![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Up top - your children are not being taught how to evaluate validity, provenance, and research usefulness of the sources they find on the Internet, unless, by happenstance, they have a librarian (public or school) that is instructing them in the course of such during their research. As more information moves on-line, this lack of ability to discern is most disturbing.
Speaking of libraries, Warner Brothers has decided that they will prevent libraries and other rental companies from getting the latest theatrical release film on the day it goes into stores, and that libraries and rental companies will be forced to purchase copies that feature only the film and no subtitles. Because, apparently, we're cutting into their market with all the people in an economic disadvantage that can't afford their full-featured disc in the stores that have it on hold at the library. The "rental" discs thing? Makes me less likely to buy your movie disc, because it means I judge the movie solely on the movie - and if the movie wasn't good enough, the special features will never get seen - they could have meant a sale, if only you had let me watch them.
Out in the world today, Iceland went bankrupt in the banking crash, and then disappeared off the news radar. Perhaps because they successfully managed to re-wrest control of the country from the banks and their paid politicians...through the drafting and creation of a new Constitution.
Pakistani officials are outraged at a NATO airstrike, launched from Afghanistan, that killed 24 soldiers. And the airstrikes that kill children in Afghanistan continue, because of the apparent desensitization of the American public to the horrors of war.
Did we mention as well that the United States attempted to stop the ban of cluster bombs, preferring to have them merely regulated, and joining with China and Russia in their push? Despite obvious examples of the harm that cluster munitions can cause, both when they explode properly and when they sit as unexploded ordnance?
The orderly withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq continues, with the Saddam-palace-turned-military-base Camp Victory turned over to Iraqi forces, and several other bases packing up and rolling out. Cue worries and insistence that Iran is gaining influence in Iraq (additional example saying that Iraq's military are meeting with Iran's Revolutionary Guard) and will soon subvert it from a Western-friendly environment to an Iran-friendly one, despite assurances from the Vice-President that Iraq can stand by itself.
Upon their return, soldiers may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder...and now, we find out, so may many of the dogs that are used.
A report from the United Nations accuses Syrian military forces of attacking, killing, torturing, and raping children in a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.
Tunisian students favoring a more hard-line Islam clashed with more secular students over gender integration and costume.
Elections in Egypt! Early results indicate that parties that use Islam as their guiding principles will win several seats in the new parliament. And thus, cue broad statements claiming that Egypt is now on a decline and that it's very likely that Egypt will soon become a hardline Islam government and abandon democracy entirely.
Finally, after an attack against the United Kingdom embassy in Iran, ostensibly by students and concerned citizens protesting the United Kingdom, the UK expelled the Iranian ambassadors in the UK and accsed the Iranian government of complicity in the attack. France recalled their ambassador from Iran for consultation, and Norway closed their embassy in Iran after the attack. (Comparisons to the embassy crisis for the United States are swift for columnists there.)
Domestically, the "Occupy" movement runs into difficulty when trying to recruit people who have experienced occupation or who are experiencing occupation because they're not talking about those occupations. Which is a problem - although the problem of cities spending lots of money to evict the nonviolent movement as they continue to close down services for the poor and homeless is one that should also be highlighted, if only in a "Priorities, huh?" kind of way.
Also, an open letter to the police forces to remind them that doing their job does not necessarily mean following the orders they receive.
Senators in the United States Congress are inserting language into the Defense Appropriations bill that would allow the military tribunal, rendition, and detention system to operate inside and outside the United States against anyone the military deemed to need that system. And, having done so, they passed the bill that contained all of that language inside.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services issued new rules today for what qualifies as expenses private insurance companies can count as expenditures toward their required medical loss ratio - the part of the PPACA that requires 80 (or 85) percent of premium income taken in by insurers be spent on actual care for their policy holders. Elsewhere, the continued drive for austerity and budget cuts has lawmakers raiding monies set aside for PPACA to pay for more immediate spending needs.
Arizona lawmakers are again taking immigration issues into their own hands and saying they will build and maintain their own border fence between the state and Mexico, believing that current federal policy on the border is ineffective.
Wall Street begins to reap the whirlwind of their action, with cuts and job layoffs at their own finance houses and firms, as their incessant search for psychopathic tendencies to lead their companies and the policies that followed that destroyed and concentrated wealth undercut the rest of the people that are a necessary support structure in their economy, and then prevailed upon the central banks to lend them money at below-market rates, which they have since profited off of.
