The Solipsist Reads the Paper! (So You Don't Have To)

A couple of interesting nuggest from today's paper.

As President Obama winds up his trip to Israel, he can boast at least one significant accomplishment: brokering a rapprochement between the governments of Israel and Turkey.  The two American allies had maintained a frosty relationship since an incident in 2010 when Israeli troops enforcing a naval blockade on the Gaza Strip boarded a Turkish vessel that was on a humanitarian mission.  Violence broke out, several people were killed, and the Turkish government broke off diplomatic relations with Israel.  At the urging of President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a formal apology to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan, who accepted the apology.  The two countries will once again exchange ambassadors.

What was interesting about the apology is that it occurred in a phone call that was made from. . .  a trailer.  One doesn't normally see such high-level diplomacy conducted from such a location--at least, diplomacy that doesn't involve Mexican drug cartels.  The trailer itself was at Ben Gurion airport.  Were the phones in Air Force One not working?

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Another article profiled Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, which is the primary organizational force behind the battle to forbid governmental recognition of same-sex marriage.  Brown is a Catholic who has already fathered eight--count 'em, eight!--children.  So, if we assume that one of the arguments against same-sex marriage is that the purpose of marriage is to produce children, I say that as long as we have dedicated procreators like Brian Brown, we have little to fear from a few gay marriages: He alone has already made up for the presumed barrenness of four to eight gay couples!

Also, has anyone considered the irony of the fact that the primary organization battling against the right to same-sex couples to wed is the National Organization for Marriage.  Orwell would be proud. 

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Finally, another front-page piece describes the dearth of female students in a number of New York City's most selective high schools.  How bad is the situation?  Well, at Stuyvesant High School, "Kathryn Rafailov, 16, a junior, said boys so dominated her square-dancing class that they had to pair off with one another."

Try to put aside for the moment the fact that Stuyvesant High School has a square-dancing class.  More troubling is the fact that a public high school is apparently OK with boys dosey-do-ing other boys!  Alert Brian Brown!