Marriage too central?

Link NYTimes piece by a marriage expert says marriage has become too central to definition of a fulfilling life. Too much depends on it, and it becomes a reason to be isolated. Friendships have suffered greatly because of it.

Related post: Marriage takes a back seat

Dems take house and senate; Rumsfeld resigns

Some unexpected good news: Rumsfeld steps down.

And the Dems have taken the majority -- albeit barely -- in the Senate as Virginia is called for Webb!

Times Select / Nov 6-12 free (sort-of)

A lot of the articles which I link to from this blog are from the New York Times. Something pretty annoying about the Times is that some articles get placed into the paid portion of the site called TimesSelect after a short amount of time. Not everyone wants to pay money to access the TimesSelect.

Well, so the poor (my case: cheap) man's solution is to read about the article or read snippets of it (or sometimes major portions of it where people have quoted much of it) on people's blogs using a blog search tool such as blogsearch.google.com . You can do a search based on the title in double quotes -- this looks for the words in the particular order matching the title.

The other solution is to read my postings not long after they get posted, so that the 'free' link is still active to the Times. Usually the free link is active for a minimum of a week.

-- updated 11/3

Link Philips is sponsoring Times Select from Monday Nov 6 through Sunday Nov 12.

Also, it appears that you no longer need to log into the Times to read articles. One less password to remember, and blog links will work for everyone, yay!

-- updated 11/8

It looks like with the free preview, you can only see the Editorials which are under Times Select. You can't see the archived materials. Bummer.

Here's some cool editorials:

Frank Rich on Truthiness overtaking reality in news.
Maureen Dowd on Cheney-Rumsfeld.
Thomas Friedman on how Bush sees Americans as stupid.
Paul Krugman on Bechtel leaving Iraq infrastructure in a mess now that its contract is "complete"
Thomas Friedman on how a good outcome is no longer an option in Iraq
Maureen Dowd on the mother party beats the impotent father party

Closeted Mark Foley might have many fellow shut-ins

Link The first is pastor Ted Haggard at the evangelical New Life church with 14,000 members. A male escort says he had a business (sexual) relationship with the pastor for 3 years. The pastor has already stepped down and his replacement has said that the pastor admits some of the charges are true. (BBC News story)

Link The second is the Republican candidate for Florida governor Charlie Crist. A convicted felon says he had an ongoing romantic relationship with Crist.

-- updated 11/4

Link Church finds Haggard committed sexually immoral conduct and dismisses him. Not sure if it means they didn't approve of his having an affair or having gay sexual relations.

Human shields killed

Link I read this stuff, and it really is unbelievable. I don't really know that it's unjustified. It's sort of the reasoning the US went into Afghanistan. If you "harbor" (supposedly Dubya came up with the word, but it's impossible he could ever be that smart) terrorists, you can be killed. I guess to the extent that the Israeli military fired on unarmed women it looks bad. But then again, the women were helping Palestinian militants that fired rockets into Israel to escape.

Stop the gay sheep experiments!

Link I agree with Navratilova. Doing experiments on gay sheep to try to make them straight is similar to the electro-shock and hormone therapy of gay humans of decades ago. It didn't work then even when some gays consented to it. And in this case the sheep are not consenting to it. It's homophobic and wrong. Leave the sheep alone!

RNC gay porn money ties / blogactive makes parody video

Towleroad mentions Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman's non-disavowed homosexuality and then talks about money the RNC took from the publishers of the gay porn that hired the 82nd airborne US army soldiers.

-- updated 10/31

blogActive makes a parody of RNC's Harold Ford attack ad.



-- updated 11/3

Link Study shows that negative ads against a candidate you favor will likely cause you to have less enthusiasm for that candidate, while it energizes supporters of the opponent. Seems obvious, but I wouldn't have thought of it without someone telling me.

China Opens First Gay Clinic

Queerty posted this. Shows just how far behind China is on gay issues. It's a little weird that it's just a health clinic just for gays. Shouldn't it be an AIDS clinic or a STD clinic for anyone with an STD? How about something like London's clinic for youth? Still, I can't fault the Chinese for reaching out to the gay community. I probably should praise them!

O'Reilly vs Letterman, Round Two

I liked Letterman's question about the crazy dictator with WMDs in North Korea...



(let's see how long this stays up before DMCA kicks in.)

NJ ruling a half-step, but shows progress

Link The NYTimes article highlights one unconventional family with 2 dads and 2 moms in NJ and potential benefits of the NJ Supreme Court ruling. Still of course, same-sex marriage advocates are not ecstatic about the shying away from ruling for 'marriage'. Meanwhile Republicans are hoping this good thing for sexual minorities fires up their base. Here's to the day that bigotry no longer works. Hopefully it's Nov 7th.

300m Americans and growing

Link Economist story on American population hilights the reason for its growth and relatively high birth rate (faith / hope for the future, less patriarchy, and spacious houses and land) compared to other developed countries. It's also stunning to hear about brand-new 3-bedroom houses going for $130k which are being built in Houston.

-- updated 10/28

A Time magazine article shows that Hispanics are having the most kids at 2.8 per family while other races are significantly lower at 1.9 per family or less. Now I wonder about the Economist story.