Mr. Herman Cain, having been struck by a scandal or two involving an extramarital affair, has decided that he's going to get out in front of the next scandal by admitting to a long-term friendship with a woman who claims that the friendship is actually a sexual affair. After this latest battery, Mr. Cain indicating he was suspending his campaign, which clears the way for the next challenger to try and take on Mitt Romney for the candidacy. (Not that conservative media columnists and establishments want Mitt Romney as the candidate, for several reasons ranging from "he's too much like Obama" to "he's nothing like Obama, but also nothing like the candidate we want.") For those whom Mr. Cain is the Black Savior of Conservatism, personal attacks and victim-discrediting and making out the accusers to be "gold-diggers" is the order of the day.
Education is going back to the building blocks - quite explicitly, as unit blocks and building / play programs help to give children the unstructured play and social tools that their overly-academic preschools and kindergartens are not providing. And for those studying for advanced degrees, therapy dogs are helping law students de-stress around their examination periods.
In technology, the latest iTunes update finally fixes a vulnerability first reported to Apple in 2008, one that would have allowed places with Great Firewalls and control of the Internet to fakesign any program, spyware-infested or no, as a legitimate update to iTunes, and then, of course, control to the attacker and all that.
The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is on hold, as AT&T withdraws their offer to buy under the pressure of the FCC and the Justice Department. But as son as they can solve those objections, they'll be back, ready to purchase and crush a competitor.
While they squabble on that, the Justice Department wants you to snitch on your fellows if they remix IP into new forms, or otherwise use copyrighted material in ways likely covered by the First Amendment.
And there may very well be keylogging software on your Android phone. And once discovered, there were quite a few people, Senators included, who were not happy about this. So that leaves the company saying "Hey, sure we're grabbing large amounts of data from phones surreptitiously, but we protect it, encrypt it, and anonymize it before we pass it on to your phone carriers", which is not saying "We think this is an invasion of your privacy and that the carriers have perverted our software to do things it was not intended to do", which would have been a better response, were it honest.
Finally, a software programmer and his team developed a method of reassembling shredded papers...even very shredded papers. Which makes me think it might be a good idea to start including shredded documents in the categories of "things that require a search warrant for law enforcement or others to search and seize."
In opinions, the WSJ reviews a book that talks about sex-selection and cultural pressure to have sons rather than daughters and claims it's a fantastic reason to outlaw abortions everywhere, because all those daughters are being killed senselessly and need protection. And nothing to be said about the culture or the practices of, say, competing for the few women that are left that leads to mail-order brides. Why not take a look at sex selection from a perspective that doesn't have a pre-ordained conclusion about getting rid of abortion. [PDF]
And then, once you can tell the difference between a paper designed to foster discussion and one that's meant to draw its pre-determined conclusion, observe Mr. Sowell's column basically telling undocumented immigrants to go home and that the national government should zealously pursue them to deport them, no matter how long they have lived in the United States as an exercise.
The WSJ is more than happy to devote column inches to the idea that the oil and gas industry are industries where there are jobs to be had. They do neglect the part about the record profits that might be driving some of that...and the oil and gas industry's notable lack of safety, whether to their workers, the environment, or to the water supplies that fracking often makes flammable.
Elsewhere, Mr. Delingpole takes the holier-than-thou ground, openly suggesting that scientists who support the human-caused climate change hypothesis should just stick to their science and disprove their critics that way, instead of looking to expose the connections those critics may have to, say, the oil and gas industry. Which, of course, wouldn't be important at all in terms of sanctity of data. Mr. Botkin joins him on that high horse by claiming climate scientists insist that they are right and questioning them is folly, contrary to the scientific principle of continual testing of hypotheses. Mr. Stephens believes global warming, as a religion, is in its death throes, mostly because it couldn't generate enough revenue to implement its green policies, but also because it doesn't really have great leaders, according to him.
Ms. Noonan expresses contempt for the supercommitee's failure, disappointment that the President didn't order the Democrats to give the Republicans everything they wanted in the name of having a success, and raises eyebrows at the Republican candidates' continuing escalation of warlike rhetoric.
