Electric Josh

Goodridge
Read this before complaining about or celebrating the MA gay marriage decision. Come on, you're smart. Read it. (Or read this if you're lazy.)

"Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."

My own take is that my lovely wife and this cute baby and I are about suffer a horrible and heartbreaking divorce, because it's now obviously illegal to be married unless you're gay. Ooo, those damned dirty gays won the culture wars! Curses!
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Ivins
Molly Ivins: "It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad president. Grownups can do that, you know. You can decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred."
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Diamonds
Goodbye diamond monopoly. Turns out some dude has figured out how to make diamonds using chemical vapor deposition for $5 per carat. (Chemical vapor deposition is really, really easy. They used to let undergrads run the machines at UVM.) Now instead of costing two months' salary (are they kidding?!) and causing the severing of the hands of one or more Sierra Leonean children, diamonds can now be had nearly for free. Good. The diamond industry is amazingly scummy. Here's some background. Do your own google search. Update: The original article, in Wired. Highlight:

So, for now, Clarke is sticking with cultured. But in the end, he insists, it won't really matter. "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what's she gonna choose?" he demands. "Does she care if it's synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite your ass if she chooses the smaller one."

Diamonds aren't scarce, and have always been nearly worthless. Now they're even more nearly worthless. Nice.
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Security
Given how secure world-class security really is, remind me never, ever to run for President. The New Zealand Herald: "A lone anti-war protester has dodged tight security and scaled the gates of Buckingham Palace on the eve of United States President George W Bush's state visit to Britain." Yikes.
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