Friends

A new study shows that for husbands and wives alike, the more housework you do, the more often you are likely to have sex with your spouse.

HUMBUG is a term you hear a lot in northern Australia. It can mean begging on the streets of Alice Springs or asking for sexual favours in some Top End communities.
It can also refer to the violence associated with payback, favours for family.
But most worryingly, in Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory, it means scrounging money, particularly off the old and infirm, usually by family members.

Translation: Regulation forbids an adult and a child to consensually form a permanent family. What for? To protect the "rights" of abandoned minors' abusive and neglectful blood relatives - plus random bigots.

Poverty: "Whereas real per capita income [worldwide] increased by about one fifth per decade in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it is expect to increase by about one third in the 2000s...The poverty rate is expected to continue to fall sharply from 57.2 percent in 200 to 49.7 percent in 2010 at a poverty line of one-half of the mean." (Lynge Nielsen, IMF Working Paper, Global Relative Poverty, April 2009
Health: Global life expectancy at birth was 64 in 1990, 66 in 2000, and 68 in 2007. Under-5 mortality rates per 1000 live births were 91 in 1990, 78 in 2000, and 67 in 2007.From 1990 - 2006, the number of people in developing regions using improved sanitation facilities has increased by 1.1 billion; the proportion of the global population with access to improved drinking water sources rose from 76% to 86% in the same period. (World Health Statistics 2009.)

Waldfogel found that, on average, gift recipients valued their gifts at less than the cost of the gift to the giver. He estimated that gift-giving destroyed between 10 per cent and a third of the value of the gifts. …
The problem becomes more acute the more distant we are from the recipient. Waldfogel's results confirmed that grandparents, aunts and uncles make the worst gift-givers. He combines survey evidence with estimates of the amount spent on Christmas presents to calculate the deadweight loss of Christmas, which he estimates at $US13 billion a year for the United States and $US25 billion globally. …
To put the stimulus spending in perspective, an Australian National University economist, Alex Robson, calculated that it could have instead funded a one-year income tax holiday for every Australian taxpayer, excluding the top 3 per cent.
If that sounds more stimulating than school halls and pink batts, then it is probably because you can think of better uses for the government's discretionary spending on your behalf.

The GSEs had begun buying risky loans in 1993 to meet the "affordable housing" requirements established under congressional direction by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Most of the damage was done from 2005 through 2007, when Fannie and Freddie were binging on risky mortgages. …
New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A. …
The government rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 signaled that the U.S. government, and perhaps others, would stand behind other large financial institutions. The moral hazard this engendered was deadly when Lehman Brothers' solvency came under challenge. Spreads in the credit default swap market for Lehman, despite massive short-selling, showed very little alarm by investors until just before the fateful weekend of Sept. 13 and 14, when they blew out on fears that the firm might not be rescued.
By that time it was too late for Lehman's counterparties to take the protective action that might have cushioned the shock. As it turned out, however, none of Lehman's largest counterparties failed—so much for the idea that the financial market is "interconnected"—but all market participants now realized they had to know the true financial condition of their counterparties. The result was a freeze-up in interbank lending.
For most people, that freeze-up is the beginning of the financial crisis. But its roots go back to 1993, when Fannie and Freddie began stocking up on subprime and other risky loans while reporting them as prime.
Why Fannie and Freddie did this is still to be determined. But the leading candidate is certainly HUD's affordable housing regulations, which by 2007 required that 55% of all the loans the agencies acquired had to be made to borrowers at or below the median income, with almost half of these required to be low-income borrowers.
Another likely reason for Fannie and Freddie's mislabeling of mortgages was their desire to retain congressional support by "rolling the dice" while making believe they weren't betting. With the Federal Housing Administration, Wall Street investment banks, and Fannie and Freddie all competing for these loans, the bottom of the barrel had long before been scraped and the financial system set up for a crisis.

