The state of the culture

This weird, weird world just got a lot weirder:

Hercules and Leo, who are currently used for biomedical experiments at Stony Brook University on Long Island, were granted habeas corpus by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe.

Happy National Pot Smokers' Day! Actually, it's probably illegal to celebrate it here, so maybe just dream about that beer you can now have at an Indiana State Fair concert.

I'm in a contrarian mood today, so this post got my day off to a good start: Stop forcing your kids to share:

Of course we want our children to get along with other people, and making them share their toys with friends seems like a step on that road.

But maybe there are other virtues we are stifling with this whole forced sharing business.

Those who predicted that changing the definition of marriage would open the floodgates to just about anything the human mind could imagine were dismissed as reactionary, alarmist troglodytes. The back and forth has only intestified since the greater Indiana RFRA freakout, and progressives feel a lot safer intesifying the vilification of the conservatives' warnings.

It's difficult enough to find good, thoughtful articles about the great RFRA freakout that try to look at both the discrimination and refligious aspects, let alone one that tries to put the whole issue in historical and constitutional perspective.

Want to see a really good case of cognitive dissonance? Just ask one of those Gaia Movement freaks to read this:

Stupid kids have been doing stupid things since the beginning of time. There should be a better way to handle it than making stupidity a crime:

The times, the are a changin':

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — A newly revised tattoo policy that will remove the limit on the number and size of soldiers' tattoos is coming very soon, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said Wednesday.

Sad but true: We've allowed our neighborhoods to become so dangerous we can't just let our kids be kids anymore.

I'm a new father. Like many new parents, I've been giving a lot of thought to how I want to raise my child. And just as this became my life's primary mission, there emerged this phenomenon of "free range kids." An anti-helicopter parenting movement was just what I wanted.

And the latest gatherings of lunatic, dangerous gun nuts can be found in . . . the Ivy League?

In between completing problem sets, writing code, organizing hackathons, worrying about internships and building solar cars, a group of MIT students make their way to the athletic center, where they stand side-by-side, load their guns and fire away.