In various countries, plaintiffs have sought court orders to halt the operation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, with the most extraordinary of allegations: that the experiment may create a black hole that will devour the Earth.

Up until now, the various lawsuits filed against the LHC have faltered. But if the right kind of claim is filed in the proper court, a judge may soon have to face the question of whether an injunction might be needed to save the world.

That Eric Johnson knows how to get your attention.  Read the whole thing, while you still can!

I scanned sites on like topic, but never saw your blog. I summed it to dearies and i’ll regular reader.

I love the “dearies” part. I would love it if somewhat would tell me what radio station or remote ham radio broadcast these people are listening to in their attempts to simulate our language.

“Summed it to dearies”! That is rich.

As well explained in the Book of Esther, it’s the holiday of turnabout, surprises, false identities, intrigue, perhaps some emotional legerdemain, and not a little spiritual confusion. The outcome isn’t always funny, or even fun, except perhaps in the sense of the divine comedy.

It all comes around in the end, though!

My point is this: Antisemitism is an important element of gentile anti-Zionism. They are not the same, but those who claim that they are unrelated are, well, antisemites, actually. And when Israel is accused of committing war crimes, or preparing to; and these war crimes are redolent of medieval accusations of well-poisoning as well as the classic blood libel, you can see a certain similarity: The Jews are claimed to be agents of not only mayhem but bearers of malefaction, poision, offal into the otherwise pure nature of things. This, then, is not such a nutty analogy.

You’ve got to understand these things.  In fact, the real dedicated anti-Semites do come in all sorts of sizes and varieties, much like a can of mixed nuts left out in the August sun for a couple of weeks.  And now, thanks to Meryl Yourish, they bloggy kind have been thoroughly categorized in a new taxonomy of online little Hitlers:

Eight years ago this spring, at the height of the suicide bombings of Yasser Arafat’s terror war known as the second intifada, I started blogging about Jewish and Israeli issues. This, of course, brought out the anti-Israel crazies. I came up with a corollary to Godwin’s Law to describe these trolls: “In any internet discussion area concerning Israel, politics, or religion, the probability of anti-Semitic comments approaches one.” (In fact, I’ve seen comments threads that have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, politics, or religion still devolve into anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing, but that’s a post for another time.)

And so, based on the thousands of comments and emails I’ve read over the years, both here and on other blogs and media sites, I present The Blogger’s Guide to Anti-Semitic Comments Trolls. Below are the some of the types of anti-Israel commenters I’ve identified over the years, but the list is by no means complete.

Bloggers:  Consider yourself guided!

Brancheau’s older sister, Diane Gross, said the trainer would not have wanted anything done to the whale. “She loved the whales like her children. She loved all of them,” said Gross, of Schererville, Ind. “They all had personalities, good days and bad days.”

In a profile in the Orlando Sentinel in 2006, Brancheau acknowledged the dangers, saying: “You can’t put yourself in the water unless you trust them and they trust you.” . . .

Howard Garrett, co-founder and director of the Washington-based nonprofit Orca Network, . . . . said Tilikum was probably agitated before Wednesday’s attack, possibly from some kind of clash with the other whales.

Gary Wilson, a professor at Moorpark College’s exotic animal training program, said it can be difficult to detect when an animal is about to turn on its trainer.

“One of the challenges working with any animal is learning to read its body language and getting a feel for what’s going on in its mind,” he said.

Right.  But here’s the thing:  If Dawn Brancheau wasn’t up to meeting that challenge–she who “loved the whales like her children,” and who knew their personalities, and the fact that they had “good days and bad days”–who is?  She was everything you would expect someone to be who is capable of “learning to read [an orca's] body language and getting a feel for what’s going on in its mind.”

So is the job of killer whale trainer at Sea World one in which you acknowledge the distinct possibility that you could do everything right but still get killed doing it?  That would not make such a job particularly unusual; millions of people do such work, and have a lot less fun at it than Dawn Brancheau did at her job until the sad day when it stopped very hard at being fun.  And not all such jobs are all that more “serious” than the one that took Brancheau’s life, or as economically productive either.

I’m not so much a “there oughtta be a law guy,” as I said in a recent post where I uncharacteristically said just that.  I don’t think there is a need for a law here, either.  It’ s hard to imagine choosing to risk death so you can do a whale show. But if it’s truly a choice, so be it.  That means, however, that if orca trainers and those like them are going to at least be said to have made their potentially deadly career choices voluntarily, they’ll have to think more clearly than at least the Associated Press wrote in lining up those quotations and leaving the obvious contradiction they raise hanging.

