University of Chicago scientists found that for rats “the value of freeing a trapped cagemate is on par with that of accessing chocolate chips”; Duke University’s Bilbo Lab found that ratlings who are intensively touched by their mothers are better able to resist morphine later in life. Mice genetically engineered to suffer cleft palates were genetically cured, mice bred into alcoholism for forty generations were found to be three times too drunk to drive, mice deprived of the H3R gene were found to be less likely than wild mice to drink alcohol in the dark, mice deprived of the FoxC1 gene were found to grow blood vessels in their corneas, and pregnant female mice given heart attacks were healed by the fetal stem cells of their pups. Mice who lack SIRTI, one of a class of proteins associated with aging, spend less time floating and more time fighting when about to drown, and are unaffected by Prozac.

—February 2002 Harper’s, “Findings”

This time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.

—Robert Silverberg, Tom O’Bedlam

—Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight

Even in the 19th Century too many Europeans persisted in the belief that kings and queens and such were somehow some higher order of human. Floating still as a derelict on the waters of the continental consciousness the atavistic notion that there was something at least semi-divine about royal folk; that said humans literally lorded it over others because The Sky Lord had, for reasons that passeth understanding, ordained it that way.

Imagine the surprise, then, of young Hans Christian Andersen, when his mother took him out one day to see, live and in person, Frederick VI, King of Denmark, and occasionally of Norway. And, from his perch in the crowd, young Hans perceived that the royal fellow resembled more the man in the street, than the man in the moon.

“Oh!” Hans cried out. “He’s nothing more than a human being!”

His mother, horrified, hushed him. “Have you,” she hissed, “gone mad, child?”

Although this is not the rabbit hole down which I intend to go, it is worth noting that some people believe that Frederick was Hans’ biological father. And this empurpled personage did express something of an unusual interest in the lad, paying, for instance, for part of the young man’s education.

In any event, when in 1837 Andersen inscribed “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” he remembered this event—seeing the king as he was. In that tale, a couple of sharpies convince an emperor, wholly besotted with his personal apparel, that they possess a magic material from which they can weave a fine set of threads that will remain invisible “to everyone who was unfit for the office he held, or who was extraordinarily simple in character.”

The emperor commands that these garments be prepared at once. And so they were.

Of course, in truth, no clothes existed at all. The rogue tailors pocketed the silk and gold they had requested for inclusion in the royal robes, and, when they announced their task completed, presented the emperor with precisely . . . nothing.

The emperor, presented with nothing, says to himself: “How is this? I can see nothing! This is indeed a terrible affair! Am I a simpleton, or am I unfit to be an Emperor? That would be the worst thing that could happen!” And so he effusively praises the miscreants for their magnificent work. As had his ministers and courtiers before him—likewise fearing that their perception of the non-existence of the emperor’s new clothes signified some fault within themselves, rather than the Reality that the clothes did not exist at all.

And so the emperor proudly dons his new non-suit, and proceeds to parade, nude, before the people.

The people too had been apprised that their lord would be clad in clothes visible only to the worthy. And so, rather than comment on the spectacle of the royal one wandering naked before them, they gabble madly of non-Reality: “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!”

Till some anonymous little boy gives voice to the true: “But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” At which point the farce collapses. Except to the emperor and his minions: “The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.”

Andersen’s story was at the printer, when he decided to change the ending. Originally, there was no boy. And the emperor passed through the whole of the people without a soul speaking the truth. All believed it wiser to remain silent.

The peculiar penchant of humans for believing that identifying something as Wrong is somehow worse than the Wrong itself, is everywhere manifest.

It was recently on display at the Orange Place. When there appeared a Diary inscribed by a survivor of grievous childhood sexual abuse, who wasn’t much moved to mourn the passing of Joe Paterno, erstwhile emperor, because Paterno chose to continue to fiddle about with boys brutalizing each other on a lawn over a ball, rather than acknowledge that his once and future lieutenant was off in the weeds engaging in child-rape and other sexual mayhem.

Umbrage, in the comments, and in feeder diaries, was repeatedly expressed, on such matters as the diarist’s decision to employ the word “fuck,” or to select the moment of Paterno’s passing as a time to note that this emperor diddled with passing lanes and body blocks, while his charges were shoved into showers and criminally stripped of their clothes.

The Diary, in short was Rude. And the Rude, so went the complaint, trumped the Wrong.

