getting the federal government to be able to control health insurance markets (first assertion right, second way wrong...), but his point of the habit of creating a situation where "everyone knows" something must be done and will be good is both valid and disturbing...and not just President Obama's, either. Why is it that we need to invent the idea that everyone is going along with it, other than to present the idea of invicibility and inevitability to the opposition?

...oh. Well, here's an example of why we'd need it - the Obama administration and the Supreme Court have firmly stood with their predecessors, letting stand a lower court ruling that declared "suspected enemy combatant" being held outside the United States are unpersons and entitled to no rights or protections other than that which the law will deign to grant them. A ruling that can just as easily be turned on those who are citizens of the United States. This could be the worst of all worlds - Huxley is right, but Orwell is accurate.

And last for tonight, because our profession appreciates and understands many of the jokes, stereotyping readers by their favorite authors, hitting the powerhouses, like Shakespeare, and the other powerhouses, like Rowing and Meyer, and the horde of authors, middling and famous, in between.

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Whoo! A whole week went by without being able to do a whole lot in terms of regular news postings. As such, we're heavy on the news and light on the opinions for once, instead of the other way around. So, for your week-size helping of news and opinions, follow on, follow on.

Something of interest to us library and literary types - Publishing under a male pseudonym does earn you more respect and attention, less condescension, less hassle, and better satisfaction with the work. I think the Unabashed Feminism department is going to have to investigate why, despite many prominent female figures through time, people still like male names better when it comes to work.

For those aspiring to be illusionists, if you design or do some ones particularly well, you might find that the CIA is interested in your talents.

And for those interested in improving the planet without having to sacrifice good vibrations, meet a vibrating sex toy that generates all its power by hand. Four minutes of cranking, claims the manufacturer, is more than sufficient for thirty minutes of use.

By the way, your local librarians are always there in case you run into a question your search skills can't find a satisfactory answer to, and you can probably work something out with them if you have overdue books. They're also pretty good hands with the decorations.

Last before the news, If you're inclined, there's a research study looking for participants about how furry subculture has changed their lives. The FAQ is a bit sparse, but there is an IRB attached to the project.

Internationally, at current rates, hospital cleaners are worth more to society than bankers. When not "destroying" wealth, bankers were also helping to launder significant amounts of drugs money, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, because they were one of the few liquid assets available. The bankers deny doing so, and it would likely be difficult to trace the money back and prove it, but still, makes you wonder how much money circulates in the above-ground economy that was generated by the below-ground one.

Human rights in China continue to be something dreamed of, instead of reality. At least in Uganda, the United States is agitating for the killing of the bill to criminalize homosexuality. Although, as hybridelephant.myopenid.com puts it, it might be better to pass it so as to point out how very un-Christian it is and force the denunciations.

Out in the battlefields, hey, look, software that lets you watch the video feeds of military unmanned aircraft. This is just one of the ways that cheap technology can be used to wage a very successful asymmetric war against a bigger and more expensively-equipped opponent. It may, in fact, be money that makes for victory or stability, because money greases the right wheels and drives wedges in the right places to prevent organized and united oppositions.

At the Copenhagen summit, Senator Inhofe came, deployed his truth squad, fielded questions from a skeptical press, and went home. Effectiveness doesn't seem to have been much above zero.

Actress Julie Newmar, known well for her role in the 60s Batman series with Adam West, alerted authorities to the eBay sale of jewels that belonged to her.

Domestically, the conservative movement continues to tear itself apart over ideological differences, leading to projections swinging in favor of Democratic candidates where a Republican and a Conservative/Tea Partier are in the same race. Not that the national party is doing a whole lot, either - the pervor over trying to stop health care has resulted in the GOP attempting to block a bill that would pay for Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And thus, the pro-war, fund it all, no questions asked party is trying to filibuster a war bill. (They failed.)

The city of Houston has elected their first openly homosexual mayor, the largest city to do so, as the century of the Fruitbat marches on, Portugal is considering letting homosexuals marry, a big issue in the Roman Catholic country, but with a Socialist government, and Washington D.C.'s city council voted to let homosexuals marry as well, but the United States Congress will have to not block it for thirty days before the bill becomes law. On the side opposed to equality for all, Oral Roberts, evangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University, was called to his judgment at 91 years. God only knows what reward he has received. Or what reward the military members who aggressively promote their brand of Christianity to other cadets, other soldiers, and the people they're supposed to be helping to protect or the people agitating to have an atheist council member not seated because the state consitution prohibits those who deny the being of God to have office, despite the clear provision in the federal constitution against religious tests for office, will receive.

