One hundred years from today, somewhere in the heart of Texas, or Alabama or Virginia the satanic priest officiating a ritual orgy will rise from the tangle of arms, legs and exposed pudenda and announce to all gathered: “Hey, did you guys realize that it was 100 years ago today that the institution of marriage was re-defined and Western Civilization began it’s irreversible collapse?” That’s because one hundred years before one hundred years from now is today, and today is the day that the Iowa Supreme court refused to acknowledge the inherent bigotry that informs  the nefarious act of treating gay people like everyone else. In so acting, the justices of the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled that: “If straight couples can marry… WTF, why not the gays, too? After all, it’ll only lead to the collapse of Western Civilization.”

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The University of Maryland has scrapped the scheduled screening of a motion picture “talkie” because the film in question is a controversial one, being more geared to adults than kids. The film Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge is geared to adults in the sense that it is a parody of the Walt Disney Series Pirates of the Caribbean that toys with genre convention and challenges audiences “horizon of expectations” (or what German literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss termed Erwartungshorizont) by being pornographic and all. And this has proved just too much for the Maryland State Legislature:

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller indicated he would vote for the budget amendment, giving substantial backing to the threat of denying the university tens of millions of dollars in state funding.
On the Senate floor, Sen. Andrew P. Harris, a Republican from Baltimore and Harford counties, suggested amending the state’s annual budget to deny any funding to a higher education institution that allows a public screening of a film marketed as a XXX-rated adult film, unless it is part of an official academic course. [A particularly awesome, official academic course, to be sure –ed.]

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Last week we debunked the myth that if every man in the PRC Armed Forces jumped at the same time, it would tilt the Earth’s axis of rotation (fact: since the Earth already rotates on as  axis that is tiled 23.5° from center, the act would actually straighten the planet’s rotation). In this week’s installment of our long running series “China Myths,” Stinque takes a look at the widely held belief that were China to dump all its U.S. Treasury bills onto the market at once, it would eviscerate the dollar and devastate the U.S. economy. This long held belief is, in fact, a myth. Allow Princeton economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to explain:

In the early years of this decade, China began running large trade surpluses and also began attracting substantial inflows of foreign capital. If China had had a floating exchange rate — like, say, Canada — this would have led to a rise in the value of its currency, which, in turn, would have slowed the growth of China’s exports.

But China chose instead to keep the value of the yuan in terms of the dollar more or less fixed. To do this, it had to buy up dollars as they came flooding in. As the years went by, those trade surpluses just kept growing — and so did China’s hoard of foreign assets.

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