The Supreme Court turned down a challenge to Don't Ask Don't Tell today, a decision Ben Smith called "a win for an administration that's promised gay and lesbian allies it will end "don't ask, don't tell" on its own timetable." That's an interesting way to put it. To me a "win" on DADT would be more like, you know, Obama actually abolishing it. See also. What on Earth is the holdup here?

I've decided to radically alter every aspect of my life from diet to exercise to procrastinative laziness, beginning today. Let's start with some blogging.

* I'm with Alex Greenberg: why were judges ever allowed to rule on cases concerning major campaign contributors? For that matter, why are jurisdictions still electing their judges? It's nuts.

* Also on the legal front: I'm beginning to suspect that "judicial activism" is just an empty buzzword designed to discredit court decisions the right-wing doesn't like.

* Almost seventy percent of Americans support allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military. What the hell is Obama waiting for?

* George Dvorsky on the top ten existential movies of all time. (Thanks, Bill!) It's a good list, but when your top ten list of existentialist film is missing The Seventh Seal it's time to consider whether limiting yourself to English-language film was a wise choice.

* Blogging wasteland: According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled. (Thanks, Steve!)

* Kids today have it easy; in my day, we had send professors corrupted files we'd made ourselves. And what happened to pretending to forget to attach the document? Too low-tech for you?

* 'Manufactured Controversy': A new report by Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of groups opposed to David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" and similar measures, argues that the entire movement is built on false premises and is designed to attack higher education.

* Enjoyed this from Boing Boing: lecture from Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky on evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality, arguing by analogy to sickle cell that schizophrenia is the hypertrophic result of genes that in isolation reward their holder with feverous religious certainty. I've become increasingly skeptical of attempts to map every feature of human existence onto genomic evolutionary pressure—and Sapolsky's lecture is much more speculative than empirical—but it's an interesting notion.

Due to various academic commitments, this blog has been very Blogspot Nights lately. I'm not happy about it but it may not change soon—once my comics class is over I have a few weeks off before work at [Undisclosed Location] starts up again.

Let's struggle onward together.

* Daily Kos has a compilation of the obsessive hate directed from Bill O'Reilly towards Dr. George Tiller for the crime of practicing medicine. O'Reilly's response tonight on the air was essentially that Tiller had it coming.

* Birthers overrun government transparency program.

* Petraeus says the U.S. violated the Geneva Conventions, while General Ricardo Sanchez calls for a Truth Commission. More from Attackerman.

* Barack Obama has declared June LGBT Pride Month. Hey, how great! It's like he's almost actually taking action! Call me when you're repealed DADT.

* Oprah and pseudoscience. Via Kevin Drum.

* The accusation that Sonia Sotomayor has—as The New York Times uncritically put it—a "race-based approach to the law" is turning out to be one of the most reality-detached arguments to make it into the mainstream since Saddam’s mushroom clouds. All the relevant evidence—all of it—proves how false that accusation is.

* Franken and Coleman went to the Minnesota Supreme Court today, and Coleman got smacked.

* And atheist children will kill you for candy.

Daily Show giving Obama much-deserved hell over DADT as we speak.

Nightime links.

* Change we can believe in: 'Obama Administration Set to Fire Its First Gay Military Linguist.' Obama's lack of leadership on gay issues, DADT first and foremost, is really startling—especially given that a majority of Americans already believe DADT should be repealed.

* At one point news of a new Ron Moore sci-fi pilot would have gotten me very excited; I was so young, once. Airlock Alpha says Virtuality most likely won't make it to series.

* Lots of things have been said about A-Rod, but this pitch tipping thing seems like a big, big deal if true. Black Sox scandal big.

* The Complete Book of Space Travel.

* As any nerd can tell you, there's a new Star Trek movie opening this weekend. io9 has your basic primer, while Slate prefers a history of the Klingon language. If you're looking to bone up on Trek, Memory Alpha might be your best bet.

* The MPAA thinks educators shouldn't get a DMCA exemption to use decryption software to show clips in class. Instead, they should use a camcorder to tape the clip off the TV. What could be more easy?

In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?