The Braindump Blog

🎶 Listening to From Zero by Linkin Park.

This is nu-metal gids Linkin Park’s first album in 7 years, and the first since the death by suicide of their previous lead co-singer, Chester Bennington.

In his place we see Emily “Get your screamy pants on” Armstrong, a decision that has been controversial with part of the fandom. I imagine some of it is the classic stupid anti-woke BS also known as sexism. But there is more to it than that. Apart from anything else, it’s quite a change, which always has to be an emotional process when the previous titleholder was so renowned and died so tragically). But, music-wise, I think it works well.

With older bands that I listened to in my youth, and still sound vaguely the same as they did back then, it’s always hard to tell how much my reaction is affected by nostalgia. But either way, I’m thoroughly enjoying the album. It’s not all that revolutionary, but it doesn’t need to be given the quality of their production in their early days. The band proves themselves as able to face a new day, despite all that happened before.

Whoops, another professional gets called out for inappropriate use of ChatGPT. This one is particularly ironic in that it was a ‘renowned expert on misinformation’.

He was giving $600-an-hour expert testimony to a court case involving a law regarding the ‘Use of Deep Fake Technology to Influence an Election’. Legal testimony of course often involves citing documents. Which this guy did. But unfortunately his citations were nothing other than made up hallucinations courtesy of ChatGPT 4o.

From the Stanford Daily:

The error occurred when he asked GPT-4o to write a short paragraph based on bullet points he had written. According to Hancock, he included “[cite]” as a placeholder to remind himself to add the correct citations. But when he fed the writing into GPT-4o, the AI model generated manufactured citations at each placeholder instead.

This of course is far from the first time something like this happened in court. Check your work, folk!

📚 Finished reading Depraved New World by John Crace.

John Crace is a political sketch writer for the Guardian This book brings together much of his lacerating, hilarious-for-as-long-as-you-don’t-remember-it’s-true work from covering the past few years of British politics.

The timespan featured encompasses Partygate, the subsequent demise of PM Boris Johnson, the rise of Liz Truss, the immediate fall of Liz Truss and the start of the Rishi Sunak era. So basically the story of the past few years as played out by “the psychodrama of the Tory leadership contests”.

It’s not going to make you feel any better about the inept way that our country has been governed in recent times. But maybe it’ll give you a resigned, hollow, despairing laugh about it.

TIL: John le Carre - famed author of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy amongst many others - apparently either invented the word, the spy context for, or popularised the use of, many of the words and phrases that we - and actual intelligence organisations - now use within that domain every day.

Here’s a list from his work, along with some definitions:

• Mole: a “deep-penetration” infiltrator, or inside agent.
• To come in from the cold: to return to normal life following a difficult period (such as an undercover assignment).
• Honey pot: seduction in order to gain information
• Pavement artists: agents skilled at blending in with the crowd or street scene to follow a target.
• Sweating: using special techniques to get a suspect to spill the beans
• Babysitter: a spy who remains out of sight in order to protect another
• The cousins: The CIA.
• The circus: MI6
• Scalphunters: those responsible for MI6’s dirty work: assassination, burglary, abduction etc/
• Lamplighter: a surveillance agent

Definitions taken from Merriam-Webster, Hindustan Times, Telegraph as well as the original Oregon Live article linked above.

OpenAI may be planning a ChatGPT Pro plan for $200 per month. Well, that’s quite a hike if true (albeit you might get access to fancier stuff).

Perhaps they’ve finally got to the point where losing vast amounts of money isn’t as tenable as it used to be.

OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down.

Well, that’s a little unnerving, for anyone who leans towards the AI doomer camp at least.

“When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time.”

“When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”

…

Furthermore, the model lied about behaving poorly, claiming to have no clue why something happened — while internally admitting to trying to “avoid detection”.

📚 Finished reading Michael Jackson’s Malt Whisky Companion by Michael Jackson.

(No, not that Michael Jackson.)

