Wingnuttish Moonbattery

Hmmm. On second thought, that sounds like a shorthand recipe for nut-encrusted milk-batter fried chicken.... I need biscuits.

Carnival of the Liberals #11 nearly deserves its own entry in the Carnival of Satire: the entire thing is done in the voice of a Rush O'Reilly wannabee and is such good satire that I very nearly decided to skip linking to the carnival this time. If I want abuse, I'll go read it straight from the source. There are some decent posts there, if you're willing to wade through it. The prevalence of satirical material raises the issue, though, that I raised most recently here, about liberal participation in conservative-dominated non-political carnivals. Submit this stuff to the Carnival of Satire, Carnival of Comedy, Carnival of Vanities, etc. (there are some folks who do; Madeleine Kane's limericks show up all over the place) and we can make some progress. This, for example is pretty good satire; will it get submitted if I don't do it? We'll see.

If you're not, here are some alternatives:

• If you're going to make a typo in a national ad campaign try to avoid STD names. Damn, spellcheck can't catch them when they're real words....
• Matt Ford's on Part 14 of his anti-Creationist series, and there's lots of really good material for him to work with there
• Texas Lawyers you don't satirize, you just quote 'em
• The Encyclopedia of World History is online, for those of us who aren't real sure about wikipedia most days
• and Not all medical drama is bad science, reinforcing once again my belief that reality is so much more interesting than the stuff we make up.

The case for abolishing nuclear weapons: Sometimes people say "you can't put the genie back in the bottle." But you can. We eradicated smallpox. We criminalized gas weapons. Countries have disarmed, many times in many ways. Only one country has ever invented nuclear weapons independently -- the US (every other country has, to a lesser or greater extent, borrowed or stolen significant components of the expertise necessary) -- and so clearly it's something that isn't all that easy. We never would have built them in peacetime: only the exigencies of war gave us the moral cover necessary to spend all that time, money, energy and expertise on a doomsday device. If nuclear weapons were abolished, the case for building them in peacetime would be nearly nonexistent. This deserves to be the most widely read post of the week.