I recently bought a copy of "Liars and Outliers" by Bruce Schneier. This book examines the mechanisms in society that enable the trust in each other that is required in order that society can function or even exist.
One of the discussions looks at marriage.
In the (rather less than) magical past, early humans sexually segregated their daily work. Men went out hunting, for example, and women stayed close to home base gathering. Men and women also bonded in pairs, and in order for society to function, some mechanism was needed to protect the integrity of these bonds. Without such protection, no man would trust his woman unattended and vice versa.
Marriage was developed as a system, informal at first and later formalized in custom and law, of ensuring that pair bonded couples would stay together, and that others in society would honor that pair bonding.
Did it work 100% of the time? No.
Did it need to? No.
In any system that enables trust, some (the vast majority) will cooperate, and some (a few) will defect. All that is needed (and all that is possible) is that defection be kept down to a manageable level. So fidelity was not "virtually nonexistent" but rather the norm, because that's what the system was designed to encourage and enforce. And since society continued to exist long enough to give rise to us, it seems to have worked well enough.

Milton Friedman stated that if lowering the tax rate increases revenue, the tax rate was too high to begin with.

My first Kindle went bad in much the way you describe -- the "screen saver" image wound up stuck on a portion of the screen while the rest of the screen updated.
I called Amazon tech support and was given a free replacement which took under a week to arrive. No incentive for an upgrade, but presumably this was because the Kindle I had bought was less than a month old.
The e-books I had purchased were still on my account, and downloaded automatically to the replacement. .MOBI format books I had found elsewhere were still on my laptop and were easily transferred to the replacement Kindle.
I use it quite a lot, especially during platelet donations at the Red Cross when I'm nailed to a couch for two hours at a time.

This seems to be a re-draft of <bigjournalism.com/libertychick/2011/11/30/when-propaganda-burns-more-than-pepper-spray/>.

It might have been a nice touch, instead of this story going "404-compliant", have a link to the new story. I had linked the earlier version on my Facebook page and had to find it again.

Just a thought.

A friend of mine told me how cell phones can be used to counter stealth technology.

One of the features of stealth technology is the shape of the aircraft which reflects radar in odd directions rather than back toward the antenna. If you carpet an area with lots of little radio emitters, radio waves from each emitter will bounce off of the plane in various directions. Some of those will bounce toward the radar installation, which can use the information to detect the plane.

Because you don't control the timing of pulses from cell phones, you lose a lot of ranging information, but you might still be able to work it out by observing the signal over time. And the rules for what kind of plane gives what kind of radar signature will have to be rewritten.

One of the red herrings I often see in this sort of debate is the dichotomy between an intelligent designer of the universe and scientists claiming everything happened "by chance".

Problem is, I don't know any scientists who believe everything happens by chance. Every scientist I've ever met believe things happen according to rules. They believe this to the point where even in fields with random components, like quantum mechanics, it's very hard to shake the belief in some hidden rules that make the apparent randomness somehow ordered. Indeed, without the belief in rules the universe follows, science would be a pointless exercise.

Now, since we're here, it would seem to follow that the rules of the universe allow for life to arise without someone or something from outside stepping in and fiddling with the system. Indeed, it's quite possible the rules of the universe actually encourage the development of life any time the conditions are even close to right.

Then the question becomes: Where do the rules come from? Were they created by some intelligent force? Did they arise at random during the Big Bang? Or are the processes that gave rise to the Big Bang part of a larger system with rules that have always existed, thereby needing no creator.

I don't know how to tell the difference between these three possibilities, or any others people may think of. Does anyone else? Can that someone prove it?

I gave up watching/listening to Bill O'Reilly when I realized his "No Spin Zone" was actually his "No One Else's Spin Zone".

Why shouldn't they fear pasta?
They don't want to be overthrown by the pasta résistance.

I'm glad to see someone else making the argument I've been raising.
Why should any society establish a legal institution of marriage? What function does it serve that it requires government licensing?

If marriage is about reproduction and about providing children a mother and a father, that's one thing. If it's about visitation rights, sharing resources, and the like, there are any number of contractual mechanisms available.
If it's about acknowledgment of a loving relationship, why do we need a government license? A likes B a lot, B likes A a lot, so we involve the government in recognizing it?

Between fostering and adoption, the notion of "parent" is a bit flexible, and by no means restricted to the biological parents. Some languages distinguish between the parents who raise a child and the parents who supply the DNA.

In my case, I was effectively a third parent for the son of some friends. He calls me "uncle", but for a couple of years, I was effectively a third parent.