The head of MSF's psychotherapy on Nauru reports that five years of enforced pointless idleness have made the refugees more or less suicidally depressed. They say that parts of them are already dead.

US citizens: file a comment against the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.

Here's the comment I sent:

The Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline is likely to do major local damage to water supplies for wildlife and for humans that live near the lakes and rivers it comes in contact with.

Even worse, it will rush the whole world towards global climate mayhem by accelerating global heating. Several years ago, scientists told us we must leave 80% of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. Based on newer results in climate modeling, that figure has probably increased. The first fuels to leave in the ground are the highly polluting ones, in particular tar sands oil.

Your Environmental Impact Statement is a sham and based on flawed data. You must do a proper, honest study, taking account of all the dangers; it will surely demonstrate that this pipeline should not be built.

Postal bomb sender Sayoc had his house taken by fraudulent foreclosure in 2009, by the bank owned mainly by Steven Mnuchin.

Obama and Holder protected the bank (and other banks too) from prosecution for this, and supporters of the bullshitter helped protect it later.

Breathing polluted air is killing 7 million people a year and harming billions more.

The unrealistic picture of sex presented in most porn harms men as well as women in their sex lives (though in different ways). Their sexual miseducation starts in adolescence, but many never learn better.

Our society's taboo cuts adolescents off from any way to learn about sexual relationships and lovemaking other than from porn and from other confused adolescents. Everyone learns the hard way, often slowly, and in many cases learns bad lessons.

The more effective the taboo, the deeper the ignorance. In 18th century France, teenage girls of good family emerged totally sexually innocent from education in a convent. Totally innocent and totally exploitable (see Dangerous Liaisons).

Contrast this with Marquesan society, where adolescents are not kept ignorant by a taboo on sex. They have various relationships with lovers of their choice, so they have many opportunities to see what pleases and what doesn't. Any one lover can please them more, or please them less, but can't mislead them — they have standards for comparison. In that society, even adolescents understand lovemaking better than a lot of American adults.

Inevitably, everyone starts out ignorant; the question is, how can society offer people a path which leads them to learn to do things well, rather than learning painfully to do them badly.