Regarding that failure, Mr. Krauthammer insists the Democrats are rejecting real plans to raise revenues through loophole closures in favor of tax rate increases that won't raise enough revenues by themselves. Surely, we could do both? Close loopholes and raise rates on those that can more than afford to pay it, so that there's plenty of new revenues to go around?
Mr. Williams unveils his latest Take That against the 99 percent - the income inequality they rail against is their own fault, because they buy J.K. Rowling books, basketball tickets to see Lebron James, and goods and stuff from Wal-Mart. So, he says, how do you stop those millions of people who create such awful income inequality? We point out that the concerns of the 99 percent aren't against Jo Rowling, Lebron James, or Sam Walton's kids - unless, that is, they're tax-dodgers or they take unethical actions to get themselves richer and pass the consequences onto employees or people with less income than they have. Or they make their money from usury, usurious fees, and arranging things so as to squeeze the most money from their suppliers/customers to enrich their own pockets, and then tax-dodge and otherwise refuse to pay their fair share of the social structures that help to make them wealthy and safe. It's not that people and corporations make money...it's what they do with that money (or don't do with that money) that causes problems. So no points for you, Mr. Williams, because you missed the premise entirely.
Mr. McGurn sees an opportunity for Mitt Romney, as a successful businessman, to capture white working-class voters by praising states whose economic policies are actively hostile to the Democratic base as exemplars. He does so with the suggestion that the Democrats and the President are abandoning the white working-class because of their hostility to the private sector, a hostility that Mr. Will believes is expressed in regulations and rules that make the private sector not know what their costs will be, and thus stop investing in their companies as much as possible, which means no new jobs. Elsewhere, the WSJ claims the Democrats of the National Labor Relations Board are union patsies and attempting to push through new rules that would rig the elections process in favor of unions by shortening the time that companies have to make their case against unions before the secret ballot is held, letting unions ply the workers and not giving the corporations enough time to react. Then again, the corporations have quite a bit of time to squash any attempts at union organization - after all, after a Wal-Mart store employees made their vote, the corporation closed their location. And then there's all the non-explicit anti-unionism that management can bring to bear at any time, be it finding an excuse to fire an overly union-friendly employee or other means. Mr. Brownfield focuses his ire on the EPA's new fuel efficiency mandates, believing it will price Americans into smaller cars that nobody wants and that will crumple and kill anyone who gets in a collision.
Mr. Sowell believes that going to the extremes is the way to capture nominations and elections, because standing for something will always attract voters compared to capturing "the center" who apparently stand for nothing at all.
Not that the Republicans are the only party of speculation. Mr. du Pont suggests that the President might want to ditch Joe Biden and take Hillary Clinton as his vice-president nominee, and Mr. Curl believes that President Obama doesn't really have the fire to campaign again, suggesting that he should step aside and let Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee of 2012.
Mr. Shapiro insults university students by claiming most of them are there to party and then pick up a useless degree, instead of following a calling for a job that requires university, then insults Occupy Wall Street by claiming most of the people in the Occupy movement are those same college students with useless degrees demonstrating so they can become more dependent on government. At least Ms. Neal confines her complaints to the focus on athletics and endowments instead of giving quality education as she indicates the Penn State scandal is an exemplar of a lot of things that are wrong with out collegiate institutions today.
In the "blinking clock is right twice a day" department, Ms. Malkin criticizes the current administration's lack of follow-through on their commitment to transparency in government, and while she tends to focus on why the logs don't show visits from people she doesn't like, she does point out that the administration has done more than a few things to be obscure. Although, her criticism that this administration touts itself as the most transparent ever maybe off the mark - this administration could very well be the most transparent, but that reflects on how dark the previous administrations have been.
Last out of opinions, because we haven't had some old-fashioned gay-bashing from the conservative columnists in a while, Ms. Kelley assumes that the school systems in states that have legal marriage for all will devote plenty of time to explaining to children the specific mechanics of gay sex, something for which they are clearly too innocent to learn about at high school age. And then there's all the other parts about how people who favor hetero-only marriages will be called bigots and subjected to discrimination. (And the article links to a post suggesting that marriages between two men or two women be called "gender-segregated" marriage, intending all the Unfortunate Implications thereof from racial segregation. The Fail there is head-deskingly awful.)
