Stranger than fiction.

A veteran Los Angeles police officer responding to a disturbance early today at a Masonic Lodge in south Los Angeles shot and killed an unarmed man reaching for his waistband, department officials said.

In her speech accepting appointment as House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made an innocuous sounding reference to a “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” one portion of the Great Seal of the United States.

The U.S. agency best known for eavesdropping on telephone calls had a
hand in the development of Microsoft’s Vista operating system, Microsoft
confirmed Tuesday.

In announcing plans to nationalize industries, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez proves that he is a Communist - as we claimed all along.

“John Michael McConnell, the retired vice admiral slated to become America’s new top spy, [has some] longtime associations [which] may cause him headaches during Senate confirmation hearings,” Newsweek.com notes.”One such tie is with another former Navy admiral, John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who started the controversial ‘Total Information Awareness’ program at the Pentagon in 2002.”

Certain themes and fallacies are especially common, so here are some predictions of the future that I consider more or less likely to occur. [Neo-Malthusianism; Robot Uprising; Eco-disaster; Morlocks and Eloi; Obsolescence of Humanity; The Surveillance Society … ]

Thousands of birds fall dead from the sky in Australia and dozens litter the streets of Austin Texas; New York City is bathed again in a mysterious stench, and again authorities assure residents it’s harmless, though they don’t know what it is and are no longer even trying to find out; multiple reports of fireballs, rock falls, strange lights and UFOs (one in Iran today, and a dramatic flap two years ago, a report of which the BBC illustrates with a photograph of Venus) compound the sense that’s no longer nonsense: that the sky really is falling. (The O’Hare UFO story became the Chicago Tribune’s most read article online, ever.) Weather patterns are breaking down and reconstituting in alarming ways, winning deathbed conversions from climate change skeptics. And perhaps most incredible of all - or it would be, if it represented something like a departure from script - the White House is about to escalate the war in Iraq and likely thereafter engage Iran, inviting a Stalingrad scenario upon US forces in the Middle East.

My contention is that Dawkins makes a categorical error in trying to
apply the scientific method of the natural sciences to disprove an
entirely logical phenomenon. In terms of logic I shall now attempt
to disprove his theses, and to demonstrate that God does indeed exist.

Plenty of North American Union material this past week–or, if you prefer, North American Community.

Devotees of the Church of Scientology have gained access to thousands of British children through a charity that visits schools to lecture on the dangers of drugs. A Sunday Times investigation has found that Marlborough College is one of more than 500 schools across Britain where the charity has taught.