Among this year’s MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship recipients is the creator of The Wire, David Simon. He is said to feel mildly guilty, given his status in an industry that has funded him pretty consistently, but as far as Heathen HQ is concerned he deserves it for the groundbreaking, astonishing accomplishment that is the Wire.

From the Salon story:

Simon … said his wife would like to thank the foundation for “five years of fresh material.” The morning after she heard the news, Simon’s wife, best-selling novelist Laura Lippman, told him, “Hey Genius, you forgot to take the trash out last night.”

Check it out:

LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave. […]

But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.

Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944.

Go read the obit.

Yeah, I went there.

The middle school in Nettleton, Mississippi, has rules limiting class offices by race.

Grades 6, 7, and 8 all have four offices (president, vice president, secretary-treasurer, and reporter). Black students may run for 6th grade reporter, 7th grade secretary-treasurer, and 8th grade reporter and vice president. The other offices are reserved for white students.

(As you might expect, Nettleton is in the ass-end of nowhere even by Mississippi standards, somewhere south of Tupelo. Which is also, come to think of it, the same area of the state that gave us the Constance McMillen/Itawamba prom fiasco. What the hell is wrong with you people in northeastern Mississippi?)

Lady Gaga Kidnaps Commissioner Gordon:

GOTHAM CITY — Supervillain Lady Gaga brazenly abducted Commissioner James Gordon from a charity fundraiser Tuesday, leaving police baffled and the citizens of Gotham fearing for their safety. Known for her outlandish costumes and geometric polygon hair, the criminal madwoman made a daring escape from Arkham Asylum last week and has been taunting authorities by interrupting television broadcasts ever since. “If you ever want to see Commissioner Gordon again, you’ll do exactly as I say,” Lady Gaga said from her secret lair, adjusting her angular yellow Tyvek and spandex dress as henchmen danced menacingly around the bound commissioner. While the kidnapping occurred at stately Wayne Manor, home of playboy jet-setter Bruce Wayne, the eccentric billionaire was not available for comment.

Suck it.

Assaulted by penny-ante Miami rentacops. Fortunately, this photographer had the good sense to have OTHER photographers on site.

We walked through the parking lot of the Douglas Road Metrorail Station and purchased tickets. Dobbs and I then walked inside through the turnstile with me holding up my Canon TX1. The rest of the news crew remained outside.

Within seconds, I was accosted by the female security guard as well as the male security guard wearing a black beret and a single latex glove who knocked the camera from my hand.

I demanded my camera but he refused to give it back.

Then I remembered I had my iPhone, so I started shooting video with that, which prompted the female security to get in my face.

She even lifted her fist up a couple of times as if she was going to strike me.

The male guard then came after me and I also tried walking away from him while videotaping.

But when he struck me, I struck back instinctively.

He then pulled out a metal baton and came after me with it.

I stepped outside the station and he sat down to tend to his lip.

Miami-Dade detectives who arrived on the scene were considering charging me with battery until they saw the footage shot by the news crew.

After two hours of talking to cops, my camera was returned to me, minus a battery that somehow got lost.

If you wear a badge of any kind and abuse your authority, real or imaginary (as is the case with these doofuses), some criminal multiplier must apply.

The FBI is apparently trying to keep Wikipedia from using its seal in the article for same, and are blatantly misconstruing the relevant laws in their saber-rattling letter to the Foundation.

Fortunately, it turns out that the Foundation has actual, learned attorneys onstaff, who told the Feds to get stuffed.

Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.

Translation: “What you wish the law was has no bearing here.”

Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, “we are prepared to argue our view in court.” He signed off, “with all appropriate respect.”

Translation: “DIAF”.

It gets even cooler when you realize who wrote the Wikimedia Foundation’s response.

MSFT execs vetoed consumer-protection features in IE8 in order to protect the interests of advertisers.

Intuit is lobbying hard to stop governments from making it easy to file taxes, which would undermine (annual! repeated!) demand for their products.

Wonder no more.

