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Parsing the far-right social conservatives defamation of Kevin Jennings, a decent human being who has dedicated his life to making public schooling easier for LGBT kids and teens, so that they can reverse his appointment as head the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
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The definitive tell-all.
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Ritch C. Savin-Williams, a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University, recently completed a survey of 160 men, straight and gay, and found that gay men provided valuable social insights to straight men.
“The idea is that a gay friend will be more in tune to women and more likely to have female friends,” Professor Savin-Williams said. “And it’s a stereotype, but straight men also feel they can talk to gay men about fashion and ask them if they’re looking O.K.”
Bryan Miller, 37, a director at a financial software firm in New York who has had several gay roommates, echoed that view. “A gay man’s advice on women is the only advice you can take to the bank,” he said. “They’re guys, but they’re not in competition with you.”
After Harvard University passed a similar plan last February, faculty members at the University of Kansas began to research how they could adopt one.In April the University of Maryland rejected a plan to allow for open access to its research journals.
June 2009 Archives
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Collection of Walter Olson's mostly favorable coverage of Cass Sunstein.
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I'm a big fan of Sunstein and an ardent foe of Chambliss.
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A significant cut was made to Universal Pictures’ “Bruno,” excising a comic scene involving LaToya Jackson, just a few hours after her brother, pop star Michael Jackson, was pronounced dead at a Los Angeles hospital.
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HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (Spring, 2008) Nearly 30 hours. Absolutely terrific!
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CRAZY WRONG: "Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent . . ."
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FROM THE POST: During the Palin/Letterman kerfuffle, the smartest thing written or said came from Alaskan blogger Shannyn Moore, whose diary "Top 10 Reasons Sarah Palin's 'Outrage' is Misplaced and A Little Late..." received far too little notice, even though it was picked up by Huffington Post. As Moore wittily revealed, there was, unfortunately, absolutely nothing new or unique about Letterman's joke, it's just that Palin had run out of more appealing options:
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Frank Rich: "Now, roughly 75 percent of Americans support an end to Don’t Ask, and gay issues are no longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from the right-wing “family values” trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter."
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Michael Kinsley in 1984 on Michael Jackson: "What's happened to Michael Jackson isn't too different from what they used to do to young male singers in Europe a few centuries ago, to keep their voices sweet. In another way, it resembles the exploitation of child stars like Judy Garland in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. In fact, what American capitalism has done to Michael Jackson is even a bit like what the Soviets do to their women athletes."
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An unidentified female was also at the campsite.
Musselwhite, a Republican, was elected to the City Council in 2000. He served on the council for six years, including as mayor of the town. In 2006, he lost a bid for a state Senate seat.
Musselwhite previously served as deacon of First Baptist Church in Gainesville.
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A YouTube spokesperson said that the new max is 2 GB. It’s clear that HD videos are becoming a significant portion of the new YouTube library, only six months since the site enabled them. YouTube raised the video upload limit to 1 GB from 100 MB in only September 2008.
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Dash says, "This was probably the one clip of Michael Jackson I wish everybody had seen."
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...having just read a new book by Sherry Wolf called Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Haymarket) a few days ago, I am trying to process the information that there were sex-change operations in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. (This was abolished, of course, once Stalinism charted its straight and narrow path to misery.) Who knew? Who, indeed, could even have imagined?
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I AM EAGER TO SEE IT. THE TIMING IS WONDERFULLY FORTUITOUS: "The movie doesn't come out until July 10th, but I was invited to an early screening in Hollywood.
I'll leave the reviewing to the professionals, but I will say that if the audience I saw the movie with is any indication, Bruno will be a big hit."
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INTERESTING: New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found substantial reductions in binge drinking since the national drinking age was set at 21 two decades ago, with one exception: college students. The rates of binge drinking in male collegians remain unchanged, but the rates in female collegians have increased dramatically.
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Harvard University announced this morning that it plans to lay off 275 staff members as the college grapples with budget pressures caused by a precipitous endowment decline.
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what might be the most shocking thing of all about this Mark Sanford scandal...is that it actually fits the standard adultery narrative, where the cheater falls in love. And what’s fascinating is how much people are embarrassed for him because of it, which doesn’t make much sense to me, since I thought the emails that were published weren’t anything unusual, though definitely private.
