Three months ago, I wrote about this happening: Iraqi intellectuals and experts being killed or intimidated. It's still going on, though the scale may not be what was originally reported. Which means that we have made little or no progress in creating order or security and that we're going to be handing Iraq back to a society whose best-educated and most productive professionals have been systematically killed or driven away or intimidated into silence. I don't know what the solution is. I do know that we should have done something about it in the interim, and we haven't.

Thanks to Anne Zook for the reference, and check out her elegant defense of rational secular epistemology in response to our Pasadena Cliopatriarch. She's evenhanded, and passionate, and as a fellow enraged moderate and professional agnostic, I heartily approve. It applies pretty well to his article below, as does Brian Ulrich's citation [Thanks, Ralph] from the late, great Edward Gibbon, who argued that while religions may speak the truth, the truth so rarely succeeds in this world that more human explanations are necessary.

Non Sequitor: NYTimes cites historian Peter Stearns in critique of anti-fat fad.