Current events

Everybody complains about the outrageous cost of popcorn and other snacks at the movies, but nobody ever does anything about it, until now; Joshua Thompson, is suing a theater chain because he "got tired o being taken advantage of." Good luck with that:

Explains a lot:

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell.

And we live in a Lake Wobegon of the mind, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

Happy Leap Day!

For the well, duh file:

This is about the specific issue of abortion, but it nicely sums up a lot of people's dissatisfaction with Mitt Romney in general:

If exaggeration is a crime, this is a felony:

At first glance, the numbers look impressive.

Indiana University's yearly economic impact on the state: $4.9 billion. The impact of its health programs: $6.6 billion.

Are you scared yet?

Tuesday’s Associated Press report that President Obama is considering large cuts in our strategic arsenal is just the latest of this week’s grim news about the president’s national-defense plans.

Earlier this month, we learned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wouldn't recommend our own Constitution as a model for other countries considering one, because, you know, it's really too old to be relevant today, and it doesn't guarantee nearly enough rights, and it's much too hard to change. That seemed to me to betray a complete ignorance of what a constitution should be -- a bedrock of principles upon which the law is erected.

Further proff, if anybody still needs it, that we live in a culture that sometimes values style over substance, the symbolic over the real, the aesthetic over the functional, appearances over meaning . . . well, you get the idea. After a prolonged controversy over an abbreviated quote on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, the National Park Service has announced it will replace the abridgment ("I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness") with the full quote -- "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.

If the bible your profession goes by is "silly" and "worrying and dangerous," how valuable is the service you provide?

Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes - may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.