Le Idiot!

Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton? Who were those guys? This in a first world, industrialized nation? H/T John Derbyshire.

NRO Lies!

Jeeze, once you get into the habit of exclamation mark abuse, it's hard to quit!

Scott Beauchamp may or may not have lied in his TNR pieces. If he did well, then he’s a liar. It’s a small thing. The uproar created when cynical attacks on TNR appeared in the Weekly Standard written by Michael Goldfarb, and taken up by irresponsible right-wing bloggers, e.g. Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades, etc… was not a small thing. Besides being hypocritical and intellectually dishonest and pathetically cynical, it the effect of raising a rabble of dimwits (there are dimwits on the left, too – they just weren’t going to respond to this crowd) all screaming about a trivial issue. Now National Review has its own little scandal, probably just as trivial as K-Lo says. But, having been part of the mob when Franklin Foer’s head was being asked for, does K-Lo step up, admit a problem and move on?

Glen Greenwald puts it this way:

Rather than acknowledging any errors in a clear and straightforward way, National Review chose late Friday afternoon to raise this matter -- the favored time period of politicians to dump embarrassing stories, when as few people as possible will see it -- in the form of a mealy-mouthed, self-justifying "Editor's Note" from Kathryn Jean Lopez. Lopez apologizes to readers on the ground that "NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall," but never says what those caveats should have been or what the missing context was.

Andrew Sullivan is piling on as well.

Franklin Foer has responded generally to the TNR/Beauchamp bruhaha here.

Friday Galactic Blogging

Face on spirals - I never get sick of looking at them. This is another, very high resolution, view of M74, a relatively close-by galaxy at approximately 32 million light years, and approximately the same size as our own. It's a nearly perfect example of what's known as a Grand Design Spiral Galaxy. This is an APOD image and as such a higher resolution image is available if you click through.