See you sometime next year. Yeah, I'm checking out -- not because of the approaching holidays or accrued vacation days or seasonal affective disorder. What it is, see, is the boxed set of "The Wire" lent to me this weekend by some dear friends/enablers. Somehow I've managed to avoid this moment for 11 years, but now I have all five seasons in one easy-to-grip package. If "The Wall Street Journal" has it right, binge viewing has now been demonstrated to be the natural order of things.

In the social-media age, nobody -- not e-tailers, not governments, not Vaticans -- can suppress speech without backlash exponentially more damaging than the offending speech itself. In the long run, this will be the ruination of the regimes ruling North Korea, Iran and China. In the short run, it will be the ruination of KlearGear.