The World Is Just Awesome

Last November, a pair of Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated in separate, coordinated incidents. The Iranian government blamed the Israeli intelligence service, or the Mossad, but so far nobody has been tried or accused, and nothing has been proven as to who did the deed. The actual assassinations were straight out of a Jason Bourne flick. In each case, the scientist was getting into his car to drive to or from work, when an anonymous motorcyclist accelerated up the street behind him. The motorcyclist threw a magnetic bomb at the scientist’s car that attached and exploded seconds later, while the motorcyclist zoomed to safety before anyone knew what had happened.

However, on a sliding scale of crazy news, that barely registers. Consider:

The Democratic contingent in the Wisconsin State Senate has fled Wisconsin entirely, and has been reduced to hiding out and conducting secret meetings in Illinois. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of protestors have replaced them inside the state Capitol building.

In space, Google is sponsoring a contest for private space companies to send the first-ever privately made and owned robot to the Moon. Meanwhile, just 369 years and 43 days after the death of Galileo Galilei, the Vatican and the Italian scientific community are finally working together.

Protests continue across the Middle East. Tunisia and Egyptian protestors have toppled their respective governments, while protests (and riots) of varying intensity and lethality have continued in Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Iran, Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen, on a scale that was unthinkable just three months ago.

The revolutions were abetted by social networking sites, most notably Facebook and Twitter. An Egyptian man even went so far as to name his firstborn daughter “Facebook” as a nod to the site’s role in toppling Hosni Mubarak’s government.

And as it turns out, the U.S. government based most of its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the testimony of one Iraqi defector, who was lying through his teeth the whole time. Best part? The codename for the defector was “Curveball”.

I love life, man. You could write a hundred books and live a hundred years and never capture the strangeness, the infinite wonderful incomprehensibility, of the one in the other. What a world.