A ProPublica reporter was followed, harrassed, and detained by BP security and Police as he attempted to report on the spill. From the shoulder of a public road.

Further, journalists are now being actively threatened with arrest and fines for reporting “the wrong way” on the spill.

WTF?

BP is clearly trying to limit coverage of this thing, and they’ve been doing it since day one. That’s understandable. However, we have a First Amendment here, and the media has an obligation to the people to report on what’s actually happening. It’s been often said that “news” is only the stuff someone else doesn’t want reported; the rest is PR. The government ought to be helping the journalists, not BP — heads oughta roll over this bullshit.

You can’t tell me this wasn’t intentional.

Radley has more, but it should be noted that the most prominent booster of the “we don’t care if you’re innocent as long as you had a trial” view is, of course, Scalia:

A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected an Oregon man’s petition for habeas corpus relief (PDF). This despite acknowledging that the man has established actual innocence for the crimes for which he’s being imprisoned (sexual abuse and sodomy of a four-year-old). The reason: He was late filing his petition. By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent.

Warning your remote control airplane may be attacked by ravens.

Apparently, crocodiles can surf for hundreds of miles on the open sea.

Massive Flow Of Bullshit Continues To Gush From BP Headquarters skewers all the right people — and, deliciously, actually quotes the BP CEO accurately.

LONDON—As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico entered its eighth week Wednesday, fears continued to grow that the massive flow of bullshit still gushing from the headquarters of oil giant BP could prove catastrophic if nothing is done to contain it.

The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.

“Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest,” said BP CEO Tony Hayward, letting loose a colossal stream of undiluted bullshit. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean, and the volume of oil we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water.”

Yeah, he said that. And:

“I’m as devastated as you are by this,” Hayward said after a meeting with cleanup crews on Louisiana’s Fourchon Beach. “We will clean every last drop up and we will remediate all of the environmental damage.”

“There’s no one that wants this thing over with more than I do,” he added a week later, just absolutely defying belief with the thickest, most dangerous bullshit yet. “I’d like my life back.”

Millions of Americans reported feeling ill and disoriented upon contact with that particularly vile plume of bullshit.

Ripped from the headlines:

Ryan O’Neal, Farrah’s de facto widower, has moved on to . . . Cheryl Tiegs.

The most disturbing revelation here is that Tiegs is 62. Ouch.

TPM is reporting that a recent SCOTUS ruling allows states to confine “sexually dangerous” inmates indefinitely after their sentence is complete. More at WaPo.

I’m sure there’s no way this will ever get abused.

A Puerto Rican prosecutor decided the porn DVD an American man was carrying featured an underage performer based on pretty much his own judgement (plus that of compliant, prosecutor-friendly “experts” who made no effort to acquire legal proof of age), and decided to prosecute him — this despite the fact that actress in question, like all law-abiding adult performers in the U.S., had proof of age on file and easily acquirable. The only thing that saved the defendant? The performer’s unaccountable willingness to fly to San Juan, show her passport, and testify under oath.

Click through to Radley Balko’s site for more (totally SFW); it’s absolutely absurd. A man spent months incarcerated for child porn because the prosecutor was on a power trip. Said prosecutor will likely suffer no consequences even though the defense made it very, very clear that the woman in question was of age.

Instead, the prosecutor pushed ahead with child pornography charges against Simon-Timmerman, even after the man’s attorney was able to show that Fuentes had appeared in movies produced in the U.S., as well as other documentation that Fuentes was of legal age at the time the movie was made.

Hernandez-Vega still didn’t buy it. Her evidence that Fuentes was a minor was apparently so strong that she not only apparently felt she didn’t need to take 15 minutes to look up the proof of Fuentes’ age on file with the federal government, she could also dismiss the evidence produced by Simon-Timmerman’s attorney that his client hadn’t broken any law — all while keeping Simon-Timmerman locked up for months.