I’m cheating a bit to say I’ve finished reading this. Much of it is a reference guide to lots of different (mostly) single malt whiskies, with a bit of info as to their background, characteristics and an overall score. I did not plough through every page of that. It’s more a reference guide to help making future beverage decisions.

But the catalogue-style layout is pre and post-fixed with some information about whisky in general, which I got something out of by reading, particularly since I got a taste of a single malt that I particularly enjoyed, my tastes having already been narrowed down based on what I learned from Edinburgh’s Scotch Whisky Experience. Now at least I know what it is that I’m drinking and what sort of thing I would likely enjoy in future.

For future reference, a single malt whisky -at least as defined in the UK in the case of Scotch - is one that is:

• produced from malted barley.
• using pot still technology.
• all at one specific distillery.
• aged in oak barrels for at least 3 years.

It is allowed to consist of a mix of different whiskies, but they all must be from the same distillery.

A friend kindly informs me that if you’re a customer of O2, a common mobile phone carrier in the UK then as part of their “Priority” rewards program you can get a free year of Perplexity Pro, RRP £150.

It comes in the form of a unique voucher code. So if you’re not an O2er. but have a friend with an O2 account that doesn’t care about such things then you can pester them for their code to use for yourself.

Perplexity is an AI-LLM powered search engine. Primarily like a Google Search except it does the effort of reading the results of your query for you, distilling it into a chatbot like response you can ask about.

It has its own model or, with a pro account you can use those from companies like OpenAI, Claude et al. It’s the same kind of technology so if you have moral objections or accuracy concerns about LLMs in general then the same will apply here. Perplexity have certainly been in trouble for ingesting content that they shouldn’t have.

But one possible advantage it does have over its brethren is at least it is a bit more transparent about citing its sources rather than trying to hoard every last click for itself, in that it provides links to the source material it uses to formulate its answers for you, should you want to check if it’s telling the truth.

It feels like a topsy-turvy world we’re living in when it’s the US state authorities that are telling us to use end-to-end encrypted messenger services. Back in my youth their government tended to exude rather anti-encryption vibes, or at least anti any encryption that didn’t have a state-sponsored backdoor in it. A backdoor for the FBI is of course a backdoor for everyone who finds it, rendering the whole enterprise a bit pointless.

Which unfortunately has ended up with them (well, us) somewhat reaping what they sowed

Now the US FBI and CISA (“Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency”) are warning Americans to use encryption for their messages and phone calls. This appears to have been prompted by the discovery of a hack on their communications networks by Chinese hackers - probably the “Salt Typhoon” gang - which is “ongoing and likely larger in scale than previously understood”. Apparently it might take years to figure out exactly where they are and what they did - but at the very least:

“Specifically, we have identified that [Chinese government]-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders,” the FBI said in a statement issued with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency earlier this month.

So far, the hack is known to have affected major U.S. firms such as AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, U.S. and industry officials said.

Or, in a bit more detail:

The hackers generally accessed three types of information, the FBI official said.

One type has been call records, or metadata, showing the numbers that phones called and when. The hackers focused on records around the Washington, D.C., area, and the FBI does not plan to alert people whose phone metadata was accessed.

The second type has been live phone calls of some specific targets. The FBI official declined to say how many alerts it had sent out to targets of that campaign; the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC News in October that the FBI had informed that they had been targeted.

The third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track people’s communications. CALEA systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders. The FBI official declined to say whether any classified material was accessed.

Basically, it seem that they don’t know how deep the Chinese state (not to cast aspersions, but…) has gotten into the system. But if you’re using proper encryption then, to an extent, it might not matter quite so much. They might still see you’re sending messages depending on how exactly the service works, but not what they were.

“Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible,” Greene said.

So, for folk less pre-existingly digitally tin-foil hatted than myself, what is the practical upshot? Probably that you want to message people, and preferably call them, via end-to-end encrypted apps. That’s the recommendation from the US authorities.