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• learn to cook fish and eat more of it
  
• get fit enough to run a lap of the lake
  
• eat more vegetables
  
• drink less beer
  
• learn yoga
  

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Michel Foucault, archetypal postwar French thinker—one of the gang of four that Stephen Hicks dissects in his excellent Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (which I review here)—was notorious for his social constructionist analysis of history and for his avid embrace of a homoerotic hedonism, extending to BDSM (bondage-dominance sado-masochism). That embrace of homoerotic hedonism led to his death from AIDS: one of the early, prominent fatalities from the “gay plague”.

There is a certain irony, therefore, in one of the most trenchant criticisms of Foucault’s social constructionism being mounted by a historian of homosexuality. Rictor Norton’s The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (which I review here) is a direct assault on Foucault’s intellectual legacy.

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Seven out of the top ten non-profits not only stayed in the top ten but increased their share of the market during the decade. So much for competition! And according to Jed Emerson and Paul Carrtar, only 6% of non-profits accounted for four fifths of all revenues in the sector.

LESS than one cent in every dollar raised by an Australian charity has gone to its intended cause in its first two financial years, documents show.
The Adelaide-based National Cancer Research Foundation last year picked up $387,864 in donations but gave just $4900 away, according to its audited profit and loss statements.
The year before, it raised almost $197,160, giving away only $935.
So far this financial year, one of the foundation's directors says the charity has passed on almost $30,000, but yesterday could not say how much had been raised.
Most of the money raised in the past two financial years went on commissions, management fees, travelling expenses and drivers.
The foundation's director, Neil Menzies, blamed the start-up costs of a charity.

NEARLY $537 million in tsunami aid for Sri Lanka is unaccounted for and over $686 million has been spent on projects unrelated to the disaster, an anti-corruption watchdog says.
Berlin-based Transparency International has demanded an audit of the money received by the Sri Lankan government to help victims of the Asian tsunami which hit the island on December 26, 2004, killing 31,000 people.

The results are striking. Successful stimulus relies almost entirely on cuts in business and income taxes. Failed stimulus relies mostly on increases in government spending. …
They report that “both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending. This effect is difficult to reconcile with Keynesian theory.”

notebuyer

A total of 56,399 contracts and grants totaling $157,028,362,536 were awarded in this first quarter for which Recovery.gov reports are available. The number of jobs claimed as created or saved is 638,826.54—an average of $245,807.51 per job.

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The journal chronicles van den Bogaert’s journey through the Mohawk Valley to Oneida, a pathbreaking trip in the winter of 1634.
Years later, van den Bogaert was made commander of Fort Orange, site of present-day Albany, but fled back into Indian country after his fellow colonists discovered he was gay. Van den Bogaert was pursued by the Dutch, captured and brought back, but he escaped when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort. He drowned in the Hudson before he got very far.

The government I serve and speak for on certain issues cannot and will not in any way criminalize homosexuality; sexual orientation is a private matter and each individual has his or her own orientation - - this is not a State matter at all.

It was a reminder that laws preventing gay marriage don’t just discriminate against gay people. These laws also discriminate against their friends and families, all the straight people who have a stake in gay lives going as well as possible.

All men and all women have a right to marry, provided they wish to marry members of the opposite sex to whom they are not closely related by blood. Heterosexuals, like homosexuals, are prohibited from marrying people of their own sex. It is no more valid to allege wrongful discrimination in this context against gays than to argue that cycle lanes “discriminate” wrongfully against wheelbarrows.

The few countries and states where gay marriage is legal had to redefine marriage to do so. This new definition does not require the two halves of humanity, as had been the case in all diverse cultures throughout time - regardless of religion, law, or culture. …
Marriage is about the fundamental essence of humanity. Are male and female only needed in marriage and family if either is desired by the adults? This would seem to make the mystery and essence of your femininity and my masculinity pretty thin in human experience. It also changes the nature of parentage. …
Same-sex marriage prohibits us from saying there is anything uniquely special about a child being raised by her mother and father! Both become merely ornamental. …
At its core, same-sex marriage is not really marriage at all, but a deconstruction of our historic and universal understanding that humanity is one nature embodied in two mysteriously powerful forms - male and female - and that the family and every human child need what both provide.

