Three days ago, I had never heard of Salman Taseer but I had heard of Pakistan's blasphemy laws and how some Christian woman was going to be executed over them.For reasons that I have not spent a whole lot of time working on, stuff like that just sends me around the bend with rage.

The whole blasphemy thing just seems – to me – to be truly insane. 

Then this asshole kills a governor over it. And then smirks when he is arrested. He is a true believer. A real zealot; a nutcase. And then a group of imams says the killer is a Muslim hero and then – and this goes against all I thought I knew about Pakistan – a bunch of lawyers strew roses in front of him as he walked into court.  

All of a sudden, John Boehner seems reasonable. And he doesn't have nuclear weapons.

A year ago, I said Happy New Decade because it was the end of a decade if you started counting when 1999 turned into 2000. And we all did. But, even though it was the end of the oughts, somehow, this seems like the real end of the decade. 

I, for one, am glad the year is over, but not as glad as Dodai over at Jezebel. It started with a massive earthquake in Haiti,  sort of peaked with the gulf oil spill, and pseudo-ended with the republicans riding back into town yelling Hold on, we will save you from Obama.

To paraphrase somebody I am glad to see this year end in  the way a man, at the bottom of a pit, is glad to see a ladder¹.

So, Happy New Decade and Happy New Year.

¹. I have been trying to figure out how to use that quote since April.

or, as far as that goes, Kesha.

this chart from Data Pointed should be an eye opener.

Each pixel represents a death: the blue = US military, green = Iraqi military, orange = Iraq civilian, and the grey = what we call bad guys. The chart on the left is by total numbers and the chart on the right is by time. This chart does not include people who have left – presumably almost anybody who could – stripping Iraq of a lot of intellectuals and professionals

Iraq was not our finest hour.

I read a couple of days ago that we have only recently began to realize how big the Universe really is. In my imagination, around the time of Galileo, we began to realize that the Universe was much bigger than our galaxy. It turns out that is not true.

In an article that I can't find now, the author wrote about our idea of the universe about a hundred years ago. Then, we thought our galaxy was the entire universe and the milky way was thought to be about 1,000 times smaller than we now think.

If history is any indicator, this video underestimates the actual size of the universe.