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“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

Conservative Christian leaders said that they would intensify their efforts to make their case, but were just beginning to discuss how to proceed. “We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president and chief executive of The Family Leader, an evangelical organization in Iowa.

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How many more mutilated women’s bodies will it take? How many more haunting ghosts of the disappeared?

Not Mexico. In smug, self-satisfied, humble-to-a-fault, little old Canada.

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The British public broadcaster has suspended all investigations by its flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, after a politician was wrongly named on the internet as a paedophile.

Allegations are that the police leaked the (wrongly) suspected identity of a child molester to the BBC. Once more, Her Majesty’s Press and the police are accused of dubious, even witch-hunting tactics. (This does not mean that there are no crimes to be investigated.)

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As further evidence of the tunnel-vision conservatism of Fox News, the Nielsen ratings for election night show just how intolerant their audience is of any information that is undesirable or contrary to their worldview.

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The sharp drop-off in viewership that occurred only on Fox reveals the sensitivity that the Fox viewer has to actual, truthful information. That is something that Fox exploits eagerly as they load up their programming with false and prejudicial stories. And that accounts for why Fox viewers have been shown to be so much less informed than consumers of news from other sources. They have such an aversion to anything other than Fox’s pre-seasoned, right-wing brand of pseudo-knowledge that they won’t even stayed tuned to Fox if there is a chance they might be exposed to raw reality.

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In early October Doug Kass, the president of Seabreeze Partners and a frequent guest on CNBC, published a manifesto on The Street listing 10 reasons he believed Apple had “lost its mojo.”

Nine of his 10 reasons were fundamental and irreversible. Things like the death of Steve Jobs. The increasing complexity of Apple’s product line. The loss of its ecosystem advantage. And worst of all: “Apple is selling an equal to worse product than the competition for more money.”

If he was correct in mid October, it would follow that he was even more correct this week, when Apple — which was trading for $674 a share when Kass started his campaign — traded for as low as $533.74.

But no. Having helped knock more than $130 billion off Apple’s market valuation, Kass on Friday cheerfully announced that he is buying Apple again.

“Hey, I never said it was a forbidden fruit,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Then he preceded to tick off five reasons he’s turned bullish on the stock. You can read them here.

Here’s the thing: None of his five reasons for buying Apple now address the fundamental concerns he raised in October. Steve Jobs is still dead, Apple’s products are still more expensive than the competition, etc. etc.

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Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was so confident of victory against President Barack Obama that he spent $25,000 for victory fireworks, had already drawn up a list of White House appointments and took it easy on election day when his opponents were still working hard to get out the vote.

Political insiders tell Capitol Hill Blue that Romney didn’t think he could lose and was genuinely “shell shocked” when he lost the Presidential race in an electoral vote landslide to Obama.

“He was supremely confident and delayed conceding the race as long as possible because he just didn’t believe he would lose,” says one senior aide. “It was overconfidence based on inaccurate assumptions and flawed data.”

In conversations with campaign insiders, a portrait of a clueless campaign emerges, driven by a candidate so sure of himself that he ignored all the obvious warning signs.

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“Mitt is not accustomed to losing,” says one friend. “It was a bitter pill for him.”

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Mark Newman of the University of Michigan has produced a map of the presidential election in which each county is colored red or blue depending on who won it.

It is pretty striking how many counties Romney won. It is also striking that Obama got 2.5 million more votes than Romney. If the blue counties are as blue as the red counties are red, that means that more people live in the small number of blue counties than in all the red ones combined. In other words, while there aren’t many blue counties, that’s where most of the people live. To give an example of this disparity, 3.8 million people live in the 469 square miles of the city of Los Angeles. This is half a million more people than the combined populations of Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, which together cover 1.6 million square miles. These four states are 3,400 times larger than Los Angeles but have appreciably fewer people. In other words, while the land area of the red counties is vastly greater than that of the blue counties, there are hardly any people living in many of them.

The map clearly shows Obama’s strengths: the Northeast, the upper Midwest, the West Coast, and the Colorado-New Mexico axis. There is also some strength in the South. In Southern Florida, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are full of New York transplants who are strong Democrats. There is also a blue band that curves down from North Carolina. These care counties with large black populations.

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Haven’t you lay awake at night wondering if 36 voxels in your rostromedial prefrontal cortex (RMPFC) can predict your future romantic decisions? If you have, you’re in luck. Cooper and colleagues (2012) conducted an fMRI study to answer this burning question in the affirmative.