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Mark Sanford, this anti-gay Republican politician from South Carolina has helped make the argument for gay marriage in a way that few of us have been able to. Take this passage, from Maria, about their feelings for one another: "Sometimes you don't choose things, they just happen ..." Could there be a more universal, recognizable definition of how feelings of love have no identifiable provenance? Even though it was written by a woman who seems quite heterosexual, can anyone who is homosexual avoid hearing echoes of "I didn't choose to be gay" in this expression of futility in the face of love? Maria goes on, in words that any lesbian or gay man who has finally stopped resisting their truest, inner self could recognize: "I can't redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you."
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The headline is especially interesting since the text tells a different story. I'm with Pollis: "In a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter Tuesday, June 23 Polis once again defended his attendance at both events. While the Democratic Party has its faults, it is far better in terms of LGBT issues than the Republican Party, he said."
"I am a Democrat and a proud Democrat. Our party is not perfect but we need to make it better," said Polis. "There is an enormous difference between the Republican and Democratic Party on equality issues."
It's as if the whole Baby Boom is dying. It has to be a cultural moment of some kind. McMahon, Fawcett, Jackson & Cronkite. Unparalleled. It gives Mark Sanford ca break.
For future reference: Example of the freak-out Google Street View causes
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Shocking: "Online students are much more likely to drop out of courses than their campus-based peers, according to a new study that confirms earlier research on what has been a longstanding concern in the distance-education industry." Note THE DISTANCE-EDUCATION INDUSTRY,
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Nestlé USA recalled its Toll House refrigerated cookie dough on Friday after health officials linked the dough to infections from the bacteria E. coli in as many as 66 people in 28 states.
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I wouldn't do that.
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I don't often find myself in agreement with The Corner: "tate, local, and federal governments should take immediate legislative and administrative action to implement nearly everything in the report. (Most of the practices are already commonplace in the federal and better-run state systems.) Although giving trial lawyers more business rarely makes sense, Congress may also want to reconsider laws that make it very difficult for prisoners to sue prison authorities absent concrete evidence of physical harm. It’s quite possible that many legitimate prison-rape claims get thrown out of court under current laws. And prison rape needs to stop."
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I'll be watching the reception and buzz around this movie, "Brüno, a movie that, in mercilessly exploiting the discomfort created when straight men are ambushed by aggressive gayness, happens to (surprise!) expose homophobia."
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Federal microbiologists and food safety investigators have descended on the Danville, Va., plant that makes Nestlé's refrigerated cookie dough, trying to crack a scientific mystery surrounding a national outbreak of illness from E. coli 0157, a deadly strain of bacteria, which has been linked to the product.
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duh!
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First Lady Michelle Obama hosts an event focused on health and nutrition, including the harvesting of vegetables from the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn of the White House.
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A New Way to Enjoy Entertainment on your TV & PC gets better,
Sanford said he was crying in Argentina. Madonna's Miami Mix:
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Did you know it's legal to keep backyard chickens in the City of Atlanta? In fact, it's legal in every city and town in Georgia except Lawrenceville, but according to The City Chicken, that law is only enforced if someone complains.
From my TMV post reacting to a piece in the NYTimes answering the question Why the Gay Rights Movement Has No National Leader. It doesn't need one:
The single most important way the lgbt rights movement differs from the black and feminist movements is that lgbt people can choose to stay invisible.Once society wanted its lgbt citizens to stay invisible. Once the culture enforced invisibility on lgbt people. But so long as lgbt people were invisible, they could only be a hidden menace.
The choice to come out and declare one's sexual orientation as a cultural identity was a prerequisite to progress. That lgbt people have made so much progress is a tribute to each and every individual who made that declaration to their family, friends and professional community.
Today the culture no longer wants its lesbian and gay citizens to be invisible. LGBT characters on television and in the movies, in politics and community life, along with those who are our friends, neighbors and colleagues, are clear evidence of this.
The culture, in this instance, is ahead of the courts. It is the foes of that cultural acceptance who have deftly used the courts and the law to hold old norms -- norms that are no longer culturally relevant -- in place.
