Undernews: June 28, 2013

How the war on education has made our classrooms intellectual deserts
"Life is not a multiple-choice test, and the answers to life’s most important questions are not A, B, C, or D"

Snowden hid documents in case something happens to him

Supreme Court strikes down key DOMA provision

NSA is not only bad, it's not very good at it

Possible record dead zone predicted for Gulf of Mexico

Stats: Younger Americans' library habits

How eroding soils are darkening our future

NSA stealing data from under ocean telecommunications cables

Meet the Press uses NSA connected lobbyist without revealing it

CNN - NSA leaker Edward Snowden is in the transit zone at the international airport in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin says. "He is a transit passenger in the transit zone and is still there now," Putin said. "Mr. Snowden is a free man. The sooner he selects his final destination point, the better both for us and for himself." Putin said Snowden's arrival in Russia was "completely unexpected."

POGO- : 99% of Booz Allen's revenue comes from government contract

How your smart meter can spy on you

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leaders announced that missionaries will do less door-to-door proselytizing, and instead, use the Internet to recruit new church members.

Ideas from the Great Depression on how to survive the Great Recession

Supreme Court ruled in favor of Chamber of Commerce 13 out of 16 times this term

Supreme Court squeezes guts out of workers' civil rights law

This week's court actions

Morning line
Democrats stand to pick up 3 governor seats; could gain 3 more. GOP could gain two. Details

Quotes
I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on. -- James Thurber

Pocket paradigm
The frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Al Graib and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocaust's lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it. - Sam Smith

Where to buy Wendy Davis shoes

Obama's eco plan seems to support fracking

Obama ducking fracking studies

Markey wins in Massachusetts

Generation gap
70% of 18-34s think Snowden did a good thing. Only 47% of those 55 and up

Collapse of liberalism
Only 39% of Republicans support spying on Americans, while 58% of Democrats do.

Infrequently asked questions
Practising medicine without a license is illegal in every state with prison terms of one to five years. Why aren't GOP legislators in the House and the Texas legislature liable for criminal prosecution given the limits they are pushing on abortions?

Obama said, "I urged Congress to come up with a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change." Does he also want, for example, a bipartisan market-based solution to cancer?

Local heroes
13 hour filibuster kills Texas abortion bill

Religion
Official word: The body of Christ is not and cannot be gluten-free

Tom Lehrer's Vatican Rag

Entropy update
Socialite reveals how she and her peers spend more than $200,000 every year on gowns, party tickets and male escorts

Media
We recently cited an article about the NY Times overuse of the term "famously." It also prefers to have people "[ick over" food rather than eat it.

Spygate
Ben Cohen, co-founder of the Ben & Jerry's ice cream brand, called both Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden "incredibly courageous patriots" during an AMA on Reddit

New Yorker reports that NSA is 3 times size of CIA, with one third of the U.S.’s entire intelligence budget

Best new reason DC should become a state
@Marion Barry Hey, at least we're not as crazy as Texas legislature last night. If TX can be a state, after that spectacle, surely we can too.

Science
A self-authenticated report from a Yealand Estate, a farm in New Zealand, indicates that playing classical music induces hens to lay larger eggs

DOMA
@Harpers - Amount the U.S. wedding industry would gain each year if gays wed at the same rate as straights: $17,000,000,000

Climate change
40 percent of Americans say global warming is a major threat, compared to 54 percent of those surveyed from other nations by Pew

Infrequently asked questions
Practicing medicine without a license is illegal in every state with prison terms of one to five years. Why aren't GOP legislators in the House and the Texas legislature liable for criminal prosecution given the limits they are pushing on abortions?

Obama said, "I urged Congress to come up with a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change." Does he also want, for example, a bipartisan market-based solution to cancer?

Quotes
The book has existed in its present format--essentially sheaves of paper between a binding of some sort--for over two millennia. It has done so because it is a perfect artifact of information technology. It is portable, permanent, nearly indestructible, easily shared. It suffers no damage near magnetic fields, and when opened its boot-up time is instantaneous--just open it and you are reading; close it and reopen and you are reading immediately once again. It uses no electricity and never crashes. When you are reading its pages, they never go blue or black and you never get a message "fatal error; system shutting down." - Lawrence G. Smith, author of Cesare Pavese And America

Pocket paradigm
The amount of homeland security we actually need is inversely related to how good our foreign policy is. - Sam Smith

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