Homosexuality and survival value

Link Economist story on homosexuality in nature and an exhibition at National History Museum at the University of Oslo. One of the interesting questions broached in the article is if you believe in evolution why natural selection didn't remove a 'homosexual gene', if such a gene exists.

Comedy Central content: YouTube complies with DMCA

What is the daily show going to be like without Bush in office?!



-- updated 10/27

Looks like YouTube is taking down Comedy Central content due to DMCA. Seems a major cut to content I find interesting on YouTube, but I think perhaps it's needed so that YouTube/Google will negotiate with Comedy Central to put it back up.

Trust Google to find candidate information?

Link Liberal bloggers are trying to influence Google data to show what they believe are hidden sides of Republican candidates. The article reminds us how people managed to manipulate the Google search algorithm in the past, and that this manipulation continues to this day when you look up miserable failure in Google.

Fake news comes to Iraq

Link Not quite the Iraqi version of the Daily Show or Colbert report, but an Iraqi is on the air with comedy.

Deb Price: Out and accepted?

Link Deb Price of the Detroit News, who writes a weekly column on gay issues, reported that 4.1% of adults identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual in government surveys. With 300 million Americans, this implies around 12 million gay persons in the US, although many straights be reluctant to count any children in that number. Some good news in that number is that it seems more people are willing to stand up and be counted even to the government.

Another interesting statistic -- and personally heartening, since I agree with the new majority -- is that in a NYTimes poll 53% of people now believe being gay cannot be changed versus 34% who believe it can. I guess the missing 13% don't know or don't care.

One other number from the same poll for those ready for more good news: only 37% of people say homosexual relations are wrong and a combined 61% say it's either okay or don't care. Not a stellar statistic, but a near reversal from 13 years ago according to Price.

US Military finally getting the idea

Link It seems there is quite a lot of experience centuries ago in seemingly very different circumstances of insurgencies and how to fight them. The US military has finally decided to listen to some of the doctrines developed way back when. A key point: defend civilians.

-- updated 10/22

Recent news out of Baghdad is that this new strategy isn't working. Not sure if it's because the strategy is worse than what was being done before or if the insurgents have become more determined to fight the Americans.

Venture capital stays local - Trust

Link An interesting request by VC firms is for the startup to be located within 20 minutes of the VC. This definitely gives Silicon Valley startups an immense advantage when looking for capital. The article also mentions other perks of starting a company in the valley. Interesting is the hidden reason behind the 20 minute rule: trust plays a huge role when investing large sums of money, and trust cannot be built without face to face interaction.

Romance and having children

I didn't disapprove right away of the opinion expressed by Pete Wilson that a gay man and a lesbian woman having a child "is a travesty." But I hadn't really thought the issue through completely...

I read through the comments on the SFGate blog website and was mostly impressed by everyone else's reasoning on the matter. What I got from everyone else's thoughts was that a stable family is important and romantic involvement is not as important.

I think there is some value to the example of romantic love that parents provides to children for later in life when they go on to have their own romantic relationships. And yet, romantically attached parents doesn't feel like an absolutely essential ingredient, and there are plenty of more conventional parenting situations where this romantic element is severely degraded anyway. (Besides I'm not sure why it is, but isn't there always an eeewwww factor when thinking about your parents having sex?)

There is another point made by some on the SF blog that many marriages end in divorce, of which many are quite rankorous and full of conflict. This platonic arrangement, which Wilson calls, "a travesty", is one where such a negative outcome is extremely unlikely -- there would be no "let's stick out this [awful marriage] out for the kids"...

I guess I would summarize the reasoning as follows: if Wilson truly has an issue with children born without romantically attached parents, then he should have complained loudly about these parents: single moms and single dads through divorce, surrogacy, sperm donation and adoption, about brokeback couples with children, about widows and widowers with children, and about couples with arranged marriages with only platonic relations (having affairs on the side). If he were really concerned about the example of romantically involved parents, maybe he should have complained that heterosexuals shouldn't be having kids until they have been married for 5 or 10 years -- when they are sure their romantic involvement will last past their children's teens -- and when they are 80% sure their relationship won't end in divorce. Why doesn't he think divorce is an experiment gone too far? And why doesn't he ask all those who fit in the categories for non-romantically involved parents to give up their children for adoption immediately for the sake of the kids if it's such a travesty?

(And how about those raising pets? Shouldn't we worry about those pets getting warped, too? :) )

All joking aside, I think the reason why there is such an uproar about this is the fact that Pete Wilson only choose to make his opinion known about the non-romantic gay and lesbian couple and not about these other cases which don't meet his strict criteria. It seems to come from a specific hatred for gays and lesbians which he has chosen to show openly and publically.

Marriage takes a back seat

Link Number of married adults in US has dipped below the 50% point according to the Census Bureau.

A few interesting datapoints:

* 2% of SF couples are male couples.
* 1.7% of Hampshire County, MA couples are female couples.
* Only 26% of adults are married in Manhattan

NGLTF says probably same-sex couples are still being undercounted because of reluctance to reveal that information.