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NBC/WSJ poll 76%, NYTimes poll, 72% support the public option. "The president wants a public option. A majority of the House wants a public option. It's likely a majority of the Senate wants a public option. A clear majority of Americans want a public option. Oh, and not incidentally, a public option makes a lot of sense as a matter of public policy.
I don't know what more it would take to stiffen the spines of wavering Democratic senators who just can't seem to bring themselves to do what needs to be done."
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Climate models predict continued warming across the Southeast for all seasons, with the increase expected to be double that experienced since 1975. The greatest increases are likely to come in the summer, with the number of very hot days projected to rise faster than the average temperature.
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Cliff sez, "Bozeman City, Montana now asks all applicants for jobs to 'Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,' the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords."
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Broadband adoption in the US has grown this year, despite the fact that customers are paying more now than they were in 2008, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report, released today at the Internet Innovation Alliance's National Broadband Strategy Symposium, shows especially big jumps among senior citizens, low-income households, and rural residents in 2009, indicating that the recession hasn't had much of an effect on people's decisions to buy or keep their Internet connections.
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TweetDeck, the most popular Twitter desktop client, is coming to the iPhone.
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Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society.
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deliicious.
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"This is the second in a series of 10 posts on how to strengthen local newspapers in the face of the economic meltdown and the societal shift to the Web." READ THEM ALL.
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Sunstein has written Going to Extremes, a short book about the nature and roots of extremism. It is meant to unsettle us in the way his earlier work did. He finds that sitting people down to deliberate does not necessarily lead them to compromise or to converge on their mean opinion. They tend to radicalize in the direction of whatever bias they had to begin with. Teams of doctors, deciding collectively, are more likely to support the "extreme" strategy of heroic efforts to save terminally ill patents than the average individual doctor among them. Juries tend to vote, after discussion, for much more "extreme" monetary awards than the average individual juror among them would. Talking things over isn't necessarily wrong. But it doesn't lead reliably to moderation, either.
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The new Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition is made up of 28 commercial and not-for-profit groups, including the American Library Association,Internet2, and and Educause. It will seek federal money to provide broadband access first through “anchor institutions,” such as colleges, schools, libraries, and hospitals, since millions of people rely on those institutions already. The coalition says the high-speed connections could help schools and community colleges offer specialized courses and distance learning, could help health-care facilities make better use of telemedicine, and could help colleges and universities advance research.
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Time on the future of newspapers: "A cadre of newly minted media whiz kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only coexist but also thrive. And the first batch of them has just emerged from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism."
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Jim Willse, Editor, Star Ledger, is brilliant
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Says newspapers can't charge for content
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The more you look at it, Georgia political history over the last half-century or so is chock full of comebacks. If Roy Barnes loses in 2010, it won't be because history dooms his candidacy. And the "no comeback rule" should be definitively dropped from coverage of the campaign.
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I had no idea: "A mammoth monument that sits on a rural Georgia hilltop contains instructions for survivors of the apocalypse, says Wired magazine’s Randall Sullivan. Who would build such a thing?
The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern, topped at a height of 16 feet by a 25,000-pound capstone. Built in 1980, this pale gray edifice, which instantly evokes England’s Stonehenge, is quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it."
It looks to me like these young guys need guidance, support and counseling. What they got was exploitation. By all parties concerned. Fratmen.tv is obvious. The coaches likely made a good faith effort, but their "boys will be boys" attitude was tested by gay porn pictures.
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Who kenw??? "It probably wouldn’t be that hard for faculty members to imagine that academic mobbing — a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague — could derail their careers. But a discussion of the phenomenon today at the American Association of University Professors’ international conference on globalization, shared governance, and academic freedom illustrated that the consequences can be much worse."
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You might think that the American Medical Association, which today came out in opposition to a "public option" on comprehensive health care reform, is just a bunch of doctors trying to do what's best for their patients, and that their opposition to the public option is a mere disagreement over details. And you'd be wrong.
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[E]ven assuming there's anything illegal about online poker, the law is simply stupid. Indeed, the Reasonarticles illustrate that the most recent legislative crackdown was a classic example of interest group legislation -- namely, an unholy alliance between social conservatives and entrenched gambling interests who don't want competition. And just so we're clear -- I'm allowed to play government-administered lotteries, to bet on horse races, to go to casinos, and to purchase things from AIG. But the federal government is apparently drawing the line at... online poker. We delicate snowflakes simply cannot endure its horrors.