Signal is the exemplar of this technology, being free, open-source, and very highly recommended by all manner of experts. But it’s also a network that relatively few people are all that engaged on - so WhatsApp is probably a more realistic option for most folk that also uses encryption by default. Both of those apps can handle text messages, photos and video calls in a securely encrypted manner.

If you’re an Android user messaging Android users, or an iOS user messaging iOS users then you’re probably also safe on the texting front from the point of view of encryption if using the default messages app. But as soon as you cross operating systems they revert to standard text messages which are absolutely not encrypted. So, much as it pains me to promote a Meta product, WhatsApp is probably a good bet for most as an encrypted app that appears to work on almost everything and almost everyone has heard of.

Lest us Britons somehow delude ourselves into thinking we’re safe, folks from our National Cyber Security Centre have also recently provided us some stark warnings.

In a speech at the NCSC’s London HQ, Horne, who took on the role in October, will point to “the aggression and recklessness of cyber-activity we see coming from Russia” and how “China remains a highly sophisticated cyber-actor, with increasing ambition to project its influence beyond its borders”.

“And yet, despite all this, we believe the severity of the risk facing the UK is being widely underestimated,” he will say.

It’s not only China raising the alert - but Russia as well. Earlier this year the NSCS and its allies uncovered a Russian military unit who had been “carrying out cyber attacks and digital sabotage” for at least a few years.

Only last month was one of our cabinet ministers warning that:

There is a danger that artificial intelligence “could be weaponised against us,” McFadden will warn, arguing that the UK is already engaged in the “daily reality” of a “cyberwar,” with hacking efforts coming in particular from Russia.

…

McFadden is expected to say that “Russia has targeted our media, our telecoms, our political and democratic institutions and our energy infrastructure,” and warn that “with a cyber-attack, Russia can turn the lights off for millions of people. It can shut down the power grids”.

The UK Government’s official “prepare for cyber-emergency advice” has the following suggested steps for us to take:

• Use strong passwords (especially for your email)
• Keep your software up to date
• Use 2 step verification.
• Use a password manager.
• Back up your data.

“The Real World” - Andrew Tate’s presumably vomitous $50-a-month “learning platform” which promises to teach you how to master the skill of “money making” - has been hacked. Yes, the institution formerly known as “Hustler’s University” has been exposed.

Well, OK, Tate says it hasn’t. But nonetheless data on around 800k usernames, 300k email addresses and a ton of messages that were extracted from their various servers was acquired by a group of anti-Tate hacktivists who shared it with various media publications, and indeed the internet at large via Distributed Denial of Secrets.

The hackers later went on to disrupt one of Tate’s streaming shows via “flooding it with emojis and symbols associated with feminist and LGBTQ+ communities”.

I can’t imagine many things less wholesome than reading the chat logs of Andrew Tate’s subscription-only online course, but there we go, they’re now available to all.

The logs are taken from the platform’s 221 public and 395 private chat servers, which are spread across a dozen “campuses.” According to the site’s metrics, it generates approximately $5,650,000 monthly. The data also includes 324,382 unique email addresses that appear to belong to users who were removed from the main database after they stopped paying their subscriptions.

They later also managed to get their hands on chats from staff servers, where it appears those in power were mostly complaining about grifters and engagement farmers. Who’d have thought those sort of characters would turn up in the Tate-o-sphere?

The chat logs include details about the inner workings of the organization; Tate’s conversations with site moderators; user concerns about widespread site abuse; members farming engagement; and lack of action on content moderation.

The email addresses have been added to have i been pwned so if you’re one of the unlucky ex-subscribers then you can find out if your personal details were leaked at the email level at least.

This isn’t the first evidence of a hack on his place of “learning”. In July, Cybernews reported finding a ton of publicly exposed data including nearly a million user accounts, email addresses and millions of messages. I’m not sure chancing upon a appallingly configured database is exactly hacking to be fair, but it has the same net effect. Despite Tate’s vehement and yet entirely untrue denials, time to re-add The Real World to the list of dubious institutions failing to take any care of the basic privacy and security of its users, as unsympathetic crowd as they may be to some.

