Word: earthly
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Trussoni is a bit of a fallen angel herself. In 2006 her memoir Falling Through the Earth put her in the upper echelons of the literary heavens, but with Angelology she has voluntarily consigned herself to the infernal realm of the commercial thriller. Angelology is based on a literal interpretation of a passage in Genesis that describes angels interbreeding with human women to produce powerful hybrid beings called Nephilim. Trussoni supposes - and why shouldn't she? - that the Nephilim are still among us, a wealthy, evil élite who secretly guide the affairs of men. It's a killer premise...
...debased, the psychological and the theological, into a single rich, strange tableau that transmits a shock of truth. The institutions that we're used to thinking of as numinous and divine - churches, banks, governments, Tiger Woods - are showing disturbingly mortal tendencies. These days anyone can be dragged to earth, and when fools rush in, the angels are usually right behind them...
...many crimes that climate scientists have been accused of lately is that they claim absolute certainty in a field of research fraught with uncertainty. Sure, the planet is warming, say skeptics, but that's happened throughout Earth's history, long before humans were burning fossil fuels. So, how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon...
According to the models, none of those combinations can produce the climate patterns currently being observed in the real world. Add the greenhouse gases that we know humans are generating (and which we've known since the 1800s tend to warm the Earth, all other things being equal), and the simulations finally come close to matching the real world. Its possible, albeit far-fetched, that the simulations are defective. It is even less possible that all of them (and there are many) are defective in the direction of overstating humanity's contribution to warming...
...year later, those calculations have been tossed upside down. Obama's poll numbers have come back to earth. And the filibuster-proof Senate majority that Specter's defection delivered to the Democrats vanished when Massachusetts voters handed Teddy Kennedy's old seat to Scott Brown. Democratic control of the House is in jeopardy, and the party stands to lose at least a half-dozen seats in the Senate. "Unless something significant changes," political handicapper Charlie Cook wrote last month, Democrats "are headed toward the losses of the magnitude we saw in the midterm elections...