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At today's memorial for John Hope Franklin at Duke University, playwright Emily Mann -- daughter of historian Arthur Mann, a close friend of Franklin's -- related one of many illuminating personal stories about the pioneering historian and scholar. In a conversation about the North Carolina political landscape, someone asked Franklin "Where did Jesse Helms come from?" Franklin quickly replied, "From hell" -- "not missing a beat," Mann said. It was a sentiment shared by many African-Americans, civil rights allies and others in North Carolina. ... The resolution to honor Helms passed 41-1 in the Senate and 98-0 in the House. Seventeen lawmakers abstained, including a half-dozen members of the House black caucus who waited outside the chambers rather than participate in the vote. Only one North Carolina legislator -- Sen. Julie Boseman, a white Democrat from Wilmington -- voted against the Helms resolution.
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The New Issue of Rolling Stone: The Liberation of Adam Lambert : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll DailyMy TMV post on Lambert is here: http://themoderatevoice.com/34887/lamberts-ecstasy-and-kristianity/
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Single payer liar: Coburn said, the quality of the care at the VA is "not up to the level of care of the rest of the country."
Regular readers of the Washington Monthly know how very wrong Coburn is. The New America Foundation's Phillip Longman had the cover story in our January 2005 issue, not only defending VA care, but describing it as superior to the care of the rest of the country, despite being a government-run system.
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while the British papers all note that the performer [Danny La Rue] was pre-deceased by Jack Hanson, his companion of 40 years — the Telegraph includes a heart-rending description of the devoutly Catholic, avowedly monogamous La Rue being “hysterical with grief” after Hanson’s death — the New York Times and the Associated Press don’t mention Hanson at all. The result lets readers imagine that La Rue led a lonely life. Given the ongoing politics of same-sex marriage, the omission of the news that an archetypal gay performer lived a life of domestic stability is especially disappointing. What a drag.
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Via Jay Rosen, "Pundits including George Will are griping: Obama uses "I" too much! But linguists can count these things... The charge is BS."
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A study released this week by a Harvard University professor and a graduate student told many who use Twitter what they may already know: The network is dominated by a few tweeters talking about themselves, much more so than other social networks.
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Bad law. "It might help them to present some of the economic research on this, including the studies that have shown how much the lack of copyright has helped the industry to thrive, and how much harm the addition of copyright would do to the overall industry. This research has been out there for years, but apparently the folks writing the laws would rather hang out with celebrities like Tim Gunn than actually do some research around what such a law would really mean for the industry." This post has good links.
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Full Exchange integration is what I need most. Good deal: $29 to upgrade from Leopard, down from their regular $129 upgrade price. $49 for a family pack. It comes out in September, before Windows 7, and a developer preview is available from today. Anyone who buys a new Mac from June 8th can upgrade for a nominal $10 handling fee.
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Every tweet in Twitter’s system is uniquely identified by an integer value. For example, the system’s very first public tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is tweet number 20 (presumably tweets 0 through 19 were used for testing). The maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648. This is a huge value, but the accelerating popularity of Twitter means has the amount of tweets is rapidly approaching this limit. If third party application developers haven’t designed their Twitter clients to store tweet IDs using something like the less restrictive unsigned 64-bit integer data structure, users might start seeing strange errors, such as tweets listed in the wrong order - or worse, applications not working at all.
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Students at Georgia’s public colleges may have more lecturers teaching their classes this coming academic year under a change approved by the state Board of Regents.
The board changed its policy last month to raise the cap on lecturers from 10 percent to 20 percent of a college’s faculty. The amended rule allows all colleges to use lecturers, not just research institutions.
Corrupted-Files.com offers a service—recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern—that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
The site promises that students can stop using "lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.
Gay male students have higher college grade point averages and perceive their academic work as more important.
Gay and bisexual males are more likely to report the presence of a faculty member or administrator with whom they could discuss a problem.
Gay and bisexual males place more importance on participating in student organizations, volunteer activities, the arts, and politics.