And what was that evidence? “Expert” testimony. At trial, Hernandez-Vega called Alek Pacheco, A U.S. Customs agent and self-described expert in child pornography who concluded (presumably after viewing the video several times) that Fuentes was “13 or 14” years of age.

FROM INSIDE, even. Check it out.

Mississippi high school excises gay teen from senior yearbook.

Update: Arizona hits back: Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill today that removes year-old domestic partner benefits from state employees.

“A bill signed by Gov. Jan Brewer redefined a ‘dependent,’ canceling the rule change made by Gov. Janet Napolitano that allowed domestic partners to receive benefits. Also eliminated are children of domestic partners, full-time students ages 23-24 and disabled adult dependents. The legislation is in legal review. About 800 state employees are affected, according to the state’s administration department…Liz Sawyer, a UA staff member, said the exclusion is ‘deplorable and it’s tragic.’ Sawyer is a spokeswoman for OUTReach, a staff group that lobbies for domestic-partner benefits at UA. Last year 170 UA employees signed up for domestic-partner benefits, she said. Forty were same-sex couples and the remainder were unmarried, opposite-sex couples, she said.”

Did God tell Brewer to do it?

“Gov. Jan Brewer said Wednesday that she believes ‘God has placed me in this powerful position as Arizona’s governor’ to help the state weather its troubles. In a wide-ranging speech on the role of religion in politics and in her life, Brewer detailed to a group of pastors of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church how she relies on her faith and in prayer to deal with many of the issues she faces as the state’s chief executive. Brewer also said there are times when, during a meeting with staffers, one will suggest praying about an issue. … But Brewer also said she recognizes the difference between bringing her faith to the office and having an ‘agenda.’ … ‘The problem with having a political agenda is that we give the impression that we have God’s truth,’ the governor said. ‘We think we can convert God’s truth into a political platform, a set of political issues, and that there is ‘God’s way’ in our politics,’ Brewer continued. ‘I don’t believe that for a moment, any more than you believe that God’s way is exclusively the Lutheran way.’ The governor said, though, she believes it is right — if not inevitable — that elected officials bring their faith to their offices.”

Gag.

(Original link here.)

Fortunately, Reason is watching:

GM CEO Ed Whitacre announced in a Wall Street Journal column last Wednesday that his company has paid back its government bailout loan “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule.”

[…]

Uncle Sam gave GM $49.5 billion last summer in aid to finance its bankruptcy. (If it hadn’t, the company, which couldn’t raise this kind of money from private lenders, would have been forced into liquidation, its assets sold for scrap.) So when Whitacre publishes a column with the headline, “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full,” most ordinary mortals unfamiliar with bailout minutia would assume that he is alluding to the entire $49.5 billion. That, however, is far from the case.

Because a loan of such a huge amount would have been politically controversial, the Obama administration handed GM only $6.7 billion as a pure loan. (It asked for only a 7 percent interest rate — a very sweet deal considering that GM bonds at that time were trading below junk level.) The vast bulk of the bailout money was transferred to GM through the purchase of 60.8 percent equity stake in the company — arguably an even worse deal for taxpayers than the loan, given that the equity position requires them to bear the risk of the investment without any guaranteed return. (The Canadian government likewise gave GM $1.4 billion as a pure loan, and another $8.1 billion for an 11.7 percent equity stake. The U.S. and Canadian government together own 72.5 percent of the company.)

But when Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion—the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the $6.7 billion loan amount.

But wait! Even that’s not the full story given that GM, which has not yet broken even, much less turned a profit, can’t pay even this puny amount from its own earnings.

So how is it paying it?

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money — government money — to pay back the government loan.

GM claims that the fact that it is even using the escrow money to pay back the loan instead of using it all to shore itself up shows that it is on the road to recovery. That actually would be a positive development—although hardly one worth hyping in ads and columns — if it were not for a further plot twist.

Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, points out that the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5 percent) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government’s tougher new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new — and bigger — DOE loan much more feasible.

