The great thing about being a bureaucrat in a dictatorship is you can take credit for everything that happens in your personal fiefdom and treat people like garbage and there is no recourse.   Well, almost no recourse.   Those guys working for Saddam Hussein didn't fare all that well when their boss started floating rumors he had weapons of mass destruction, but generally the life of a senior guy in a dictatorship is pretty good.

Yesterday I posted a couple splendid instances of people driving nails into their brains. And here, for those of you that think (as I do) that the only thing better than nails-in-the-brain stories is MORE nails-in-the-brain stories, are a couple more. Stay tuned tomorrow for things other than nails that've been surgically removed from brains of the unfortunate.

Politics is funny business because there will always be a conflict between freedom, democracy and the Constitution and political winds blow decisions in various directions - that's the way it was written and part of why it works.   Given the power of the courts to determine which part wins there will also be competition between the three branches of the federal government and it's a reason why various sides of the political spectrum should hope for balance rather than stacking the court with like-minded judges.   If it becomes okay to stack the court your way it will be okay to stack the court against you too.

Hank recently wrote a piece that dealt with the problem of a "ghost train" and a "ghost hunter" that was killed by a real train while waiting for the apparition.

Since these were amateur ghost hunters, it would be a bit much to presume that there was any actual scientific query going on, but nevertheless there seems to be a persistence of belief that ghosts are the subject of active research.  However, the question to ask is whether there's any scientific basis for thinking there's something to investigate.

Here are a couple wonderful instances of people accidentally or intentionally driving nails deep into their gray matter. Can't get enough nails in the brain? Don't worry—I'll post another couple tomorrow.

The Standard Model of particle physics has been under attack since its original formulation, in 1967, and yet it has so far resisted every assault; in so doing it has become one of the most thoroughly tested physical theories. Like it or not, the construction has stood the test of time so well that theorists and experimentalists alike feel threatened by the chance that the Large Hadron Collider, too, will fail to find new physics beyond what the model predicts.