According to Stanton same-sex parenting and parenting by other people than the biological parents are less than fully human.

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Since our world is currently under the iron grip of a consortium that includes 4chan and The Onion’s editorial board, the Nobel Peace Prize was just accepted by a man currently escalating a land war in Asia.

Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag.

What we’re seeing is the natural sentiment of people who think of themselves as quintessentially American looking at an American popular and public culture that presents them as marginal.

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Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s.

This positive feedback loop was a bad news surprise that our climate models did not predict. Now we have evidence of a good news surprise that no model predicted--a negative feedback loop that acts to keep the southeast portion of Greenland's Ice Sheet from runaway glacial acceleration. We can expect many more surprises--good and bad--over the coming decades, as our climate responds to the huge shove human activities are giving it.

Tempers flared during an all-night plenary session, held after most of 120 visiting world leaders had left.
Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese negotiator, said the draft text asked “Africa to sign a suicide pact”.
One Saudi delegate said it was without doubt “the worst plenary I have ever attended.”

But as the email story unfolds over the years, it is clear that the history of climate and temperature change over the past 10,000 years remains mostly speculative and largely unknown. The emails also imply that, in part because the past is so unknown, any attempt at long-range forecasts is, at best, uncertain.
Also clear is that the official science on climate change as we know it today, looking backward and forward, has been developed and controlled by the relatively small collection of scientists who wrote most of the emails. Working directly or indirectly for the IPCC, the scientists seem to have become captive of that organization’s objectives, which was to find “the hand of man” in climate records to justify plans to change the climate in future. The scientists, in other words, became engaged in the all-too-familiar business of decision-based evidence making. …
If the emails show anything on the climate scenarios, it is that the 100-year science projections never really got settled. They were a product of climate and economic models that remained problematic all through the 13 -year email record. Equally uncertain were the attempts to reconstruct paleoclimate records going back 1,000 years.

If temperature history is the “only” way to test climate models, the tests we have on hand — mainly the shaky temperature history of the last 1,000 or 2,000 years — suggest current climate models are not getting a proper scientific workout. …
Over the next 10 years, the emails become a zone of internal conflict and external battles to suppress criticism, ridicule critics and resist all outside interference with the official science story they had assembled: The late 20th century was the warmest in history, and the next 100 years could be a climate nightmare.
The Mann technique of aggressive intervention in the peer-review process over Mr. Briffa’s work sets the tone for what would become a major strategy as all the scientists within the IPCC loop waged war on any science and papers that contravened or questioned the official view. …
The emails reinforce the worst of suspicions that the official scientific community did all they could to smear Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick, prevent publication of the work of skeptics, manipulate the peer-review process and isolate all skeptics as cranks. …
Exactly who did what with which data requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

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The scale and extremism of the literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims, by contrast, are traditional. We need to work with them to fight against liberal cultural imperialism in their countries. I wouldn't wish the humiliation of gay marriage on my worst enemy.

A few examples: When Our Lady of the Rosary, Qatar's first-ever church, opened last year, it did so minus cross, bell, dome, steeple, or signboard. Rosary's priest, Father Tom Veneracion, explained their absence: "The idea is to be discreet because we don't want to inflame any sensitivities." And when the Christians of a town in upper Egypt, Nazlet al-Badraman, finally after four years of "laborious negotiation, pleading and grappling with the authorities", won permission in October to restore a tottering tower at the Mar-Girgis Church, a mob of about 200 Muslims attacked them, throwing stones and shouting Islamic and sectarian slogans. The situation for Copts is so bad, they have reverted to building secret churches.

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