One of the things about being away for a week is that you come back with scads of shit to catch up on. Work looked like a conspiracy theorist had been sleeping in my office. Podcasts accumulated on my computer, and I'm listening to week-old updates about TV and other stuff that I have convinced myself I care about. And reading through the news is just gutshot after gutshot.
I'm not going to get into it (aside from the post I'll make in 2 seconds about this fucking Hillary ad), but it's worth drawing your attention to this article in the Times about the abysmal state of our public education system:

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

Years from now we'll be sitting around recounting the glory days of America and her once proud stature of the leader of the free world. Invariably, some fuckface will blame the GOP or the Demmycrats. They'll talk about how it was the wars or it was not stopping the outsourcing of labor or it was John Kerry's giant stupid face. But nobody's going to point out that it's the fact that our kids can barely fucking read and would stab each other in the face for Hannah Montana tickets while we're all sitting here feigning outrage over bullshit minutia. Read the article, please.