Two weeks ago hundreds of people came to the Legislative Office Building to protest state government's long failure to appropriate funds for group homes for mentally disabled adults living with aging parents. As many as 3,000 people are said to be on the waiting list of the state Department of Developmental Services, whose policy, a function of the lack of money, is not to place a disabled person in a group home until his parents die, leaving those parents with an ever-growing burden and no assurance that their son or daughter will have a gentle rather than terrifying transition.

This disregard of a compelling social need is the most disgraceful failure of state government - and state government has quite a few such failures.

A week after the protest Gov. Dannel P. Malloy made another round of budget cuts to reduce the worsening state deficit, and the agency losing the most money, more than $7 million, was the Department of Developmental Services.

The governor seemed to be mocking and punishing the mentally disabled and their advocates for daring to complain.

But they should keep complaining, especially since in recent weeks the governor has awarded or presided over the awarding of millions of dollars in raises for state employees, most notoriously, a $300,000 raise for the president of the University of Connecticut, Susan Herbst. None of those employees needed a raise as much as the mentally disabled need housing and their parents need to be relieved of a burden society must share.

With the governor so churlish and vindictive, the disabled and their advocates have nothing to lose. They should start parading the many dumb extravagances of the Malloy administration all around the state Capitol and all over the state until better priorities and decency prevail.

Tick, tick, tick

What's the difference between the ancient fable about the shepherd boy who cried wolf and the modern scientists who maintain a "Doomsday Clock" whose hands are annually adjusted closer to midnight?

The scientists have more technology to scare people with, but that's about all. For their "Doomsday Clock," concocted in 1947 at the onset of the nuclear age, has never been more than 17 minutes from midnight in all its 68 years. The other day the clock was reset to 3 minutes to midnight on account of fears about climate change, modernization of nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste disposal.

Climate change is a fair concern, but since the planet has cycled between warm and cool periods every half millennium or so, starting long before man-made carbon dioxide and the internal-combustion engine, "doomsday" talk about climate change is hysteria.

Of course nuclear war is a threat, but on the whole the nuclear age has been more peaceful than what preceded it, since nuclear weapons have deterred wars between the great powers.

As for nuclear waste disposal, it is an ordinary political problem. Now that Nevada's Harry Reid is no longer majority leader of the U.S. Senate, the federal government may find the will to build the storage facility long planned at Yucca Mountain in the desert state - might find the will to assert the national interest against the special interest.

While doomsday used to be exclusively the province of religious crazies, lately they compete with secular ones, all resembling the cult members depicted a half-century ago in the skit from the British stage show "Beyond the Fringe" - going to the mountaintop to await the end of the world and counting down to the appointed time, only to experience ... nothing. "Never mind, lads," the cult leader says. "Same time tomorrow. We must get a winner one day."

And one day the religious crazies and crazy scientists will get a winner, but not within the next three minutes, and probably not until long after their hysteria has been forgotten.