Current events

Heh:

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

This "Key Indicators in Media & News Report" from the folks at Pew shows how news consumption changed in 2013 and has lots of tidbits about which we can endlessly speculate. Cable news audience -- declined; are we getting tired of the partisan shouting? Local TV news -- new signs of life, and network news viewership increased, too; are we trying to find our commonality again? Newspaper readership -- up 3 percent daily and 1.6 percent Sunday; woo-hoo!

As someone who once had a lot of fun bowling in leagues -- and, yes, even watching the pro matches on television -- I found this interesting and even a little depressing:

Guess things are even tougher than we thought:

Between 30% and 50% of parents steal money from their kids piggy bank or savings account, surveys show. Is this anyway to set an example?

Looks like I'm being obsoleted:

Professor of Computer Science Dr. Kristian Hammond predicts that by 2030, 90 per cent of all news stories will be written not by human reporters but by computer algorithms.

I think this, from a Washington Post story about the impending divorced of Gwyenth Paltrow and Christ Martin, is my favorite sentence of the year so far:

Is this a legitimate civil rights issue or a case of accommodation and  inclusionism gone wild?

It's a matter of judgment:

I've said before that one of the things that bother me most about Rand Paul is his isolationist tendency. But at least he comes by it honestly. Here's father Ron on Russia's takeover of Crimea:

Bet this will be the gloomiest report you read all year:

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.