As a reminder, Andrew Tate is a self-proclaimed misogynist who is currently on trial for several crimes including “rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.”

His “university” is also the only one I’ve seen where the first FAQ is “Is this program suitable for women?”. Despite the answer - which a cynic might claim has strong vibes of “YeS of Course! soMeOf my best friEnds aRe Women!?” - I can’t imagine it’s actually suitable for anyone.

I’m not saying The Owl is wrong, but this was a bit galling to be presented with earlier today

Truly phones are surveilling us too much when cartoons are capable of popping up to quantify how many bad life choices I made this year.

(Yes, knowing the context makes it a little less demoralising - I already know I’m bad at Spanish.)

New presumably terrible reality show just dropped. The life of Jacob Rees Mogg and family - “Meet the Rees-Moggs”. Just what you always wanted.

4 thoughts I always have when this sort of malarkey happens:

1. Please stop promoting the worst of the ghouls. Overly humanising those who espouse inhuman policies, rendering sympathetic those who lack sympathy, might not be the greatest idea unless done with extreme care.
2. On the other hand, keep ‘em busy with nonsense and maybe they’ll leave politics alone?
3. What type of twisted mind dreamt up the idea in the first place?
4. How long am I going to be able to resist watching it? (i.e. what type of twisted mind do I have)

I’ve no idea what the show is like to be fair. Perhaps it’ll be truly insightful and not at all cringe-worthy sycophancy. Perhaps.

📺 Watched season 7 of Young Sheldon.

This is the final season of Young Sheldon. Any fans of the Big Bang Theory with good memories might be able to guess something of the ending. There’s plenty of entertainment within, but it’s certainly not all fun and games for the Cooper family.

An older article from MSNBC explains why Elon Musk’s basic misunderstandings of free speech are a problem for all of us. Of course he’s not the only one who suffers from such delusions. And the dynamics of why this matters specifically in the Elon case have changed a whole lot since the era of the Twitter files in 2022 of course.

But as a refresher, the US First Amendment, like most parts of the Constitution, applies primarily to state action:

A private business no more violates the First Amendment by banning particular types of speech in its operations than I violate the First Amendment by not allowing particular types of speech in my home.

Privatised social networks aren’t able to violate it even if they wanted to.

And secondly, even if the First Amendment was relevant, then not everything that one could possibly imagine being posted online is covered by it. Some of the stuff that Musk was arguing at the time was being hidden in constitution-breaking ways included photos of Hunter Biden’s genitalia uploaded without his consent. It’s rather ludicrous to imagine that anyone has a protected right to see that. Personally, I’m very glad I do not.

That would be like arguing that someone who posts revenge porn to the internet has a First Amendment right to have it preserved for all to see.

In fact, in California where Twitter is headquartered, sharing photos of someone’s intimate body parts without their consent is explicitly illegal, covered under the revenge porn law, as well as it being against Twitter’s own policy. Of course Musk is free to rewrite Twitter’s policy as and when he wants to, so I’ve no idea if the latter is still true.

The British TV channel GB News - right-wing mouth-piece for the worst of Conservative/Reform lame ‘anti-woke’ culture-war-obsessed warriors - has taken a break from its massive cost cutting exercise in order to burn £100k converting its existing gender-neutral toilets in separate female and male facilities.

Probably because someone laughed at them on Twitter about having them as far as I can gather.

Per The Mirror:

…a source told this newspaper senior GB News figures were so infuriated by the “woke” bathrooms that they spent eye-watering sums to “fix” them.

I’m sure the country sighed in relief at their brave action. At least that’s £100k they can’t spend on making their inflammatory, offensive and inane programs I suppose.

Today is the big vote for our British Parliamentarians on whether we should introduce a law to allow for assisted dying.

Most of the British public are in favour of such a law in principle - 65% for, 13% against in a recent More In Common survey.

One surprising thing to me is that the support for such a law - not necessarily this particular law to be clear - in the British population at large doesn’t seem to be in any way partisan. At least according to a report from that survey More In Common conducted.