In the comments to the original Diary, it was noted that parishioners of a Jesus preacher were similarly known to shriek and poke their eyes out when he would observe:

“I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ‘shit,’ than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

The “shit,” then, so much more Wrong than the starving, dead children.

Who, whenever they are invoked, deserve at least this benediction, from Richard Crashaw, inscribed back in the day when humans could still naively, touchingly, blind themselves that another, better world, exists after this one:

Go, smiling souls, your new-built cages break,
In heaven you’ll learn to sing, ere here to speak,
Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst
Be your delay;
The place that calls you hence is, at the worst,
Milk all the way.

The dawn of the Obama administration brought forth the phenomenon of ceaseless howls of outrage directed at people with functioning cerebrums, all of whom observed racism in this country resurgent with the installation of a black man in the White House.

Any human not in a persistent vegetative state has seen that, as an example, the teabaggers were born and bred of, and depend upon as their very oxygen, racism.

That, as Jill Lepore put it in The Whites Of Their Eyes, this racism so inflames teabaggers and others of their ilk that “everything about Barack Obama and his administration [is] somehow alarming, as if his election had ripped a tear in the fabric of time.”

An observation last week repeated by Lee Siegel, in a piece in the New York Times, explaining the appeal of Mitt Romney as the whitest motherfucker to run for president in living memory: “[W]hether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum.”

And yet one can hear, for 12 hours every day, on the hate-radio programs that blanket more than 600 radio stations, which wave their fetid air into every household in this land, that voicing these correct perceptions of racism, are of several magnitudes Worse than the racism itself.

Alleged leftoids went through something similar, some will recall, there on the Orange Place. Where, for months, for years, deafening lamentations sounded, garments were feverishly rended, at expressions of the correct perception that racism exists too on the left, and, yea verily, demonstrably on that very site.

That this was denied is, in a way, as touching, though exasperating, as those who would cling to Crashaw’s 400-year-old delusion that starved-unto-death children go to a Heaven where there is “milk all the way.” Rather than just . . . wink out. Forever.

That the emperor has new clothes: it’s a dream, that dies hard.

As the Obama administration too consists of humans, it is not immune to this malady.

And so this week we have been subjected to the spectacle of former CIA agent John Kiriakou indicted for allegedly speaking to reporters, and/or criminal-defense attorneys, and/or other such miscreants, of “classified information,” concerning the torture of the War on Terra prisoner Abu Zubaydah.

Though, so far as is known, no one involved in actually torturing Zubaydah, has been brought to account, at any level.

Here, the Obama administration subscribing to the notion that speaking of the Wrong, is greater than the Wrong itself.

As I wrote here, Abu Zubaydah is, to me, the ground zero, the original sin of the War on Terra. In addition to that piece, I have previously written about Zubaydah here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. I imagine I’ll be writing about him for so long as I write.

Though—it’s curious—nobody really knows where he is. It is thought that he is in Guantanamo. But nobody really knows.

Though I know of one place he is. Every day. And that’s in my head.

Abu Zubaydah was of the inheritance that Barack Obama received from George II. And that Zubaydah has not been released, is not being cared for, is still somewhere in the gulag of the War on Terra—this is, to me, Obama’s “to kill a mockingbird” sin.

Because this is a man who is literally insane. Was known to be insane within days after he was apprehended. Was further known to be of no intelligence value whatsoever. As useful to the pursuit of the War on Terra as any grievously mentally ill man or woman picked up off any American street.

And yet he is still out there. In there. Somewhere.

Because Kiriakou has been indicted for passing on “classified information,” I want to begin by making my position clear on such information.

I don’t believe in it.

I expressed that opinion, long ago, at the Orange Place, here. Where I was treated like a lunatic. Then I expressed it again, here. In a Diary that was front-paged.

I don’t [] believe in secret intelligence. A couple years ago, I said on this site that I believed that all intelligence collected by the nation’s ever-expanding array of intelligence agencies should be posted on the web, so that the American people—who after all are those for whom this intelligence is collected—may read it and judge it for themselves. I was promptly pronounced a loon. Maybe so, maybe so. But is a fact that if all the intelligence collected by BushCo about Iraq were to have been posted to the web, neither the Congress, nor the American people, would ever have sanctioned Operation Iraqi Fiefdom.

At any rate, I don’t care what Kiriakou supposedly murmured that was “classified.” I am currently immured in the United States of America, and that means I am obligated to fork over money that is then paid to various humans who gather information that is subsequently classified as “secret.”

