"[Rudy’s] hope: That Huckabee wins Iowa, McCain wins New Hampshire, Romney wins Michigan, and Thompson or McCain wins South Carolina. Then, after four defeats, he comes roaring back in Florida, grabs the headlines going into Feb. 5, when half the primaries are held, and marches forward to the nomination.
Whoever thought up this strategy is the kind of guy who plays Russian roulette with four bullets in the chamber," – Pat Buchanan on the electoral plans of Rudy Giuliani.
An American hero is born:
A 5-year-old Arkansas County boy killed a black bear Sunday weighing more than 400 pounds. Tre Merritt, a descendant of Davy Crockett, was hunting with his grandfather Mike Merritt when a black bear happened upon their stand.
Slog’s Christopher Frizzelle lets us in on his ruminations on the presidential race:
Yesterday, we were lifting weights and scratching our heads over whether it was going to be Clinton or Obama, over what the Oprah Effect was going to be, over who would be more beatable in a general election. We were doing the bench press. He was struggling with some weight and I said, "If you can do five of these Obama wins in Iowa and New Hampshire" …
A friend who lives in New York and was in town on business last night said that he’s a Clinton guy every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and an Obama guy on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. This seemed like the most articulate distillation of my current position. I forgot to ask what he is on Sundays.
Keep bench-pressing.
Scott Horton digs for the real reasons for Trent Lott’s early departure – in Mississippi, where else?
The latest research suggesting that human evolution has sped up dramatically in the last 10,000 years strikes me at first glance as potentially among the most important discoveries of our time. It affects so much that we have come to know, or think we have come to know. It definitely impacts the race and IQ debate, as well as very basic questions about human nature. The data is still preliminary and sketchy; and my skepticism is primed. But if it’s true, it’s a huge change in human self-understanding:
"Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes," Hawks notes, because that gene—OCA2—had not yet developed. "We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes."
Comparing the amount of genetic differentiation between humans and our closest relatives, chimpanzees, suggests that the pace of change has accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate, the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
Not all populations show the same evolutionary speed. For example, Africans show a slightly lower mutation rate. "Africans haven’t had to adapt to a fundamentally new climate," because modern humanity evolved where they live, Cochran says. "Europeans and East Asians, living in environments very different from those of their African ancestors and early adopters of agriculture, were more maladapted, less fitted to their environments."
Rick Davis elaborates – with a PowerPoint!
South Park said it best, as usual – dum dum dum dum dum:
A 1971 cartoon from the dark ages.
If that’s your license plate, you have a problem.
They can, in fact, kill people.