UPDATE:  A tad more rigor at Overlawyered.

That’s the other reason I don’t go to CPAC.  Because I’m the last cultural conservative, remember?

Today is the one-year anniversary of the landmark stimulus bill which most economists agree has staved off a second Great Depression. The evidence that the stimulus has worked is overwhelming – the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at its actual impact on jobs, and an indispensable graphic showing a timeline of key economic indicators before and after its passage. There’s another beautiful chart based on job loss data from Dec 2007 to Jan 2010 which also makes the impact of the stimulus crystal clear. The recognition of the stimulus’ success isn’t just data-driven – Republican lawmakers who have publicly denounced it for political gain have been quietly and hypocritically scrambling for stimulus money for their districts – as documented by the Wall Street Journal and by the Washington Times.

The only real flaw in the stimulus bill was that it wasn’t big enough . . .

Aziz, Aziz, Aziz.  Where do we start with this?

• How about the leap from “most economists agree” to the sole source of his authority for this breathtaking proposition–”the New York Times has an in-depth article . . .”  That’s it.  I don’t even have to find economists who don’t agree and with this and try to figure out whether they are or aren’t “most”–Aziz thinks the New York Times is actually a trustworthy source for this preposterous statement.  That actually tells me, in contrast, that the entire remainder of his article is not worthy of reading, because Aziz, who is not an economist, is not making  a serious attempt to objectively see if his central premise is correct.
• Then there’s the fact that “most economists” didn’t agree what ended the first Great Depression until about 20 years ago (it wasn’t the New Deal, by the way).  The idea that “most economists” would agree “the landmark stimulus bill . . .  has staved off a second Great Depression” –and that they would have nothing to say about a trillion dollar deficit that has resulted–is, to any serious student of economics, truly laughable.
• And what exactly do “all economists” say?  It would be too easy to merely cite Cato and Heritage economists who are predisposed not to agree.  But what else is out there?  Everyone knows the “jobs saved” metric is no metric at all, or at least not much more than half of one.  On those lines, in the Atlantic, columnist Derek Thompson votes a lukewarm slightly-thumbs-up in a piece reprinting some Times charts and graphics from a couple of months ago, but much like the ones that make Aziz all woozy, regarding which one commenter writes, “I like the line for ‘if no stimulus’. It’s kind of like drawing the line of the number of girls I could have slept with if I weren’t married. Useless. A huge guess made to make the other number look good (or bad).”   But beyond merely the jobs figure, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times writes:

The policies that new-Keynesian economists are advocating stem from a theory that is built on sand. Before economists become policy advocates we need a theory that is internally consistent and that can explain the evidence from the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s and the current economic collapse. The Keynes of The General Theory was right about the problem, but he was wrong about the solution. High unemployment can persist forever unless we do something about it. But fiscal policy is not the way to restore full employment.

If new-classical and new-Keynesian economics are both wrong, where do we go from here? The classical economists argue that the economy will repair itself. The new-Keynesians argue for more fiscal stimulus. I agree with the Keynesians that very high unemployment will persist if we don’t do something about it. But I do not believe that large fiscal deficits that will be paid for by our children and our grandchildren are the answer.

Okay, well, that’s the fat cats at the Financial Times, right?  In contrast, we can count on NPR for objectivity, I suppose?  It’s at least as dependable, politically, as the Times.  What does NPR say?

Obama’s critics have been helped by the continuing flood of bad news on the jobs front. The unemployment rate, which stood at 7.7 percent in January when Obama took office, has shot up to 10 percent, even with the stimulus spending.

Most economists agree that the economy was even weaker at the beginning of 2009 than many experts, including those at the White House, had realized. But there is little agreement in the political world over what role the stimulus played.

“The problem with the stimulus is that while people have their own direct experiences with the economy, the impact of government action on the economy is almost always subtle and less than powerfully visible,” Franklin says.

It’s not that I know the answer to this question.  I don’t.  I’m not an economist; I’m an economics major who can’t balance a checkbook.  But the breathless conclusion by Aziz is a joke, and just proof, not of how good the stimulus is, but–even still–how good that Kool-Aid really is.

U.S. Encounters Limits of Iran Engagement Policy

Well, let’s be sure and learn all this stuff from scratch.  Each time.

In most cultures, lying about Israel is not an issue.

But for Palestinian “leaders,” lying about Israel is the default position.