I have a slightly smaller pain-lump on the left side of my throat this morning, but I’m still coughing up phlegm and goop.

Connecticut was just placed ninth on the list of most liveable states in America. The top ten, in order from highest to lowest, are New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont, Iowa, New Jersey, Wyoming, Virginia, Nebraska, Connecticut, and South Dakota. The complete list is online. Massachusetts ranked 16th.

The ossuary connected with Jesus’s brother James is almost certainly a fake. I’m substantially relieved to learn this The owner of the box continues to claim otherwise, so the forgery will probably not be destroyed, and we’ll have to deal with this idiocy in another 500 years or so. The article neglects to mention that this bone box was bought in the 1950s for $140, but that if the inscription is real, and it really was connected with Jesus’s brother in some way, it’s probably worth about $1.4 million today. Jesus merchandising remains big business in the United States. The WWJD phenomenon is valued at $400 million in sales annually, out of a total business in Jesus-junk of almost $2 billion.

The Jordanians claim to have stopped an attack on Jordan designed to kill 80,000 people and bring chemical weapons into the war on terror for the first time. On the side of the terrorists, of course. The US government frets enormously about dual-use items, fearing that aluminum tubes could be used as rocket launch tubes, or as tubes for centrifuges for processing uranium ore into high quality uranium for nuclear weapons.

And, of course, the Marines are still ready to invade Fallujah and Najaf, and the Iraqi combatants are storing weapons in schools, mosques, and hospitals. The US is saying, if you leave those weapons there, we have to destroy those buildings; the Geneva Convention says we can attack those structures if there are weapons in them. The Iraqi combatants are saying, the US intends to attack our schools and mosques and hospitals! It’s a violation of the Geneva Convention!

Sigh.

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