Italy Descends Into Intellectual Barbarism

Granted, I haven't paid much attention to the going-ons in Italy lately - most of the news seems to be about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's predilection for barely-legal girls.  So I don't know if they've been sliding down an intellectual slope for a while now, or this is just the dip one would expect to see when the cast of Jersey Shore comes to town.  Still, I had to read this story twice to make sure it wasn't parody.

Alas, it is not:

Italian government officials have accused the country's top seismologist of manslaughter, after failing to predict a natural disaster that struck Italy in 2009, a massive devastating earthquake that killed 308 people.

A shocked spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) likened the accusations to a witch hunt.

"It has a medieval flavor to it -- like witches are being put on trial," the stunned spokesman told FoxNews.com.

Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), will face trial along with six other scientists and technicians, after failing to predict the future and the impending disaster.

Earthquakes are, of course, nearly impossible to predict, seismologists say. In fact, according to the website for the USGS, no major quake has ever been predicted successfully.

"Neither the USGS nor Caltech nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake," reads a statement posted on the USGS website. "They do not know how, and they do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future

It's a witch hunt, all right. By politicians looking for someone to blame for a natural disaster. Maybe Italian officials are taking an example out of the Democratic playbook, when our own leftists used Hurricane Katrina as a cudgel to beat George W. Bush, despite the fact that if one could blame anything outside of natural forces for the devastation there, it would be the local (Democratic) officials who sat back and did nothing.

Regardless, another wall that separated Western Civilization from barbarism has fallen. And in the homeland of the Renaissance, no less. Alas, there is no trusting the Europeans, who seems simultaneously ready to become socialist Jew-killers (again) as well as resigning themselves to be overthrown by barbarians (again). Maybe, with that forethought, they are trying to beat the clock, and jump-start the race (back) to the bottom.

Somewhere, Galileo weeps.

...don't blame these guys....