Bollocks.

Since I pay for it, I have a right to hear it, read it. And since “America” and “American” are nonsensical, larval constructs that have no weight or meaning in the real world, all peoples elsewhere on this planet have a right to hear it, read it, too.

Where Kiriakou transgressed Reality is not in dribbling forth “classified” information, but in the spin he fitfully put upon it.

He originally publicly claimed that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded, that the waterboarding caused him to give up useful information, and that therefore waterboarding, though probably torture, was useful.

The first assertion is true. The second two are bloody lies.

Because this is what we know of Abu Zubaydah.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3″—a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics—travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”

When CIA Director George Tenet told George II that Abu Zubaydah was grievously mentally ill, with no useful intelligence embedded anywhere in his sadly disordered brain, this is what took place:

“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?”

“No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.

Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a waterboard, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.”

And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

It is possible, if not probable, that one or more arms of Darth Cheney’s “dark side” octopus snatched the lives from three Saudi princes and a Pakistani air force general, after they were falsely fingered as Al Qaeda contacts by the mad, tortured Zubaydah.

And here we see: a fatal “emperor’s new clothes” world. George II had said publicly that Zubaydah was “important.” That he “was a top operative[] plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”

And so they tortured him. Until, from desperation, from the desperation of believing that he was drowning, dying, he became what they wanted him to be. And from what they wanted him to be, they fanned out their “dark side” squads, to bring death and destruction, upon the figments he had hallucinated, in agony, in hopes they would let him be.

They created their own clothes. Emperor George II. And all his little people.

For reasons that passeth understanding, ObamaCo keeps on keeping on. As if the BushCo myth of Abu Zubaydah were Real.

Though, as I’ve detailed here and here, the judges in the federal courts are by now well aware of Mr. Zubaydah. And heave right out of any case any “evidence” attributed to him. And so much War on Terra “evidence,” as these cases demonstrate, flows back to this insane, tortured man.

For those in the know, like these judges, the wheels have completely come off the Zubaydah outrage.

But, as in Andersen’s story, “the procession must go on[;] and the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.”

And all George II’s aforementioned “little people,” of course, constitute the American people.

Because the dirty little secret of torture in America is that the American people don’t give a damn if it continues.

They proved this in 2004, when they re-elected George II. Even as all the facts of Abu Ghraib had been laid out before them. They didn’t care. They returned the torturer-in-chief to office. That is what they wanted to do. And so that is what they did.

Further, Guantanamo is today not closed, and the NDAA is today the law of the land, because the American people want it that way.

More inconvenient “emperor’s new clothes.”

For no piece of legislation passes so massively through both houses of Congress, as these have, unless great clots of congressmembers tremble in fear that if they do not vote the way that they do, they may be driven from office by their constituents. They are controlled by fear, these congressmembers. As are the voters whose fears control them.

It’s simple, really. Getting to this place. All humans have to do is Otherize. And they’re very, very good at that. Are humans. Especially American humans. Who founded this nation by exterminating one people. Built it by enslaving another. And sustain it today by grinding a third, and a fourth:

what’s all the fuss
they ain’t like us
they don’t matter anyway

Almost all the humans in America, they’re ready to beat on Mrs. Drew. Only difference separating them, is the identity of Mrs. Drew.

Which is why so many purported leftoids too often make me ache.

Every day, I come to the Orange Place, and if I spend too much time there, I feel like I’m attending a fucking hanging party. I feel the Frankenstein mob, all around me. Torches and pitchforks. Somebody to hung.

Would be nice if they looked at themselves. Reviewed their history. Sieve their comments.

Those who want to have this and that arrested. Who want this and that locked away in a cage. Who want this and that prosecuted. Who want this and that perpwalked. This 1000 and that 10,000 locked away with no key. Who want this and that waterboarded. Who want this locked away forever, and that blown up. Who want this pronounced “evil.” That pronounced “evil.” All pronounced “evil.”

So often, for their draconian desires, they marshal no more evidence than did those who put away Abu Zubaydah. But they think you do. Because it’s all clear in their minds. True-believer minds. True-believer minds . . . just like BushCo minds. From true-believer minds, they would visit on people like BushCo, what people like BushCo visited on its victims. And would feel just as righteous as did they.

Such folks: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

I don’t know shit, but I do know this: i know for sure/that both sides lie.