A quick aside from one of our resident followers of Ganesha, hybridelephant.myopenid.com, a sequence on the need to contextualize the misuse of the swastika as a recent phenomenon, one contrary to its actual intentions, involving the carving of the phrase "I 卍 Obama", leading to correction of the article by a sixth grader with the correct knowledge. For the opposite attitude, the one that continuees to associate religious symobls with men who were nowhere near that religion (or any other of the nominally peaceful ones), the offense an uneducated student took over the comparison between the cross symbol of Christians and the swastika symbol, with WND helpfully providing the wrong image as context in the middle of trying to paint the person firing religious symbols in direct contravention of school rules as being discriminated unfairly against. (The Liberty Institute person quoted at the end of the article is also wrong. Schools can and do ban religious symbols.) Speaking of the atrocities, someone stole the sign over the gate at Auschwitz, the one proclaiming that work will set you free.

NPR's All Things Considered talks about how the Tea Party movement is harnessing the anger of the populace to promote their message, a message which the Slacktivist indicates contains a healthy does of racism against the President, assuming that he hates America, and that his "Yes We Can" doesn't include all of America, but just the America that is like him, threatening to steamroll everyone else on his way to whatever boogeyman is convenient these days. Worse, the Tea Partiers seem very intent on an unhealthy form of denial of reality, perferring to believe there are monsters out there and investing a lot of effort in combating those imaginary monsters.

It would be far easier to focus on the real monsters, like the ones uncovered in the Kansas City Star's multi-part feature on human trafficking, which implicates Kansas City as a place where a lot of that trafficking takes place. And it's not necessarily sex-trade trafficking. It can also be someone brought over who had their documents seized by their employer, and then were abused or forced to work very long days for little or no pay, possibly with the threat of harm to themselves or their families if they didn't continue in those awful conditions.

In health care, we start with Joe Liberman's declaration that he will filibuster any bill that includes real reform. So, in a spineless attempt to get Joe to please, please, pretty please, stay with the Democrats, Harry Reid caved and removed any mention of any real reform. Thus, things have gotten very bad. So very bad, in fact, that some progressives are now calling for the death of the bill instead of passing the gutted monstrosity. Because, after all, it maintains the for-profit private insurance cabal and provides no competition. And the system as it is kills people who were living the Way-It-Never-Was form of the American Dream - because someone who never worked gets no Social Security, and her husband made too much for public assistance, and thus it eventually became a choice of chemotherapy or food. Food won, as it almost always will.

Leaked documents describing TSA screening procedures from 2008, with images and examples of things and people exempted from screening, and those things and people that get special screening.

And last out, will wonders never cease... John McCain, of all people, is for putting the wall between commercial banking and investment banking back up. Perhaps the Republicans have finally decided that they've got too far in their deregulation frenzies (not that you were much help, Bill Clinton).

In technology, a best man set up the newlywed bed so that when the couple was having sex, it would post to a twitter account, even Facebook people are okay with you falsifying some of your optional data to help protect your privacy, which indicates to me that the new privacy settings aren't, an octopus and a coconut shell, showing the animal kingdom can do the tools and technology thing, too, a reminder that you can have great security and still be hijacked if someone takes over the lower-level protocols feeding your site, a company is selling two robots that will be crafted to be your doppelgangers if you bid high enough to get them, stress is certainly not a modern concept, research continues to indicate the Peter Principle is true, much to all our chagrin, the unlocking of the genetic codes of common cancers, proving there's a lot you can do when you have significant computing resources at your disposal, the possibility that synaesthesia is the result of higher brain functioning, instead of crossed sensory wires at a lower level, and Google's CEO joins the crowds saying "If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be concerned about your privacy". Excepting that everyone has something to hide, whether it is their real name or a heinous crime. (Did we mention Google wants to buy Yelp, and thus gather more data unto itself?)

Oh, and there was the almost Earthsize planet orbiting a star much smaller than Sol.

In the opinions, Mr. Lind opens the salvo with a reminder that with a new census comes new gerrymandered districts, ensuring that nobody from an opposition party will ever be elected in the next ten years, when, if they're in power, they'll gerrymander to favor themselves.

Mr. Pett usees one picture about climate change to explain why, even if warming is natural, why people should be concerned about their environment. And why some people will still oppose it.

Last out of opinions, a light take on things - how much television owes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for changing it in ways that we still feel today - season-long arcs, strong female characters, witty dialogue, and permanent death for major characters.

Last for tonight, in your VEWPRF fun department, Christmas Tree Light Hero. Because the bar on synchronized light and sound displays had to be raised somehow. Going for one better, forty-five beautiful slow shutter speed pictures, and some very nice landscapes of the Southwestern United States, including the traveling stones.

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I haves a new toy!!!

'Tis an iPod Touch!!!

I'm excited, can you tell?!