The Post Came On A Monday

There was the Puppy Bowl and the Super Bowl but I elected to watch Lord Grantham spike the Meerschaum pipe in the drawing room in the Downton Bowl. It was most awesome.

Malala Yousufzai’s surgery was a success:

A Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating girls' education has undergone successful surgery at a British hospital to reconstruct her skull and help restore lost hearing.

A team of doctors carried out a five-hour operation on Saturday on 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai, who was shot in October and brought to Britain for treatment.

The procedures carried out were cranial reconstruction, aimed at mending parts of her skull with a titanium plate, and a cochlear implant designed to restore hearing on her left side, which was damaged in the attack.

"Both operations were a success and Malala is now recovering in hospital," said a statement on Sunday from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, central England, where she is being treated.

The girl's condition was described as stable and the statement said her medical team were very pleased with the progress she has made. "She is awake and talking to staff and members of her family," it added.

The attack on Yousufzai, who was shot in the head at point blank range as she left school in the Swat valley, drew widespread international condemnation.

Just admit that electric cars are a waste of time:

Are electric cars running out of juice again?

Recent moves by Japan's two largest automakers suggest that the electric car, after more than 100 years of development and several brief revivals, still is not ready for prime time - and may never be.

In the meantime, the attention of automotive executives in Asia, Europe and North America is beginning to swing toward an unusual but promising new alternate power source: hydrogen.

The reality is that consumers continue to show little interest in electric vehicles, or EVs, which dominated U.S. streets in the first decade of the 20th century before being displaced by gasoline-powered cars.

Despite the promise of "green" transportation - and despite billions of dollars in investment, most recently by Nissan Motor Co - EVs continue to be plagued by many of the problems that eventually scuttled electrics in the 1910s and more recently in the 1990s. Those include high cost, short driving range and lack of charging stations.

The public's lack of appetite for battery-powered cars persuaded the Obama administration last week to back away from its aggressive goal to put 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015.

(Sidebar: one might politely say he miscalculated.)

I would like to hear what the surviving district security agents in Benghazi have to say.

I’d be more concerned about a government wasting money than a charity.

One knows one's economy is in the tank when even the Bangladeshis are flying home:

Poor and unemployed, with little hope of being able to earn a living, thousands of migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Ghana, and Iraq are applying for a funded program that helps them leave Greece to return to their home countries.

More proof that brain cells are diminishing:

A Brampton father has won a partial exemption from religious studies for his son but may still take a Catholic school board to court to win a full pass, as other parents across the province fight for a basic right outlined in the Education Act.

How difficult is it to not send your child to a Catholic school or simply allow him to attend the classes so that he might learn something? 

Start privatising education now.

(and I thank you)

It’s official: Sandra Fluke isn’t just a washed-up moron; she’s also despicable:

“If you take a step back and think about that, you work at a restaurant or you work at a store, and your boss is able to deny you leukemia coverage or contraception coverage or blood transfusions or any number of medical concerns that someone might have a religious objection to … So the folks who are still objecting [to the mandate] have some very extreme ideas about religious freedom and employee health care in this country.”

(Sidebar: see here. She’s not even original).

What a b!#%*.  Who, exactly, would deny coverage for blood transfusions to their employees? None (indeed, one case involved an employer ceasing insurance payments to a widow whose husband, a Jehovah’s Witness, passed away primarily due to his not taking a blood transfusion which could have saved his life- hardly a case of denying treatment for religious reasons) but proving that hardly matters. Sandra is trying in her own insipid, spiteful way to paint a fantastical and draconian scenario of employees being deprived of necessary treatments at the hands of unfeeling, religious employers. How contraception is in the same category as life-saving blood transfusions boggles my mind. Does someone wake up one day and want a disease requiring blood transfusions the same way a pasty, whiny, little daddy’s girl wants someone to pay for her birth control? As Obamacare, in all its prophylactic provisions, doesn’t come close to covering all Americans anyway, these figments of poor Sandra’s imagination don’t gain much traction. 

She’s horrible. Let’s leave it at that.

And now, something a littler lighter: curious maps. Enjoy.