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Miss Jess sez, "The Design Piracy Prohibition Act is very, very scary to all of us in the apparel industry. There are millions of jobs at stake if this legislation passes, and this act is simply being pushed by a handful of wealthy celebrity designers who continually pirate the 'little guys' designs anyway. Basically, this act will kill my business along with thousands upon THOUSANDS of other small, medium and large design and manufacturing businesses around the US and the world if it is passed. It's a big deal!
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Analysis, detail & links
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In a letter sent last week from Civil Rights Division Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King to Georgia state officials, the DOJ said that Georgia's voter verification program is frequently inaccurate and has a "discriminatory effect" on minority voters, subjecting a "disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote." The letter went on to say that the system "does not produce accurate and reliable information and that thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged." The ruling bars Georgia from continuing the citizenship verification, although the state can appeal to the DOJ to reconsider.
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“We have more gay people serving in South Carolina than probably in anyplace in the United States; they’re just not out of the closet,” she told blogger Howie Klein. “We have an awful lot of people in the closet — Lindsey Graham, Glenn McConnell who’s our Senate president pro tem, our Lt Governor [André Bauer].”
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bring the vast majority of YouTube’s content to your TV or large-screen computer monitor. ... At its core YouTube XL is basically a redesigned version of the YouTube website. It’s still run in the browser, and you don’t have to download anything to get it working (assuming you have Flash installed). It looks (and according to the demo, feels) like a native application.
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duh... More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.
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Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission see Gallup poll as evidence that Christians need to disassociate themselves from gays and everyone else who doesn't share their right-wing values.
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While 57% of Americans oppose legalizing gay marriage, Americans who personally know someone who is gay or lesbian are almost evenly divided on the matter, with 49% in favor and 47% opposed. Among those who do not personally know anyone who is gay, 72% oppose legalized gay marriage while just 27% favor it.
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Americans are six percentage points more likely than they were four years ago to favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military, 69% to 63%. While liberals and Democrats remain the most supportive, the biggest increase in support has been among conservatives and weekly churchgoers -- up 12 and 11 percentage points, respectively.
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My TMV post on Steven Berlin Johnson's Time Cover Story, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" Links to academic study: Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention:”
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STRATEGIES: 1. Integrated, beefed-up chips. Chips are built directly into the television, but those chips come with enough performance to accommodate future innovation.
2. The modular approach. Chips are built into a module that the consumer could swap out and replace with something newer.
3. Separate boxes. TVs become thin, dumb panels that are connected by wire or wirelessly to a bundled box that has the chip inside it. As more processing power is required, the box is swapped out for a new one, but the panel remains.
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Phoenix police arrested a 20-year-old man Monday on suspicion of raping an unconscious woman live on the Internet.
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...bloggers may want to prepare themselves for what is coming, whatever exactly that is. "We're going to be learning more ourselves about exactly how the technology is going to work" in about two weeks, Bridis said.
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"[The] core reason an abortion/slavery comparison falls down lay in the actions of the enslaved, versus the inability of action amongst embryos. Abortion is a debate between two groups over the ultimate fate of embryos. The Anti-Slavery fight was a violent struggle between two groups over the fate of the enslaved, but with the enslaved as indispensable actors. Unlike embryos, black people were very capable of expressing their thoughts about their own personhood, and never held it in much doubt. Whereas the fight against abortion begins with pro-lifers asserting the rights of embryos, the fight against slavery doesn't begin with the abolitionists, but with the Africans themselves who resisted. "
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While the interactive style could be fun, Ms. Cheal’s students [enrolled in her the Second Life course] worried they were having too much fun.
In her recently published study, “Student Perceptions of a Course Taught in Second Life,” Ms. Cheal wrote that the 15 undergraduate students enrolled in the course raised concerns that too much “play” in the assignments inhibited learning. The students also cited problems with the program’s slow speed and with challenges acclimating to virtual life.
Although Ms. Cheal admits that the sample size was small, she warns others to be careful when designing new courses that may use a similar approach.
Just a few months after the Recording Industry Association of America began offering a curriculum for teaching copyright law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a curriculum of its own. LINKS TO BOTH
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A list of blogs / websites about the future. Add if you're interested. It's an open google docs spreadsheet.
Ads 'n Such
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