Last for tonight, a letter of note and admiration from one A. Einstein to M.K. Ghandi, and a letter from Dr. Stephen Hawking about the presence of equations for time travel.
Speaking of libraries, Warner Brothers has decided that they will prevent libraries and other rental companies from getting the latest theatrical release film on the day it goes into stores, and that libraries and rental companies will be forced to purchase copies that feature only the film and no subtitles. Because, apparently, we're cutting into their market with all the people in an economic disadvantage that can't afford their full-featured disc in the stores that have it on hold at the library. The "rental" discs thing? Makes me less likely to buy your movie disc, because it means I judge the movie solely on the movie - and if the movie wasn't good enough, the special features will never get seen - they could have meant a sale, if only you had let me watch them.
Out in the world today, Iceland went bankrupt in the banking crash, and then disappeared off the news radar. Perhaps because they successfully managed to re-wrest control of the country from the banks and their paid politicians...through the drafting and creation of a new Constitution.
Pakistani officials are outraged at a NATO airstrike, launched from Afghanistan, that killed 24 soldiers. And the airstrikes that kill children in Afghanistan continue, because of the apparent desensitization of the American public to the horrors of war.
Did we mention as well that the United States attempted to stop the ban of cluster bombs, preferring to have them merely regulated, and joining with China and Russia in their push? Despite obvious examples of the harm that cluster munitions can cause, both when they explode properly and when they sit as unexploded ordnance?
The orderly withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq continues, with the Saddam-palace-turned-military-base Camp Victory turned over to Iraqi forces, and several other bases packing up and rolling out. Cue worries and insistence that Iran is gaining influence in Iraq (additional example saying that Iraq's military are meeting with Iran's Revolutionary Guard) and will soon subvert it from a Western-friendly environment to an Iran-friendly one, despite assurances from the Vice-President that Iraq can stand by itself.
Upon their return, soldiers may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder...and now, we find out, so may many of the dogs that are used.
A report from the United Nations accuses Syrian military forces of attacking, killing, torturing, and raping children in a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.
Tunisian students favoring a more hard-line Islam clashed with more secular students over gender integration and costume.
Elections in Egypt! Early results indicate that parties that use Islam as their guiding principles will win several seats in the new parliament. And thus, cue broad statements claiming that Egypt is now on a decline and that it's very likely that Egypt will soon become a hardline Islam government and abandon democracy entirely.
Finally, after an attack against the United Kingdom embassy in Iran, ostensibly by students and concerned citizens protesting the United Kingdom, the UK expelled the Iranian ambassadors in the UK and accsed the Iranian government of complicity in the attack. France recalled their ambassador from Iran for consultation, and Norway closed their embassy in Iran after the attack. (Comparisons to the embassy crisis for the United States are swift for columnists there.)
Domestically, the "Occupy" movement runs into difficulty when trying to recruit people who have experienced occupation or who are experiencing occupation because they're not talking about those occupations. Which is a problem - although the problem of cities spending lots of money to evict the nonviolent movement as they continue to close down services for the poor and homeless is one that should also be highlighted, if only in a "Priorities, huh?" kind of way.
Also, an open letter to the police forces to remind them that doing their job does not necessarily mean following the orders they receive.
Senators in the United States Congress are inserting language into the Defense Appropriations bill that would allow the military tribunal, rendition, and detention system to operate inside and outside the United States against anyone the military deemed to need that system. And, having done so, they passed the bill that contained all of that language inside.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services issued new rules today for what qualifies as expenses private insurance companies can count as expenditures toward their required medical loss ratio - the part of the PPACA that requires 80 (or 85) percent of premium income taken in by insurers be spent on actual care for their policy holders. Elsewhere, the continued drive for austerity and budget cuts has lawmakers raiding monies set aside for PPACA to pay for more immediate spending needs.
Arizona lawmakers are again taking immigration issues into their own hands and saying they will build and maintain their own border fence between the state and Mexico, believing that current federal policy on the border is ineffective.
Wall Street begins to reap the whirlwind of their action, with cuts and job layoffs at their own finance houses and firms, as their incessant search for psychopathic tendencies to lead their companies and the policies that followed that destroyed and concentrated wealth undercut the rest of the people that are a necessary support structure in their economy, and then prevailed upon the central banks to lend them money at below-market rates, which they have since profited off of.
