The Flu

From now on I will no longer accept "the flu" as an excuse to miss class. Remember: the free market solves all problems and God has chosen the leader of the free world. If you are so weak as to defy both of them and catch this virus which kills 36,000 Americans a year, then you deserve your fate.

And don't bother to rely on those scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates, from the "reality-based community" who hate America. Ron Suskind finally figures out the secrets of the universe:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

So quit your whining, coughing, sneezing, and studying. Got it?