Current events

Uncomfortable truth of the day: The further away we get from 1984, the closer it seems:

A Texas high school student is being suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip.

Well, what do you know? I agree with PETA for once:

It’s a White House tradition with a century and a half of history behind it, but PETA is asking the White House to skip it this year.

A truly great "Take this job and shove it!" moment:

BANGOR, Maine — Citing a longstanding battle with upper management over journalistic practices at their Bangor TV stations, news co-anchors Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio announced their resignations at the end of Tuesday’s 6 p.m. newscast.

Actually, I haven't noticed this much myself:

In the hours after Sandy made landfall, noted online wits doffed their aloof masks and hung their heads in solidarity; those who seemed insufficiently somber got chastised. The key word of the storm became hunker—a term that nearly oozes honey glaze and cocoa. “Much of the seen-it-all and isn’t-it-dumb seemed to leak out of my Twitter stream,” the media critic David Carr wrote a couple of days later.

Hey, let's see if I can tick off everybody today. First off, Ronald Reagan was right, you know:

Israeli interceptors have eviscerated the Iranian-supplied Hamas missiles heading for population centers. Chalk up an important strategic and technological win for missile defense.

Megan McCardle on men and women and "noticing inflation":

What could possibly go wrong?

Two sex therapists have sparked outrage in the Netherlands by calling for 'virtual' child porn to be legalised to relieve the urges of paedophiles.

I suspect this is right, so let's have no Twinkie panics, no Ding Dong withdrawal symptions, no Wonder Bread riots:

Hostess Brands, the maker of the iconic Twinkies snack cakes, may find a buyer when it heads to bankruptcy court today to liquidate the 82-year-old company, the company’s CEO says.

Finally one of them says in public what they all think in private:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that Congress should stop placing legal limits on the amount of money the government can borrow and effectively lift the debt limit to infinity.

On Bloomberg TV, “Political Capital” host Al Hunt asked Geithner if he believes “we ought to just eliminate the debt ceiling.”

Well this is a cheery thought -- human intelligence "peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline every since":