In short, GM is using government money to pay back government money to get more government money. And at a 2 percent lower interest rate at that. This is a nifty scheme to refinance GM’s government debt — not pay it back!

There’s more. Click through.

Even more now, after last night, that’s for damn sure.

For several days, I’ve had this Mefi link open in a tab, and I didn’t get around to clicking through until now. It’s Robert Kennedy at a rally on 4 April 1968, announcing that Dr King had been killed. (Yeah, kids: back then, you didn’t learn every news story immediately. Crazy, I know.)

He spoke off the cuff, with no notes. It’s probably not a waste of time to wonder, just for a minute, what might have happened had a second President Kennedy been elected that fall, and not Richard Nixon; instead, of course, RFK himself was assassinated two months later.

A transcript follows; how awesome was he that he could get away with quoting Aeschylus?

I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some — some very sad news for all of you — Could you lower those signs, please? — I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King — yeah, it’s true — but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we — and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.

They had a prom, as previously noted, but only Constance McMillan and a few other people went; most students attended an other, private prom to which Constance, her date, and the learning-disabled kids weren’t invited.

Nice.

Radley Balko explains just how hostile the NoVa departments are to routine citizen oversight, transparency, and even existing sunshine laws. The quotes in this story are absolutely staggering, and appear utterly at odds with the stone cold fact that power, unsupervised, leads to corruption and abuse every single time.

Apparently, last week some Somali pirates tried to seize a US Navy frigate, which predictable results.

John Forsythe was 92.

The LA Times, apparently: Sinead O’Connor: ‘There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope’.

Someday, we’ll have to explain ourselves.

Fortunately, all those subprime bastards make the likes of Pets.com look positively Buffetesque by comparison.

Itawamba Agricultural High School senior Constance McMillen wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom, so school officials cancelled it. (Local coverage.)

Sigh.

Obama has appointed information design guru Edward Tufte to help track and explain the $787 billion stimulus spending. There’s transparency, and then there’s hiring the guy who wrote the book on information display. Good job.

Go. Watch. Enjoy. He breaks it all down in less than 4 minutes.

That student-laptop-webcam-spying thing? Yeah, it just gets worse and worse for the jackass administrators who set this thing up.

• Students were required to use the laptops.
• Attempts to disable or control the webcam could be grounds for expulsion
• The laptops were locked down such that there was no way to control the camera or microphone locally — but, of course, the spyware could do those things remotely.

Fortunately, it turns out the “tech” at the school can’t keep his mouth shut, and has been bragging about their security and surveillance methods online (which makes it obvious the administration was lying when they said this was only for stolen laptops).

More here.

Also, refreshingly and delighfully, the FBI is now involved.

A Pennsylvania high school is in hot water after it was disclosed that the laptops they supplied to students were loaded with software that allowed the administration to remotely access the built-in camera. The goons are now admitting it, saying it was only in the event of theft, but we’re calling bullshit, especially since the administrators gave bullshit excuses when the students noticed the tell-tale green light coming on at random intervals.

There is, inevitably, a lawsuit.

Onion: Nation’s Strangers Decry Negative Portrayal Among Children.

As it turns out, it’s still illegal to shoot people in church there.

The TV moneyvangelist thinks Haiti got hit by an earthquake because, generations ago, enslaved Haitians made a pact with the devil.

However, Digby points out why we still have to pay attention to him. He is not a fringe figure. He has power in conservative circles, and people listen to him:

You want to start to see genuine change in this country? Take Pat Robertson very, very seriously. For example, I doubt there are more than two major universities in this country that bother to teach a course on Pat Robertson and his influence. Until he is given the genuine attention he deserves – and I mean, until Robertson is really held up to intense, withering, and sustained scrutiny by people who seriously care about this country’s liberal traditions – he and his ilk will continue to have a disproportionate input into our national dialogue.

Google has taken some flak for collaborating on Chinese censorship when it opened Google.cn, but apparently their complicity in the Great Firewall of China wasn’t enough: it turns out, “someone” has been actively hacking Google from a Chinese IP, with a healthy interest in Chinese human rights activists. Hmmm, I wonder who that could be?