And I know this: in the world to come, nobody belongs in a cage. Nobody.

Ask somebody who been there sometime. What it’s like. When the left sets up tribunals.

American humans are very good at erecting war memorials. Someday, inevitably, some memorial will be erected, somewhere, in some fashion, to the War on Terra.

Heretofore, all such memorials have been static. They did not move. But here in the 21st Century, humans are so beyond that. They can build anything. And so this is what they should build, American humans, to commemorate their War on Terra. In three dimensions, and in constant movement. What they—you—have made of Abu Zubaydah. What he’s out there, in there, somewhere doing. As this piece you read.

“He spent all of his time masturbating. Like a monkey in the zoo. He went at it so much, at some point he injured himself. They had to intervene. He didn’t care that they were watching him. He masturbated constantly. He wasn’t facing the camera, but it was rigged so there was no place for him not to be seen.

“He complained to the interrogator that he would never have the chance to feel a woman’s touch again, and lament that he would never have children. He freaked at one point, because there was blood in his ejaculate. He saved it for the doctors in a tissue, to show them in the morning.

“The doctor said not to worry.”

The time has arrived one more time. Time for more science talk. New discoveries, new takes on old knowledge, and other bits of news are all available for the perusing in today’s information world. Over the fold are selections from the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today’s tidbits include carbon dioxide is driving fish ‘crazy’, harp seals on thin ice, most distant dwarf galaxy detected, genetic analysis shows tortoise species thought to be long extinct to be alive today, and the first physical evidence of tobacco in a Mayan container. Pull up that comfy chair and grab a spot near the fireside. There is always plenty of room for everyone. Another session of Dr. Possum’s science education, entertainment, and potluck discussion is set to begin.

Featured Stories
Rising carbon dioxide concentrations from human activity may be damaging the central nervous systems of fish and endangering their ability to survive the future.

Prof. Munday and his colleagues began by studying how baby clown and damsel fishes performed alongside their predators in CO2-enriched water. They found that, while the predators were somewhat affected, the baby fish suffered much higher rates of attrition.

“Our early work showed that the sense of smell of baby fish was harmed by higher CO2 in the water—meaning they found it harder to locate a reef to settle on or detect the warning smell of a predator fish. But we suspected there was much more to it than the loss of ability to smell.”

The team then examined whether fishes’ sense of hearing—used to locate and home in on reefs at night, and avoid them during the day—was affected. “The answer is, yes it was. They were confused and no longer avoided reef sounds during the day. Being attracted to reefs during daylight would make them easy meat for predators.”

Other work showed the fish also tended to lose their natural instinct to turn left or right—an important factor in schooling behaviour which also makes them more vulnerable, as lone fish are easily eaten by predators.

With 32 years of gradual warming Arctic ice is thinning and leaving harp seals in trouble.

[S]easonal sea ice cover in all four harp seal breeding regions in the North Atlantic has declined by up to 6 percent a decade since 1979, when satellite records of ice conditions in the region began.

Harp seals rely on stable winter sea ice as safe places to give birth and nurse their young until the pups can swim and hunt on their own. Female seals typically seek out the thickest, oldest ice packs in sub-Arctic waters each February and March, and have adapted to the spring melt by developing unusually short, 12-day nursing periods.

Recent reports that some harp seals are whelping in new breeding grounds off East Greenland indicate some shifting may be taking place, but thousands still return each year to traditional breeding grounds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence or along the Front, off Newfoundland, regardless of ice conditions.

A new dwarf galaxy almost 10 billion light years from Earth has been detected.

Galaxies like our own are believed to form over billions of years through the merging of many smaller galaxies. So it’s expected that there should be many smaller dwarf galaxies buzzing around the Milky Way. However, very few of these tiny relic galaxies have been observed which has led astronomers to conclude that many of them must have very few stars or possibly may be made almost exclusively of dark matter.

Scientists theorize the existence of dark matter to explain observations that suggest there is far more mass in the universe than can be seen. However, because the particles that make up dark matter do not absorb or emit light, they have so far proven impossible to detect and identify. Computer modeling suggests that the Milky Way should have about 10,000 satellite dwarf galaxies, but only 30 have been observed. dwarf galaxy almost 10 billion light years away from earth has been detected.

With advances in genetic analysis and new reports comes the news of giant tortoises long thought to be extinct alive in a remote location in the Galapagos Islands.

