Hybrid Man-Eating Pythons

So I’ve previously ranted at length (http://freshmediocrity.blogspot.com/2009/07/pet-burmese-python-strangles-toddler-in.html) about the danger posed by pythons. I know, everyone thinks I’m over-blowing the python threat, like my rants about the “war on Xmas” (http://freshmediocrity.blogspot.com/2005/12/war-on-christmas-road-to-victory-part.html) over-blew the threat of Koala-loving drivers. But check this shit out. The CSM has this story (http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0915/p02s01-usgn.html) reassuringly-titled “HYBRID MAN-EATING PYTHONS? FLORIDA IS ON ALERT”.

In an [sic] case of real life imitating Hollywood, the US scientific
community is increasingly concerned that two nonnative python breeds currently
slithering free in south Florida could morph into a giant man-eating swamp coil.

The capture of five African rock pythons recently near an Everglades already teeming with the gentler Burmese pythons has scientists worried about so-called "hybrid vigor" – a phenomenon that occurs when interbreeding uncorks volatile recessive genes, passing traits such as aggression onto the offspring. Think Africanized bees.

The two species have interbred in captivity. While Burmese pythons aren't known to eat people in their native habitat, the African rock python, unfortunately, has been known to do just that (emphasis mine).

The “Africanized bees” of the python world! Great! It’s all fun and games until one of these things winds it’s way through a trailer park or clan rally or goat-rape (http://freshmediocrity.blogspot.com/2008/09/theres-no-justice-for-rednecks-victims.html) or whatever else they do down south. Then, when it coils around some fat, toothless, delicious redneck, and EATS THEM WHOLE, the goddam rednecks will somehow blame Obama.

Is it something in the water?

I wonder, what happens when someone signs on to write a column for the NYT? Does the paper filter the list of candidates to make sure no one with any reasonable cognitive ability is dismissed? Do they only accept columnists from an approved Party list, in effect serving as the propaganda arm of the [use your imagination] Party, without having to consider the commercial, logical, ethical, or journalistic impact of their content? Or maybe they hire normal people, and through a hazing period of tiger cages, Clockwork Orange-style indoctrination, and massive doses of LSD turn them into barking lunatics?

For example, reading anything written by Paul Krugman SHOULD result in a reaction of "Paul, what the fuck is wrong with you?" But yet, he gets to keep devaluing the NYT, journalism, and the Nobel Prize with crap like this piece pining for Richard Nixon's economic policies. Nick Gillespie at Reason wrote a critique of Krug-nonsense here, but frankly a critique could be written weekly about Krugman's inane rambling. But he writes on.

Or this week, when "The World Is Flat" author Thomas L. Friedman, who also writes a column for the NYT, conjured up a screed about how China is better governed than America. Allow me to quote Matt Welch's piece from Reason's Hit & Run column:

The next time anyone tries to tell you that Thomas L. Friedman is a serious
thinker, or a tribune for global democracy, or even a good columnist, or
basically someone who isn't worth sending on the next slow boat to Shanghai,
please refer him to this despicable column from today, then ask: Do you, too, prefer Chinese governance to American democracy? No really, Friedman says that:

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Then there's the recurring fun and games of Maureen Dowd's convulsing gibberish, and Roger Cohen's "reporting" of how happy the Jews of Iran are.

I don't understand - who pays for all this nonsense?