Or even all that demographically split for that matter.

Perhaps we found a miraculous issue that is certainly both emotionally and morally charged - but hasn’t descended into an unpleasant 50:50 culture war issue.

The importance of religion to someone seems to be amongst the biggest differentiators - the more religious you are, the more likely you are to oppose such a law. But even in this case more people in every category measured support rather than oppose the idea.

Some good work by Skeleton Claw:

From The Register:

A local Japanese government agency dedicated to preventing organized crime has apologized after experiencing an incident it fears may have led to a leak of personal information describing 2,500 people who reached out to it for consultation.

This is a particularly unfortunate hack given that organised crime gangs have something of a reputation for seeking revenge on anyone whom they might regard as disloyal or a threat to their impunity.

It happened as the result of one of the classic phishing exercises:

A staff member was using his work computer when he received a popup warning him his computer had been disabled and to call a number for support. He did so, followed the instructions, and unintentionally gave criminals remote access

The insatiable and unmet demand for GLP-1 medications is unlikely to decrease anytime soon. Semaglutide - branded versions of which include Ozempic and Wegovy - was the top selling drug in the US, with net sales of $14 billion last year.

Recent research from Shi et al suggest that around 137 million adults in the US have conditions that make them medically eligible for treatment with it. That would include folk who meet the current criteria for needing it to assist with diabetes, weight management or cardiovascular disease.

137 million people represents a little over a half of the estimate 250-million-ish adults in the US. Of that 137 million, around 15 million patients are currently estimated to be on a GLP-1.

There are signs in the research that GLP-1 drugs might help with a wide variety of other conditions. If they get approved for use beyond these three domains the number of course will only go up.

It was fun to learn that training to be a CIA agent involves playing board games.

Not just any old off-the-shelf game mind. These are special CIA-created playthings, including such hidden hits as:

• Collection: vibes of Pandemic - ‘a group of players must work together to resolve three major crises across the globe.’
• Collection Deck: a Magic The Gathering like game that ‘focuses less on collaborative work and more on the sheer act of collecting intel’.
• Satellite Construction Kit: ‘players cooperate to manage resources, budget, and time to build and maintain connected satellites.’
• Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo: used ‘to train analysts who might work with law enforcement and other partners around world to find a well-armed, well-defended, well-protected bad guy’.

I suspect that board games are a vastly underutilised opportunity for education. Apparently for the CIA they’re particularly good for helping agents learn how to cross-reference vast amounts of information in order to understand how situations they might face in real life might work.

“People playing a game, together they’re experiencing the designers' mental model of insurgency in Afghanistan and sharing that model,” he says. “They are learning it, very quickly, because they’re inside, operating in it. Pushing levers, pulling cords, seeing what happens. Stories are very sticky, and they’ll remember their own stories.”

The Guardian will no longer officially post on X, formerly known as Twitter. I’m sure one could critique the decision as having come a bit belatedly. But good for them for doing it at all when so many other journalistic sources seem to think it’s still an essential part of their business.

And even better, they spell out their rationale:

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.

As they spell out, they “can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms”. That’s a good lesson for us all. If your business depends on someone else’s company treating your favourably then that’s rather risky, even it’s not run by a dangerous and unpredictable megalomaniac.

I hope it goes well for them and that readers continue to support them. Who knows, it might even bring in extra punters. Supposedly they raised an extra couple of million of dollars in donations when they went out of their way to endorse Harris, and criticise Trump, in the recent debacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times censoring their journalists.

📚 Finished listening to Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn.

In this book, Cal Flyn visits the places that humans have been, oftentimes ravaged , and left in order to explore the nature of “life in the post-human landscape”.