A team of Yale researchers visiting Volcano Wolf on the northern tip of Isabela Island in 2008 took blood samples from more than 1600 tortoises and compared them to a genetic database of living and extinct tortoise species. An analysis detected the genetic signatures of C. elephantopus in 84 Volcano Wolf tortoises, meaning one of their parents was a purebred member of the missing species. In 30 cases breeding had taken place within the last 15 years. Since the lifespan of tortoises can exceed 100 years, there is a high probability that many purebreds are still alive.

The use of tobacco has roots in ancient times in North America as shown by the presence of the substance in a Mayan container.

In recent years, archaeologists have begun to use chemical analysis of residues from ancient pottery, tools, and even mummies in an attempt to piece together minute clues about ancient civilizations. Among the potential problems with isolating a residue for analysis is preservation and contamination. Many vessels serve multiple purposes during their lives, resulting in muddled chemical data. Once the vessels are discarded, natural processes such as bacteria and water can destroy the surface of materials, erasing important evidence. Additionally, researchers must be attentive to archaeological field handling and laboratory treatment of the artifacts that might lead to cross contamination by modern sources.

To make their discovery, the researchers had a unique research opportunity: a more than 1,300-year-old vessel decorated with hieroglyphics that seemingly indicated the intended contents. Additionally, the interior of the vessel had not been cleaned, leaving the interior unmodified and the residue protected from contamination.

Other Worthy Stories of the Week
Volcano observatories around the world
Watch a bike disappear in 365 days Slow motion video.
Catching a comet death on camera
Tiny amounts of alcohol double worm’s lifespan. But why?
Ancient ‘tulip creature’ discovered
Helix Nebula in new colors
Native forest birds in Hawaii in unprecedented trouble
Scientists design solar cells that exceed the conventional light-trapping limit
Gaseous ring around young star raises questions
Archeologists find clues to Neanderthal extinction

For even more science news:
General Science Collectors:
Alpha-Galileo
BBC News Science and Environment
Eureka Science News
LiveScience
New Scientist
PhysOrg.com
SciDev.net
Science/AAAS
Science Alert
Science Centric
Science Daily
Scientific American
Space Daily

Blogs:
A Few Things Ill Considered Techie and Science News
Cantauri Dreams space exploration
Coctail Party Physics Physics with a twist.
Deep Sea News marine biology
Laelaps more vertebrate paleontology
List of Geoscience Blogs
ScienceBlogs
Space Review
Techonology Review
Tetrapod Zoologyvertebrate paleontology
Science Insider
Scientific Blogging.
Space.com
Wired News
Science RSS Feed: Medworm
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe–a combination of hard science and debunking crap

NASA picture of the day. For more see the NASA image gallery or the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive

The Eagle Nebula, NASA, Public Domain

] far more than originally planned. What was in the script from the start was the scene in

When Mick Audsley started cutting it together, he made a different scene from what was written because there was more on the actual Vertigo soundtrack that started working in a quite magical way. Mick created an extraordinary dialogue between the script and the film.

In the script Katherine was a blonde and she puts on a black wig as disguise. Since Madeleine [Stowe] has dark hair, we gave her a blond wig and put a trenchcoat on her, with the result that, when Bruce [Willis] sees her in the lobby of the cinema, it’s a totally Hitchcockian moment . . . with a Hitchcock blonde to boot.

You mean it recapitulates getting Kim Novak to dress up like the woman he thinks he’s lost?

The music in the background is from Vertigo and Mick had grabbed a piece that seemed to work. Then we needed a better version of it, which involved going back to the film to find where exactly it came from. None of us had looked at the video while working on the film, and we discovered that this music came from the scene where Judy has been remade as the blonde Madeleine and appears before Jimmy—and the scene is cut exactly as we had cut ours, even up to the end where they embrace and the room starts spinning. I’d actually done a shot in the cinema foyer and, because it was circular, I’d put Madeleine and Bruce on a turntable so that they floated while the room spun around them. Was this not Vertigo remaking itself without us realizing it? We sat in the cutting room and couldn’t believe it. It was spooky. If I had left in the spinning kiss, it would have been the exact Vertigo scene—and people would have said I was just stealing from it—but, since it was unnecessary, I left it out.

I suppose David and Jan had foreseen that these would begin to interact, even if you weren’t mimicking Vertigo consciously.

