Sunshine finally this afternoon — and for more than just a few minutes.

A factoid known in reality, but yet proven.
Via the LA Times:

New research has rigorously tested Male Idiot Theory, which posits that, well, men are idiots and are driven to take ridiculous risks despite the clear prospects for self-harm, and for no defensible reason.
Newly published by the venerable British Medical Journal (in its annual BMJ Christmas issue), the landmark study has shown that Male Idiot Theory holds up under strictly scientific scrutiny.

Or maybe: ‘The verdict: women dumb, men dumber.’

(Illustration found here).

And as George Carlin once did posit truly: ‘“Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”‘

Or maybe the idiots (male mostly, of course, though, a few female) that make up the US Congress, and the cheap, noxious-drama in the Senate facing a Saturday deadline to approve a $1.1 trillion spending bill, a nasty-suck-hole passed last night by the House, that would avert a government shutdown. These are are asshole-idiots, however, no-risk asshole-idiots.
Charles P. Pierce at Esquire this afternoon makes note of a worse then mean-spirited pattern:

They will be doing some of it in order to curry favor with the oligarchs.
They will be doing some of it just because they’re mean.
But the derivatives scam is the first step to unravelling financial reform, just as surely as the Halbig case is the last chance to unravel heath care reform.
The basic goal of the political opposition in Congress, having thrown so much sand in the gears that it’s a wonder the president got anything done, and the stated goal of the newer, more radical Congress that will be assembling in January, will be to undo everything he did accomplish until the presidency of Barack Obama vanishes from history as a kind of failed experiment.
It is important to these people that the country not remember that it elected (twice) an African American Democratic president.
It is important to people who have spent 40 years constructing their own private American history that their own private American history not include him.

And the rest just happy idiots.