…we will travel to some of the eeriest and most desolate places on earth

There are many such places. Some she covers include:

• The Chernobyl exclusion zone - the site of the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster, and its nearby towns.
• The abandoned settlements of the Scottish Highlands.
• The empty villages of the Greek Islands of the Aegean
• The now desolate industrial areas of Detroit.
• Poveglia Island, a former quarantine station and mental asylum.
• Kolyma, Siberia, previously home to forced labour camps
• The Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea
• The Usambara Mountains in Tanzania, where imperialists planting species from their native country overran the indigenous species of the area.
• The huge slag heaps of West Lothian, Scotland, a legacy of the production of oil.
• Place à Gaz in France, where unused chemical weapons were burned after the first world war.
• Various Soviet collectives of times past.
• Arthur Kill, New Jersey, where toxic chemicals from industrial processes cause harm to anything or anyone that lives there.

However well it is written - and it does contain many surprisingly poetic sentences, beautifully evoking the strange environments under discussion - one might think that this would be nothing other than a book of despair, a dystopia of what we did to our planet.

But that’s not really the case. For, as she documents, in many of these places nature has found a way to to re-emerge, to live once again, sometimes even to thrive.

Humans have given up and fled the area, and may never return - or at least most humans, in some of these places a few people remain, for better or worse. But the rest of our planet’s organisms have not give up so easily.

This should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worse places in the world. In fact, it is a story of redemption: how the most polluted spots on Earth - suffocated by oil spills, blasted by bombs, contaminated by nuclear fallout or scraped clean of their natural resources - can be rehabilitated through ecological processes,

This does not necessarily things have reset to what was there before, before humans tore the place apart. Apart from anything else, tragically, many species of life have been lost for good. What emerges from these post-human places is often something new, a different ecosystem, organisms that thrive in or managed to adapt to the mess we left behind. These places aren’t permanently destroyed, forever destined to be places without life. Instead we see regeneration, a natural re-wilding of a type, untouched by human planners.

And sometimes in a form that might even save us from ourselves - witness the regrowth of forests in previously abandoned Russian farmland that may apparently in theory, though having developed simply because humans left, lead to them meeting their Kyoto Protocol commitments.

This might give us hope that whatever we do to our planet, we will not truly kill it. If we continue to behave in the depraved and irresponsible way that we seem to have so far, it’s possible that we might wipe out humanity, sure, or at least render our lives to something more like how she tells us that the residents of Slab City live, but planetary life would go on.

Quite incredibly, yesterday was the 1000-day anniversary of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

I now believe the Bluesky mass migration is for real, having learned that even dril made the leap.

From Kosu:

State Superintendent Ryan Walters sent superintendents an email Thursday afternoon mandating districts show students a video of him announcing the new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism and inviting students into a prayer for President-elect Donald Trump, among other topics.

This from nearly-Trump’s America is one of those instances that is so ridiculous that if it was fiction you’d think it a foolish exaggeration. Instead it’s just weird and scary.

I mean, the ‘Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism’. Come on. Apart from anything else surely that should be either no offices or two offices. Just call it “Office of I HEART TRUMP PLS GIV ME JOB” and be done with it.

The accompanying speech is of course full of violent rhetoric about the “radical left” and “woke” and all the usual buzzwords these ridiculous folk like to use.

Here it is, for those who like to punish themselves.

So strange that he forgot to pray for their actual current president, Biden? Oh, and neglected to defend the religious liberty of any religion that isn’t whatever subsection of Christianity he presumably follows - no doubt the one that adds “Trump” to bullet-point two of the Ten Commandment’s list of acceptable gods to worship.

On which note, this isn’t this guy’s first failure on this front. Previously he’s sent a memo to mandate that “the Bible”, including the all-important 10 commandments, must be taught to everyone in grades 5-12.

Americans United for Separation of Church and States have it right. There is nothing about “religious freedom” to be seen here. Rather:

This is textbook Christian Nationalism: Walters is abusing the power of his public office to impose his religious beliefs on everyone else’s children.

Another weirdo lawmaker from that area of the country was previously trying to get a law in place to make it required to display a poster of the 10 (Christian) Commandments “at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall” in every school. That’ll stop those pesky kids from inappropriately committing adultery I guess.