Mr. Herman Cain, having been struck by a scandal or two involving an extramarital affair, has decided that he's going to get out in front of the next scandal by admitting to a long-term friendship with a woman who claims that the friendship is actually a sexual affair. After this latest battery, Mr. Cain indicating he was suspending his campaign, which clears the way for the next challenger to try and take on Mitt Romney for the candidacy. (Not that conservative media columnists and establishments want Mitt Romney as the candidate, for several reasons ranging from "he's too much like Obama" to "he's nothing like Obama, but also nothing like the candidate we want.") For those whom Mr. Cain is the Black Savior of Conservatism, personal attacks and victim-discrediting and making out the accusers to be "gold-diggers" is the order of the day.
Education is going back to the building blocks - quite explicitly, as unit blocks and building / play programs help to give children the unstructured play and social tools that their overly-academic preschools and kindergartens are not providing. And for those studying for advanced degrees, therapy dogs are helping law students de-stress around their examination periods.
In technology, the latest iTunes update finally fixes a vulnerability first reported to Apple in 2008, one that would have allowed places with Great Firewalls and control of the Internet to fakesign any program, spyware-infested or no, as a legitimate update to iTunes, and then, of course, control to the attacker and all that.
The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is on hold, as AT&T withdraws their offer to buy under the pressure of the FCC and the Justice Department. But as son as they can solve those objections, they'll be back, ready to purchase and crush a competitor.
While they squabble on that, the Justice Department wants you to snitch on your fellows if they remix IP into new forms, or otherwise use copyrighted material in ways likely covered by the First Amendment.
And there may very well be keylogging software on your Android phone. And once discovered, there were quite a few people, Senators included, who were not happy about this. So that leaves the company saying "Hey, sure we're grabbing large amounts of data from phones surreptitiously, but we protect it, encrypt it, and anonymize it before we pass it on to your phone carriers", which is not saying "We think this is an invasion of your privacy and that the carriers have perverted our software to do things it was not intended to do", which would have been a better response, were it honest.
Finally, a software programmer and his team developed a method of reassembling shredded papers...even very shredded papers. Which makes me think it might be a good idea to start including shredded documents in the categories of "things that require a search warrant for law enforcement or others to search and seize."
In opinions, the WSJ reviews a book that talks about sex-selection and cultural pressure to have sons rather than daughters and claims it's a fantastic reason to outlaw abortions everywhere, because all those daughters are being killed senselessly and need protection. And nothing to be said about the culture or the practices of, say, competing for the few women that are left that leads to mail-order brides. Why not take a look at sex selection from a perspective that doesn't have a pre-ordained conclusion about getting rid of abortion. [PDF]
And then, once you can tell the difference between a paper designed to foster discussion and one that's meant to draw its pre-determined conclusion, observe Mr. Sowell's column basically telling undocumented immigrants to go home and that the national government should zealously pursue them to deport them, no matter how long they have lived in the United States as an exercise.
The WSJ is more than happy to devote column inches to the idea that the oil and gas industry are industries where there are jobs to be had. They do neglect the part about the record profits that might be driving some of that...and the oil and gas industry's notable lack of safety, whether to their workers, the environment, or to the water supplies that fracking often makes flammable.
Elsewhere, Mr. Delingpole takes the holier-than-thou ground, openly suggesting that scientists who support the human-caused climate change hypothesis should just stick to their science and disprove their critics that way, instead of looking to expose the connections those critics may have to, say, the oil and gas industry. Which, of course, wouldn't be important at all in terms of sanctity of data. Mr. Botkin joins him on that high horse by claiming climate scientists insist that they are right and questioning them is folly, contrary to the scientific principle of continual testing of hypotheses. Mr. Stephens believes global warming, as a religion, is in its death throes, mostly because it couldn't generate enough revenue to implement its green policies, but also because it doesn't really have great leaders, according to him.
Ms. Noonan expresses contempt for the supercommitee's failure, disappointment that the President didn't order the Democrats to give the Republicans everything they wanted in the name of having a success, and raises eyebrows at the Republican candidates' continuing escalation of warlike rhetoric.
Regarding that failure, Mr. Krauthammer insists the Democrats are rejecting real plans to raise revenues through loophole closures in favor of tax rate increases that won't raise enough revenues by themselves. Surely, we could do both? Close loopholes and raise rates on those that can more than afford to pay it, so that there's plenty of new revenues to go around?
