CNN is reporting that the Florida legislature is closing the state’s boot camps. Another of JEB’s great ideas bites the dust, as it should.

You can see the reason for this action in this video of the final minutes of Martin Lee Anderson’s life, but I don’t recommend it, because it is brutal.

The Miami Herald had this initial article on the death.

This was a total mess and has brought to light yet more failed policies of another Bush, as well as the “good ol’ boy” culture of parts of Florida. They may have changed their party affiliation from Democratic to Republican, but it’s the same people in charge. [Read more →]

To prove they are fiscal conservatives, and are dealing with the immigration issue, Republicans in the Senate voted to take $1.9 Billon that was supposed to go for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and use it to do something on the southern border. They are not really certain what it will be used for, possibly donuts for the Minutemen.

If you have any interest in Bible research you should give a listen to tonight’s Fresh Air from Whyy:

Religion scholar Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, talks about his new book, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend.

Ehrman looks into the lives of three major followers of Christ, plumbing legend and the writings of the New Testament to illuminate facts and details about these figures.

Ehrman is also the author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it came to be.

I read Misquoting Jesus, which is an excellent account of trying to separate fact from fiction in old records and writings.

As NTodd notes, It is the 20 anniversary of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the world: the failure of the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility [Чернобыльская АЭС им. В.И.Ленина] near Pripyat, Ukraine.  The West found out about the problem from alarms at Swedish nuclear facilities due to the fall out from Chernobyl. The Soviet authorities did not admit the problem for three days.

The BBC has one of their excellent In Depth sites up, and a great slide show that helps you to understand what happened, if not why.

The concrete cap over the destroyed reactor is cracking and must be replaced, but the site is still radioactive and can’t be worked on directly without killing people.