Oh, yes, it will be Father’s Day on Sunday. If you or your children are among the statistically shrinking demographic that actually has or has had a father in your life, be thankful.

I’m in St. Louis for the Concordia Publishing House board meeting, and the whole city is in a tizzy over an attempt by a Brazilian-Belgian company named InBev to buy Anheuser-Busch. See Critics of the Bud Buyout Are Frothing. When the South African corporation SAB bought Miller, Milwaukee didn’t get all in an outrage, and many people welcomed it. But St. Louis is worried that their local beer giant under foreign management might cut out all of their civic involvement, shut down the free Grant’s Park, cut jobs, and who knows what all.

ABC is sponsoring a big conclave of scientists who are saying that this might be the last century of our civilization or even of the human race. See ABC News: Earth 2100: This Century Our Last?

At least people don’t believe in progress anymore. Notice how we now have a secular apocalyptic millennialism to go along with the religious kind.

Some scientists think we might survive, though, and keep evolving until we are all connected into a vast sphere surrounding the sun, whereupon we will go from galaxy to galaxy consuming everything we find. See this review of The Year Million. The supermind we will evolve into after a million years is described as being “so vast and unknowable that we might as well call it God.”

We get to be God! That’s been the fantasy ever since the Serpent put it into our minds at the very beginning.

We need to pray for everyone affected by the floods, tornados, and other weather catastrophes in the midwest. See, for example, Cedar Rapids struggles to endure historic flood. Are any of you caught up in this? (I realize that getting on the internet is your last priority, but if possible we’d like to hear how you are doing.)

Now that gasoline costs upwards of $4, buying a hybrid automobile–which typically costs around $3000 more than the all-gasoline model–makes economic sense. But you would need to keep your Prius for three and a half years to recoup that extra money. There are now many hybrid models from a wide range of manufacturers. The Wall Street Journal has a useful article comparing them, including the chart below. I am astonished, though, to see how little improvement there is in gas mileage from a normal car, except for the Prius and the Civic. Do any of your drive hybrids? Are they worth it?