Mr. Williams unveils his latest Take That against the 99 percent - the income inequality they rail against is their own fault, because they buy J.K. Rowling books, basketball tickets to see Lebron James, and goods and stuff from Wal-Mart. So, he says, how do you stop those millions of people who create such awful income inequality? We point out that the concerns of the 99 percent aren't against Jo Rowling, Lebron James, or Sam Walton's kids - unless, that is, they're tax-dodgers or they take unethical actions to get themselves richer and pass the consequences onto employees or people with less income than they have. Or they make their money from usury, usurious fees, and arranging things so as to squeeze the most money from their suppliers/customers to enrich their own pockets, and then tax-dodge and otherwise refuse to pay their fair share of the social structures that help to make them wealthy and safe. It's not that people and corporations make money...it's what they do with that money (or don't do with that money) that causes problems. So no points for you, Mr. Williams, because you missed the premise entirely.
Mr. McGurn sees an opportunity for Mitt Romney, as a successful businessman, to capture white working-class voters by praising states whose economic policies are actively hostile to the Democratic base as exemplars. He does so with the suggestion that the Democrats and the President are abandoning the white working-class because of their hostility to the private sector, a hostility that Mr. Will believes is expressed in regulations and rules that make the private sector not know what their costs will be, and thus stop investing in their companies as much as possible, which means no new jobs. Elsewhere, the WSJ claims the Democrats of the National Labor Relations Board are union patsies and attempting to push through new rules that would rig the elections process in favor of unions by shortening the time that companies have to make their case against unions before the secret ballot is held, letting unions ply the workers and not giving the corporations enough time to react. Then again, the corporations have quite a bit of time to squash any attempts at union organization - after all, after a Wal-Mart store employees made their vote, the corporation closed their location. And then there's all the non-explicit anti-unionism that management can bring to bear at any time, be it finding an excuse to fire an overly union-friendly employee or other means. Mr. Brownfield focuses his ire on the EPA's new fuel efficiency mandates, believing it will price Americans into smaller cars that nobody wants and that will crumple and kill anyone who gets in a collision.
Mr. Sowell believes that going to the extremes is the way to capture nominations and elections, because standing for something will always attract voters compared to capturing "the center" who apparently stand for nothing at all.
Not that the Republicans are the only party of speculation. Mr. du Pont suggests that the President might want to ditch Joe Biden and take Hillary Clinton as his vice-president nominee, and Mr. Curl believes that President Obama doesn't really have the fire to campaign again, suggesting that he should step aside and let Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee of 2012.
Mr. Shapiro insults university students by claiming most of them are there to party and then pick up a useless degree, instead of following a calling for a job that requires university, then insults Occupy Wall Street by claiming most of the people in the Occupy movement are those same college students with useless degrees demonstrating so they can become more dependent on government. At least Ms. Neal confines her complaints to the focus on athletics and endowments instead of giving quality education as she indicates the Penn State scandal is an exemplar of a lot of things that are wrong with out collegiate institutions today.
In the "blinking clock is right twice a day" department, Ms. Malkin criticizes the current administration's lack of follow-through on their commitment to transparency in government, and while she tends to focus on why the logs don't show visits from people she doesn't like, she does point out that the administration has done more than a few things to be obscure. Although, her criticism that this administration touts itself as the most transparent ever maybe off the mark - this administration could very well be the most transparent, but that reflects on how dark the previous administrations have been.
Last out of opinions, because we haven't had some old-fashioned gay-bashing from the conservative columnists in a while, Ms. Kelley assumes that the school systems in states that have legal marriage for all will devote plenty of time to explaining to children the specific mechanics of gay sex, something for which they are clearly too innocent to learn about at high school age. And then there's all the other parts about how people who favor hetero-only marriages will be called bigots and subjected to discrimination. (And the article links to a post suggesting that marriages between two men or two women be called "gender-segregated" marriage, intending all the Unfortunate Implications thereof from racial segregation. The Fail there is head-deskingly awful.)
Last for tonight, a letter of note and admiration from one A. Einstein to M.K. Ghandi, and a letter from Dr. Stephen Hawking about the presence of equations for time travel.