No, they hadn’t. Vertigo was purely and simply a reference in the script; and the fact that Katherine would be blonde wasn’t predicted—it only happened because of casting Madeleine Stowe. You begin to think there must be Platonic scenes already in existence, which just have to be remade.

—Terry Gilliam and Ian Christie, Gilliam On Gilliam

I recall then coming upon a report of a very old woman who one evening was compelled to whip out her cane and commence whomping the bejesus out of her equally aged husband’s testicles, as he sat there in his wheelchair, “because he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Well, I thought at the time, prob’ly won’t read anything like that ever again.

Oh, foolish youth.

For now comes the report of 87-year-old Dorothy Desjardins, who took a pistol to 88-year-old husband Peter, because she was convinced the old reprobate was carrying on an affair with her hairdresser.

Fitfully literate Springfield, Missouri police-people record this:

On 11/05/2011 officers were dispatched to 2941 E. Lamonta Drive in reference to a domestic assault where a female had shot a male. Upon their arrival, they contacted Desjardins and P.E.D. in their living room. When P.E.D. told the officers Desjardins had shot him in the arm she made several spontaneous utterances. Some of those statements included, “He had it coming. He was cheating on me,” “I’m not mad at him anymore,” “I caught him folling around,” “I intended to scare the shit out of him,” “I wasn’t going to kill him,” “I just went a little bit beserk,” and “I did what I intended to do to scare him.”

Before firearms entered the fray, Desjardins asserted to her husband that the hairdresser had confessed all to her. Her husband denied all charges, claiming the only time he ever laid eyes on this hairdresser was when she was laying hands on his wife. Tiring of his wife’s continuing accusations, he retreated to their bedroom. She then came roaring in on her walker, and proceeded to toss books at him.

Next:

When Desjardins ran out of books to throw she picked up P.E.D.’s revolver from nearby shelf. P.E.D. said Desjardins then started flinging the revolver around in the air and he told her to stop because she didn’t know how to handle it. P.E.D. said it was at that time that Desjardins pulled back the hammer and fired the revolver at him. P.E.D. said he had his right arm covering his face when the gun went off.

The projectile pierced said right arm. However, the weapon was not loaded with bullets, but instead “fine grain pellets,” most often used on small mammals and reptiles, rather than aged lotharios. An examining physician stated that the victim sustained no “vascular damage,” and that surgery would not be performed to remove the pellets lodged in his appendage.

That the wee-wee of The Bedbug, also known as Newt Gingrich, long ran wild across the land: this has been known to many, and for many years. So long as The Bedbug languished in irrelevance, nobody thought much of making much of this.

But once The Bedbug began gnawing his way to the top of the plops—enabled by those GOoPer voters simply unable to stomach as their nominee Captain Underpants, the rag doll sewn by inebriates—then The Bedbug’s meandering member received renewed attention. This culminated in a televised appearance last Thursday by one of his innumerable ex-wives, who basically denounced her former spouse as a cretin and a cad, cravenly compelled to flee wives when once they evince intimations of mortality.

This, as it developed, made no difference to the GOoPer voters of the state of South Carolina. Who, as detailed here, are most focused, when they go to the polls, on whomsoever on the ballot most hates black people. That is whom they will most wuv. And so it was Saturday night. The Bedbug, that being on the ballot with the record of most hating black people for the longest period of time, chewing his way to victory. Though it is true that Captain Underpants remains “the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory,” voters just didn’t perceive his heart to be filled with the requisite hate. Meanwhile, The Grub, also known as Rick Santorum, was regarded, correctly, as a man who hates pleasure, more than anything else. While the fourth candidate remaining in the race, Rugs, a.k.a. The Wizard Of Paul, hates hardest, paper currency.

Prior to the arrival of the South Carolina primary results, appeared in the New Yorker an interesting piece on The Bedbug’s present partner in matrimony. It contains an observation from once and future GOoPer presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, which is reprinted here for the consideration of red readers:

“I hear from friends who are conservative women who say, ‘I will not vote for Newt Gingrich.’ I say, ‘Why?’ ‘He’s walked out on two wives.’ And these are hard-core Republican women—conservative activists, women who put signs up in their yards, make phone calls. And they have bluntly said, ‘I will not vote for him.’ Not ‘I have questions about voting for him’ but ‘I will not vote for him.’ That sort of rocked me back on my heels.” Huckabee added, “I don’t hear that ever from male voters, by the way. What does that tell you? Men are pigs.”