I’ve been on blog vacation for about three weeks now, and a number of things have happened in that time. So let me get a few things off my chest.
- Stephen Colbert was brilliant at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. That is a fact, not an opinion. Frankly, the whole idea of the Correspondents’ dinner is a bit grotesque. Journalists should not be hobnobbing and having a good time with the politicians they cover. Colbert said exactly what needed to be said.
- David Blaine totally won me over with this last stunt. He held his breath for seven minutes and eight seconds. That’s freakin’ incredible. I tried holding my breath along with him and conked out at a minute twenty. And I wasn’t trying to escape from handcuffs, and I hadn’t just spent a week pickling in a large glass sphere.
- Harvard neuroscientist Kevin Shapiro published this pro-evolution op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He argues that conservatives don’t do themselves any favors by attacking Darwin. It’s a good essay, well worth reading. But it does little to change the fact that in today’s political climate, sympathy for creationism is the dominant view among conservatives. People like Shapiro, George Will, or Charles Krauthammer are lonely voices in the conservative wilderness, accorded about as much respect in the Republican party as pro-lifers are in the Democratic party. Every conservative politican of any prominence is anti-Darwin, and virtually every right-wing media outlet publishes anti-evolution articles on a regular basis. Indeed, as Chris Mooney documented at book length, hostility towards science is an integral part of Republican politics today.