Google’s response is stellar; read the whole thing, but the punch quote is:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

More at Ars Technica, who point out:

Well, we’ve got to hand it to Google—the company’s “don’t be evil” schtick has long worn thin and governments around the globe are already probing its potential monopoly power, but who else would come out swinging against the entire Chinese government and announce an end to its own collaboration in censorship, all while recognizing that it could lose access to the entire Chinese market? And do it in a blog post?

Gawker breaks down the terror odds for us.

The esteemed Mr Schneier points out once again how humans tend to vastly overestimate rare risks while downplaying much more common ones; this is especially true where terrorism is concerned.

You are more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be victimized by terrorists.

From the first link:

The Underwear Bomber is precisely the sort of story we humans tend to overreact to. Our brains aren’t very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare events. Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we’ve had to deal with throughout most of our species’ existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks modern society forces us to face. We exaggerate spectacular rare events, and downplay familiar and common ones.

We can see the effects of this all the time. We fear being murdered, kidnapped, raped and assaulted by strangers, when it’s far more likely that the perpetrator of such offenses is a relative or a friend. We fear school shootings, even though a school is almost always the safest place a child can be. We worry about shark attacks instead of fatal dog or pig attacks — both far more common. In the U.S., over 38,000 people die each year in car crashes; that’s as many deaths as 9/11 each and every month, year after year.

Overreacting to the rare and spectacular is natural. We tend to base risk analysis on personal story rather than on data. If a friend gets mugged in a foreign country, that story is more likely to affect how safe you feel in that country than abstract crime statistics.

Later:

I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of “news” is “something that hardly ever happens.” It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that you should start worrying.

And:

And once we’re scared, we need to “do something” — even if that something doesn’t make sense and is ineffective. We need to do something directly related to the story that’s making us scared. We implement full body scanners at airports. We pass the Patriot Act. We don’t let our children go to playgrounds unsupervised. Instead of implementing effective, but more general, security measures to reduce the overall risk, we concentrate on making the fearful story go away. Yes, it’s security theater, but it makes us feel safer.

Apparently, kiddie porn paranoia is getting in the way of airport security paranoia.

Check out this Subway store.

Turns out, octopi use tools. We’re so doomed.

Hey Anglicans! Hate gay and female priests, but strangely untroubled by wholesale obstruction of justice and ongoing protection of pedophiles? The Vatican wants you back!

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican announced a stunning decision Tuesday to make it easier for Anglicans to convert, reaching out to those who are disaffected by the election of women and gay bishops to join the Catholic Church’s conservative ranks.

Pope Benedict XVI approved a new church provision that will allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church while maintaining many of their distinctive spiritual and liturgical traditions, including having married priests.

Cardinal William Levada, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official, announced the new provision at a news conference.

You’re an Indiana prosecutor, and you’re hell-bent-for-leather on jailing a grandmother for buying too much sudafed.

“I don’t want to go there again,” [Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina] Alexander told the Tribune-Star, recalling how the manufacture and abuse of methamphetamine ravaged the tiny county and its families.

While the law was written with the intent of stopping people from purchasing large quantities of drugs to make methamphetamine, the law does not say the purchase must be made with the intent to make meth.

“The law does not make this distinction,” Alexander said…

Just as with any law, the public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse, the prosecutor said.

In the 80s, the Soviet Union built a system of sensors and failovers scarily close to an automated “dead-man’s switch” that would ensure the launch of their nuclear arsenal even if a US first strike destroyed their command and control, or even most of their cities and population. They called it Perimeter, and it’s actually still in place.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it’s no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button … If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The older I get, and the more I reflect on the Cold War era of nuclear detent, the more shocked I am to still be alive in a green and living world.

Sure, it’s a crappy week, but how about these?

• The Funny: Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds Of Secret Arctic Lairs

and, even better:

• The Bleakly Funny: Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.