According to Newser, Christine O'Donnell, a Tea Party candidate for the GOP nomination for the Delaware Senate race, is opposed to masturbation because the Bible says "lusting in your heart" is the same as committing adultery. (She has, of course, taken the Bible quote out of context.) She said of the fact that we have a sexually unhealthy society, "That's wonderful. It's called modesty."

The "Tea Party Express" has pumped a quarter of a million dollars into this nutjob's campaign.

Delaware's mainstream Republicans are attacking O'Donnell -- the state GOP chairman says she "couldn't be elected dog catcher." (Where, exactly, is dog catcher an elected office, anyway?) Democrats, I'm sure, would love to run against her rather than moderate Mike Castle.

NPR reports on how the Army is routinely denying the Purple Heart to soldiers who have sustained traumatic brain injuries, despite the fact that such injuries are explicitly listed in regulations for the medal.

In 2008, the top medical commander in Iraq, Brigadier General Joseph Caravalho, blocked doctors from talking about the Purple Heart with soldiers who suffered mild TBIs, claiming that "in many cases, [concussions with] minimum medical intervention will not warrant this award" -- a statement that contradicts Army regulations, which require only that the injury must require treatment by a medical officer and must be documented. "Concussion injuries caused as a result of enemy generated explosions" are explicitly included in the list of injuries eligible for the award.

So what's the deal? One officer says that "no more John Kerrys" became a catchphrase among some medical officers in Iraq.

If you've ever climbed a tree, you may have learned that sometimes it's easier to get up than to get back down. Ringo apparently learned this lesson this evening; I came back from my karate class to find him on top of this deck box/bench on the back patio. (Click on the thumbnails for larger versions of the photos.)

It was apparently within his capability to jump up on top of it; but when I called him to get down, he balked. I finally had to lift him up and place him back on the ground. I don't know what got him up there in the first place -- somehow I'm reminded of old cartoons where fear of a mouse sends a 1950s housewife jumping up on to a table, but I can't see that being the case here.

Bjorn Lomborg was one of the first high-profile "climate change skeptics". In 2001, he argued in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist that fighting global warming would be a waste of money.

Now, in a new book Smart Solutions to Climate Change, Lomborg is calling climate change "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today", and calling for a carbon tax to collect $50 billion a year.

The Week has a brief on him and five other climate "skeptics" who have come around.

Good news for barflies! Time reports on new research into alcohol and life expectancy, which not only shows that moderate drinkers live longer, but that even heavy drinkers live longer than total abstainers.

...[A]fter controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.

A key factor here is that the study accounted for the difference between people who never drank, and those who had problems with the bottle and then quit. It still found that moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial.

This morning, while I was doing my usual Wednesday 10k-ish run my mind wandered all about, as it usually does. If I were a "real" runner I suppose I'd be worrying about improving my stride or something, but as a dilettante, all kinds of stuff goes through my head.

I was thinking about the need for (gentle! voluntary!) population control, about how mainstream economists insist we need to keep the population growing so we have enough younger workers to support the elderly, and how what we really need to do instead is to recognize and encourage the contributions that the elderly make to our society.

I had the beginnings of an interesting piece for the blog, about how ZPG -- and even a slight NPG -- ties in with better status for women and the elderly, about how it means more wealth for everyone, since wealth is limited by natural resources divided by population. Indeed, some say that the population reduction cause by the Black Death helped set the stage for the Renaissance, with a reduction in population meaning more stuff per per person, including lots of surplus clothing -- which could be turned into rag paper to feed the new printing presses.

But now, forget about it, we can't have a meaningful discussion about the topic for months if not years thanks to the poor doofus who stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters today with a gun and some bombs, insisting that they air "programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility."

He's dead now, and it will be impossible to have a serious conversation about a serious issue for a while. That's what violent extremism gets us.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: writing off of a prompt from another participant. I drew the phrase "She said Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, and that I only looked 25." (If you know our group, you might have guessed that this came from Jeff! And I would like to emphasize that this is entirely a work of fiction.) So...

She said Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, and that I only looked 25. It was that sort of evening, that sort of crowd. If I was a fox I would have chewed my leg off to escape, but I had to settle for chewing off my brain by means of strong drink. I raised my hand and caught the bartender's eye. "Bombay Sapphire martini, please."

But it would take a few minutes before the medicine could take effect. So while I waited for the drink, I had to employ a bit of the ol' social engineering to prevent this vapid old-money bimbo from getting a tighter grip. How to repel someone who thinks that Hitler wasn't that bad? Being Jewish would top the list, but no such luck, and I didn't think I could pass. Who else was on the Nazi hit list? Gypsies, pacifists, vegetarians, gays...ah!

"Oh, thank you, darling!" I waved my hand, letting my wrist flop a bit. "You know, it's so important to moisturize. Product, product, product!" As the martini arrived, I thought, shoot, I should have ordered a Cosmo; still, I picked up the cocktail glass with a flourish, my pinky hanging out, took a sip, and declared, "Yummy!"

Her knee, which had been flirtatiously almost-brushing mine, backed away at least eight inches, and her face tightened like a lug nut being driven home by an air wrench. "Oh. Well," she stammered, "um, excuse me just a minute, be right back." She jumped off her barstool like it was on fire. I relaxed and took another sip of my martini, actually tasting it this time.

Dear Ms. Palin:

I am not quite sure how to react to your remarkable claim that the way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., is to support the military.

It's difficult to believe that you could be so totally ignorant of Dr. King's anti-war activism. King wanted us to honor our soldiers the same way that today's peace movement does: by bringing them home and apologizing to them for sending them on a fool's errand. In one of his most famous speeches, he spoke against the American invasion of Vietnam and said that it made the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".

On the other hand, I am reluctant to believe that you are so evil, so deliberately and shamefully immoral, that you would knowingly and maliciously twist the legacy of one of the greatest Americans in history. I don't want to think that you're deliberately employing the Big Lie technique.

I try to assume the best in people. In a case as outrageous as this, that's really difficult; but I will operate under the assumption that somehow, you never actually learned about Martin Luther King and what he stood for.

If that's the case, at this late date I honestly don't know if it's useful to try to teach you. One would have to dig down through decades of beliefs built on top of a foundation of dangerous ignorance.

But, as I understand them, one of the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ -- a man whom both you and Dr. King claim to follow -- is that all people, however wretched, are capable of salvation. So to attempt to honor Dr. King, I will choose to believe that even you, Ms. Palin, can be taught and can reform your ways.

So let me present you with some excerpts from that famous April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church in New York City, where he spoke to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned. Here's what Dr. King really thought about war and militarism; and where he speaks of communism in Vietnam, we could just as truthfully say the same of religious extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan: