For Your Information

While I was at the Atlantic site, skimming over Nicholas Carr's articles on how the Internet may be making us stupid (but it remains to be seen), I also saw a link in a sidebar to this article: "A Reminder That America Is Improving," it was headed: "Sodomy Is Not a Crime." By one Conor Friedersdorf, it's about how some guy from the Christian-right American Family Association is calling for the re-criminalization of sodomy. But he's totally wrong, because:

Beyond judicial constraints on lawmakers, the reason sodomy won't again be illegal in the United States is that bigotry against homosexuals has declined tremendously, and -- especially among younger Americans -- there is a recognition that they are as deserving of personal liberty and equal treatment under the law as anyone.
Well, I hope Friedersdorf is right about that, though he makes a mistake common among straights and gays alike. He think that the sodomy laws criminalized homosexuality, instead of certain acts, and denied "personal liberty and equal treatment under the law" to homosexuals. In one sense he's right, especially since the 1986 Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that sodomy laws targeting homosexuals were constitutional, construing sodomy as a "rhetorical proxy" for not only gay men but all "sex/gender outsiders" (Marta T. Zingo, Sex/Gender Outsiders, Hate Speech, and Freedom of Expression: Can They Say That About Me? [Westport CT: Praeger, 1998], p. 116). And this assumption was used by our enemies as a justification for denying us equal treatment under the law, since we were all supposed to be felons. But before 1986, sodomy laws in the US forbade heterosexual couples, married or unmarried, to engage in "the abominable crime against nature, not fit to be named among Christians."



But Friedersdorf is also wrong about something more serious, something I hadn't known myself until a few days ago. It's true, in 2003 the Supreme Court did declare unconstitutional all sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas. But the US military continues to enforce its sodomy regulations, and

Eight years later, however, eighteen states still refuse to rewrite their laws and take these anti-gay relics off their books, with countless LGBT Americans continuing to feel their devastating effects as a result. Several state legislatures and courts have exploited loopholes in the Lawrence decision, while others have simply refused to acknowledge the decision altogether.
Some of the states which have defied the Court are the usual suspects: Texas, Idaho, and Utah. But some are more surprising: Michigan, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, where same-sex couples can get legally married -- but they'd better not try to consummate the union!



This is important, since (usually) men are still being arrested, charged, and tried under these laws. Often the charges are dropped, but this means that states are at the very least using these laws to harass people, and just having them on the books means they can still be used to stigmatize gay people.



Yes, Lawrence v. Texas was progress. But we still have a ways to go, and in an area where we thought we had already won.

For Your Information

While I was at the Atlantic site, skimming over Nicholas Carr's articles on how the Internet may be making us stupid (but it remains to be seen), I also saw a link in a sidebar to this article: "A Reminder That America Is Improving," it was headed: "Sodomy Is Not a Crime." By one Conor Friedersdorf, it's about how some guy from the Christian-right American Family Association is calling for the re-criminalization of sodomy. But he's totally wrong, because:

Beyond judicial constraints on lawmakers, the reason sodomy won't again be illegal in the United States is that bigotry against homosexuals has declined tremendously, and -- especially among younger Americans -- there is a recognition that they are as deserving of personal liberty and equal treatment under the law as anyone.
Well, I hope Friedersdorf is right about that, though he makes a mistake common among straights and gays alike. He think that the sodomy laws criminalized homosexuality, instead of certain acts, and denied "personal liberty and equal treatment under the law" to homosexuals. In one sense he's right, especially since the 1986 Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that sodomy laws targeting homosexuals were constitutional, construing sodomy as a "rhetorical proxy" for not only gay men but all "sex/gender outsiders" (Marta T. Zingo, Sex/Gender Outsiders, Hate Speech, and Freedom of Expression: Can They Say That About Me? [Westport CT: Praeger, 1998], p. 116). And this assumption was used by our enemies as a justification for denying us equal treatment under the law, since we were all supposed to be felons. But before 1986, sodomy laws in the US forbade heterosexual couples, married or unmarried, to engage in "the abominable crime against nature, not fit to be named among Christians."



But Friedersdorf is also wrong about something more serious, something I hadn't known myself until a few days ago. It's true, in 2003 the Supreme Court did declare unconstitutional all sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas. But the US military continues to enforce its sodomy regulations, and

Eight years later, however, eighteen states still refuse to rewrite their laws and take these anti-gay relics off their books, with countless LGBT Americans continuing to feel their devastating effects as a result. Several state legislatures and courts have exploited loopholes in the Lawrence decision, while others have simply refused to acknowledge the decision altogether.
Some of the states which have defied the Court are the usual suspects: Texas, Idaho, and Utah. But some are more surprising: Michigan, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, where same-sex couples can get legally married -- but they'd better not try to consummate the union!



This is important, since (usually) men are still being arrested, charged, and tried under these laws. Often the charges are dropped, but this means that states are at the very least using these laws to harass people, and just having them on the books means they can still be used to stigmatize gay people.



Yes, Lawrence v. Texas was progress. But we still have a ways to go, and in an area where we thought we had already won.

Rush to the GLD

Gold is up nearly 30% today. there's been a rush to the GLD. exchange rated fund, up around 50% this year. Bob Mipisani shows us the unprecedented access he got at the GLD vault. it was an incredible array of gold A look at where gold prices are headed and who are the largest buyers of the precious metal, with Jason Toussaint, World Gold Council "it's important to note there is a big dichotomy where that demand is coming from. there is constraint and supply coming to the market. secondly, if we look at the difference between developed markets and investors and u.s. and europe, they're turning to gold as a store of wealth, safe haven asset and looking to store that wealth through time. particularly in markets in India and china, an economic prosperity story. certainly through the last decade, we're looking at 9% above GDP growth estimates for both of these markets, there is a huge wealth creation effect going on. we know both cultures have strong affinities to gold and now decreasing discretion area income and taking more gold off the market." says Jason Toussaint,

The Tower of Brabble

(Brabble = "paltry noisy quarrel")



This article by David Sirota urges readers to "trash their smartphones," which might or might not be a good idea. I'm sympathetic to it -- I just have a basic cellphone, and the only upgrade I'm thinking about is to a phone with a QWERTY keyboard -- but on the whole I still disagree with his analysis.



Sirota begins thusly:

A miracle is occurring as you read these words - that's right, an impossible-to-explain miracle of the mind. Somehow, you just managed to read a complete sentence - and that's nearly inexplicable these days.
Oh, horsepucky. This is pure Occidental hyperbole. Since he published it at Salon.com, one of the text-heavier sites around these days, he must know it's bullshit. Sirota gives no evidence for that statement; I suppose it's just one of those things that Everybody Knows. He continues:

There you sit, hammered by stimuli - on your computer screen, you're pounded by an overflowing RSS reader, twitching Facebook and Twitter feeds, an email box constantly chirping at you and IM bubbles doing their best pop-up video impression; off in the distance, your television frantically flits between images of explosions and a screaming, over-coiffed suit whose impossibly fat head floats disembodied above a never ending ticker-tape; and on your desk, face up, a cell phone perpetually spasming with text messages, photos from friends, yet more email and, of course, phone calls.
Well, there you are. It isn't just smartphones, it's what the media (the major perpetrators) call Information Overload. Instant messaging programs, Facebook, Twitter, most e-mail -- these are all corporate media, and being corporate they are enemies of your ability to concentrate. They want to shift your attention away from wherever it is now to something else, anywhere else as long as it's paid content. The more commercial links you click on, the more money someone makes. The more edits in the videos or tv shows or movies you watch, the more excited you'll be, and the more you'll find more leisurely-paced content boring. TV news is limited in time, so concision is at a premium, and of course complex thoughts can't be expressed in soundbytes, but complex thoughts are the Devil's playground, so it's all good.



The necessity to be connected at all times is partly habit, but it's also mandated by a lot of white-collar work, as Jill Andresky Frazier showed in her book White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (Norton, 2001). As the crumbling economy has deteriorated even further and employment instability has made more inroads into management, you have to be on call -- accessible, available, connected -- at all times. If you aren't, someone else is willing, and will be happy to take your job.



None of this is news, of course. Various Jeremiahs have been yelping that television is destroying our attention spans for decades, and every new technology that affects information, from writing to printing to the telephone to electronic media, has been denounced as a threat to our civilization. But that was then and this is now, and this time, Sirota insists (along with others of his ilk), it's really true!



Maybe so. But where's the evidence? Sirota has nothing but anecdotes and what Everybody Knows. (Can't you feel your mind degrading right now? Did you even make it to the end of this sentence? You see! I told you.) But then he says this:

The science is pretty clear in showing that the Internet is rewiring our cerebral circuitry and re-melting our plasticky gray matter in ways that can addict us to the short information bursts that the Internet specializes in.
Those two links at "pretty clear" go to two articles by Nicholas Carr, a writer at The Atlantic. One article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", offers no scientific evidence at all about the effects of the Internet on our brains -- none. Carr admits that "we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition," and then provides a link to one study of "online research habits," in which researchers

examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.
This proves basically nothing. Imagine a study of the old library card catalogs and printed journal indexes that scholars used to use before such resources went online. I know from my own experience that someone observing my own use of such tools would have found the same pattern of behavior: skimming, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source I'd already visited. That's because only a small amount of the material I skimmed over was useful to my work. And this is the sum total of Carr's evidence for the deleterious effect of the Internet: he says that the study he cited "suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think." "Suggests" is a far cry from "pretty clearly showing."



I wouldn't be surprised if researchers behaved like this, but again, it has more to do with economic and political pressures in academia than with anything about the Internet. In the good old days an academic could get tenure with barely any publications at all; but since the explosion of higher education in the US since World War II, with more and more Ph.D.s being ground out by the universities, and fewer and fewer jobs for them, they've had to compete with each other by publishing more. This produces vast numbers of articles, dissertations, and books, far too many for any human being to read and digest. Nowadays in the humanities you need at least a book published by an academic press, and some articles besides don't hurt. That's the economic pressure, but it's buttressed by political pressure from state legislatures to provide "objective" evidence that you, O pointy-headed intellectual, deserve your job. A scholarly book or article needs to include citations of other scholars' work, another "objective" criterion of quality. The Internet makes it easier to track down references, and produce that all-important paper (or increasingly, electronic) trail that will get you a secure job, and possibly free you to think instead of collect material for the footnotes.



The other article by Carr that Sirota linked to is an interview in which he expands on his concerns without any new evidence, much less "science." At best this "suggests" that Sirota is guilty of the same sloppiness he decries, and I suppose he can blame it on the Internet, but writers and scholars did the same thing long before there was an Internet.



Of course, ignoring structural and political factors is another feature (not a bug) of the corporate media. I agree with Sirota that ramping down one's use of rapid-fire media is a good idea, though for the reasons I've mentioned, it may not be as easy as exercising a little willpower. Sirota does admit that for some people a smartphone may be a "genuine necessity, by virtue of one's work," but claims that most who justify it on that ground are just trying to excuse their "addiction."



So what about someone like me, whose "addiction" is to print, to sentences and paragraphs and longer strings of text? C'mon, gimme a little taste, I need just a little, please... Sirota doesn't mention e-readers, and whatever my reservations about them, there's no doubt that people are using them to read, you know, books. The concentration of publishing into fewer and fewer conglomerates, like that of media into fewer and fewer media consortiums (consortia?) is connected to the success of e-books, but it's not the fault of the Internet either.



One other factor might be worth mentioning here, and that's the magical thinking that underlies a lot of the celebration of computers and the Internet. Recently I read something that reminded me that many people expected word processors to do more than just make it technically easier to compose, edit, and format text: on some level they expected it to produce content as well -- just sit back and let the computer write your novel for you! The same consideration applied to graphics and video software: you still had to come up with the content yourself -- it's so unfair! Other people expected the Web to do their "thinking and communicating" for them:

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.
They too were disappointed when they found out that it was just a tool for transmitting information: they were still going to have to do their own thinking. Still other people thought that computers would be pets. Still no go. And these fantasies were harbored and promulgated by computer geeks themselves, though of course they were useful in advertising as computers caught on among non-geeks. In the end, there's no real escape from what is for so many people the misery of being human: computers and the Internet are not saviors, though they could be useful tools for those who want to save themselves. That's hard work, though.



The Tower of Brabble

(Brabble = "paltry noisy quarrel")



This article by David Sirota urges readers to "trash their smartphones," which might or might not be a good idea. I'm sympathetic to it -- I just have a basic cellphone, and the only upgrade I'm thinking about is to a phone with a QWERTY keyboard -- but on the whole I still disagree with his analysis.



Sirota begins thusly:

A miracle is occurring as you read these words - that's right, an impossible-to-explain miracle of the mind. Somehow, you just managed to read a complete sentence - and that's nearly inexplicable these days.
Oh, horsepucky. This is pure Occidental hyperbole. Since he published it at Salon.com, one of the text-heavier sites around these days, he must know it's bullshit. Sirota gives no evidence for that statement; I suppose it's just one of those things that Everybody Knows. He continues:

There you sit, hammered by stimuli - on your computer screen, you're pounded by an overflowing RSS reader, twitching Facebook and Twitter feeds, an email box constantly chirping at you and IM bubbles doing their best pop-up video impression; off in the distance, your television frantically flits between images of explosions and a screaming, over-coiffed suit whose impossibly fat head floats disembodied above a never ending ticker-tape; and on your desk, face up, a cell phone perpetually spasming with text messages, photos from friends, yet more email and, of course, phone calls.
Well, there you are. It isn't just smartphones, it's what the media (the major perpetrators) call Information Overload. Instant messaging programs, Facebook, Twitter, most e-mail -- these are all corporate media, and being corporate they are enemies of your ability to concentrate. They want to shift your attention away from wherever it is now to something else, anywhere else as long as it's paid content. The more commercial links you click on, the more money someone makes. The more edits in the videos or tv shows or movies you watch, the more excited you'll be, and the more you'll find more leisurely-paced content boring. TV news is limited in time, so concision is at a premium, and of course complex thoughts can't be expressed in soundbytes, but complex thoughts are the Devil's playground, so it's all good.



The necessity to be connected at all times is partly habit, but it's also mandated by a lot of white-collar work, as Jill Andresky Frazier showed in her book White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (Norton, 2001). As the crumbling economy has deteriorated even further and employment instability has made more inroads into management, you have to be on call -- accessible, available, connected -- at all times. If you aren't, someone else is willing, and will be happy to take your job.



None of this is news, of course. Various Jeremiahs have been yelping that television is destroying our attention spans for decades, and every new technology that affects information, from writing to printing to the telephone to electronic media, has been denounced as a threat to our civilization. But that was then and this is now, and this time, Sirota insists (along with others of his ilk), it's really true!



Maybe so. But where's the evidence? Sirota has nothing but anecdotes and what Everybody Knows. (Can't you feel your mind degrading right now? Did you even make it to the end of this sentence? You see! I told you.) But then he says this:

The science is pretty clear in showing that the Internet is rewiring our cerebral circuitry and re-melting our plasticky gray matter in ways that can addict us to the short information bursts that the Internet specializes in.
Those two links at "pretty clear" go to two articles by Nicholas Carr, a writer at The Atlantic. One article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", offers no scientific evidence at all about the effects of the Internet on our brains -- none. Carr admits that "we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition," and then provides a link to one study of "online research habits," in which researchers

examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.
This proves basically nothing. Imagine a study of the old library card catalogs and printed journal indexes that scholars used to use before such resources went online. I know from my own experience that someone observing my own use of such tools would have found the same pattern of behavior: skimming, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source I'd already visited. That's because only a small amount of the material I skimmed over was useful to my work. And this is the sum total of Carr's evidence for the deleterious effect of the Internet: he says that the study he cited "suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think." "Suggests" is a far cry from "pretty clearly showing."



I wouldn't be surprised if researchers behaved like this, but again, it has more to do with economic and political pressures in academia than with anything about the Internet. In the good old days an academic could get tenure with barely any publications at all; but since the explosion of higher education in the US since World War II, with more and more Ph.D.s being ground out by the universities, and fewer and fewer jobs for them, they've had to compete with each other by publishing more. This produces vast numbers of articles, dissertations, and books, far too many for any human being to read and digest. Nowadays in the humanities you need at least a book published by an academic press, and some articles besides don't hurt. That's the economic pressure, but it's buttressed by political pressure from state legislatures to provide "objective" evidence that you, O pointy-headed intellectual, deserve your job. A scholarly book or article needs to include citations of other scholars' work, another "objective" criterion of quality. The Internet makes it easier to track down references, and produce that all-important paper (or increasingly, electronic) trail that will get you a secure job, and possibly free you to think instead of collect material for the footnotes.



The other article by Carr that Sirota linked to is an interview in which he expands on his concerns without any new evidence, much less "science." At best this "suggests" that Sirota is guilty of the same sloppiness he decries, and I suppose he can blame it on the Internet, but writers and scholars did the same thing long before there was an Internet.



Of course, ignoring structural and political factors is another feature (not a bug) of the corporate media. I agree with Sirota that ramping down one's use of rapid-fire media is a good idea, though for the reasons I've mentioned, it may not be as easy as exercising a little willpower. Sirota does admit that for some people a smartphone may be a "genuine necessity, by virtue of one's work," but claims that most who justify it on that ground are just trying to excuse their "addiction."



So what about someone like me, whose "addiction" is to print, to sentences and paragraphs and longer strings of text? C'mon, gimme a little taste, I need just a little, please... Sirota doesn't mention e-readers, and whatever my reservations about them, there's no doubt that people are using them to read, you know, books. The concentration of publishing into fewer and fewer conglomerates, like that of media into fewer and fewer media consortiums (consortia?) is connected to the success of e-books, but it's not the fault of the Internet either.



One other factor might be worth mentioning here, and that's the magical thinking that underlies a lot of the celebration of computers and the Internet. Recently I read something that reminded me that many people expected word processors to do more than just make it technically easier to compose, edit, and format text: on some level they expected it to produce content as well -- just sit back and let the computer write your novel for you! The same consideration applied to graphics and video software: you still had to come up with the content yourself -- it's so unfair! Other people expected the Web to do their "thinking and communicating" for them:

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.
They too were disappointed when they found out that it was just a tool for transmitting information: they were still going to have to do their own thinking. Still other people thought that computers would be pets. Still no go. And these fantasies were harbored and promulgated by computer geeks themselves, though of course they were useful in advertising as computers caught on among non-geeks. In the end, there's no real escape from what is for so many people the misery of being human: computers and the Internet are not saviors, though they could be useful tools for those who want to save themselves. That's hard work, though.



HARD TO IMAGINE.

There's something about Sweden's Little Majorette that's deceptively brilliant. Frontwoman Zoe Durrant's voice is unthreateningly whisper-soft, sometimes infantilized even, bringing to mind fellow Scandinavian heartbreakers, Flunk. We first fell for Durrant in her previous project Havana Guns - whose debut single "She Always Goes Down" briefly won over our hearts and minds before their breakup back in 2006 - but with Little Majorette she's back and better than ever, joined by musicians Petter Winnberg and Nils Tornqvist, who also moonlight as musicians in Miike Snow's touring band.



In "Never Be The Same", Durrant's vocals provide the perfect distraction from the suspicious piano chords ominously crescendoing under the dark electronic shadow of the song's intro, anxiety building as the synths crawl closer and you brace yourself for the jump scare around the corner that never comes. That is, until the massive gang vocal chorus drops and an avalanche of Miike Snow-sized synths from the coldest Arctic winter fall from the sky above. Then just as you think the coast is clear, they unleash one of the most chillingly amazing keys riffs we've ever heard, almost classical in its design as it spirals up, up and away into the cold night air as the song reaches its twilight. And just like that, Little Majorette burst onto the scene out of nowhere with one of our favorite singles of the year. Shock and awe.



MP3: "Never Be The Same" - Little Majorette

ATRA Releases List of Worlds 10 Safest Airlines

In first-ever kind of a ranking, as many as six U.S. carriers are placed among the ‘Top 10 Safest Airlines’ in the world. The report was released by the Air Transport Rating Agency (ATRA) yesterday.



European-based Air Transport Rating Agency (ATRA) released its list of the world's 10 safest airlines yesterday. While European and American airlines seldom make it to the top rankings when it comes to top notch customer service, carriers from these regions seem to be much safer as per the ATRA.



As many as six North American airlines made it top the top 10. These airlines are American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways. European carriers that made it to the list are Air France - KLM, British Airways and Lufthansa.



No airlines from Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East or Asia are in the top ten lists, with the sole exception of Japan Airlines.



The ATRA is a rating agency based in Geneva, Switzerland that deals with aviation risk assessment and advanced data analyses in the air travel sector.



To conduct first study of its kind, the Air Transport Rating Agency is reported to have examined publicly available information on 15 criteria. This includes total number of travellers and cabin crew workforce; the average age of the carrier's aircraft fleet, frequency of accidents in past ten years, dedicated flight academy pilot-training facilities and dedicated full flight simulators.



Air Transport Rating Agency elucidated that to understand airline safety, one is required to not only look at accident figures, but also give attention to "technical, human, organisational and external" elements.



ATRA believed that the European Union's list was a good beginning as far as airline safety rating is concerned but the agency said that the listing led to a belief that all airlines which do not feature on the 'blacklist' are providing the same level of safety, which the agency believes is surely not the case.



For more information visit here

Emirates staff 'to become Dubai experts'

People travelling with Emirates may soon find they can get all the information they need from the airline's staff.



People taking flights to Dubai with Emirates could soon find that they can get all the information they need about their holiday from the airline's staff.



The Dubai Department of Tourism & Commerce Marketing has announced that it is working on a project which will provide training for staff working with the airline to make them as knowledgeable as possible about what is going on in the emirate.



Staff are trained on new developments, what is opening soon and the key selling points of the location.



"Dubai is always growing and diversifying, so this type of regular training with our teams ensures that our clients are always provided with the most up to date destination knowledge" said Barry Brown, Emirates vice-president for Australasia.



For more information visit here

Gay Horror Stories!-kinda

Gay Horror Stories!-kinda

World's Top 10 Safest Airlines According to the ATRA

Air Transport Rating Agency (ATRA) has come with a report that lists the world’s most safe airlines. This report was released by the agency yesterday and already it has created quite a flutter in the industry and raised a few eyebrows.



According to the report, no airline from Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East is ‘safe enough’ to be listed in the top 10. On the other hand, as many as six American airlines -American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways - have made it to the list.



Air France-KLM, British Airways and Lufthansa are the three Europe-based airlines that are included in the top 10 safest airlines list. Whereas, Japan Airlines is the only Asian carrier that will appeal to the anxious traveller looking for cheap flight tickets!



It is interesting to note that the list of safest airlines has no crossover with operators providing top notch customer service. It seems that passengers who buy air tickets can either have good customer service or excellent flight safety!



Geneva-based ATRA is a rating agency that deals with aviation risk evaluation and advanced data analyses in the air travel sector. The agency has conducted this first of its kind study and it is reported that the agency has examined publicly available information on 15 criteria before coming up with these rankings. Few criteria that were considered by the ATRA are the figure of travellers and cabin crew employees, the average age of the carrier’s aircrafts and number accidents taken place in last decade. Air Transport Rating Agency also took in the consideration the availability of dedicated flight academy pilot-training facilities and dedicated full flight simulators.



ATRA explained that just depending on the accident figures to come up with a quotient of airline safety is not entirely right. One is needed to look into the “technical, human, organisational and external” elements before making the call.



ATRA hailed European Union’s ‘blacklist’ as the step in the right direction as far as airline safety rating is concerned, but the agency believes that EU’s list led to a belief that airlines which do not feature on the 'blacklist' are all on the same level as far as safety in concerned.



“Even though the European Union publishes a 'blacklist' of dangerous airlines, there exists a real difference in safety between the other airline companies,” ATRA was quoted by various news portals.



No Skytrax Awarded Airline in ATRA’s List



None of the airlines that are renowned all over the world for their superior customer care or in-flight services have found a place in the ATRA’s newly released list. Cheap flights on 5-star airlines like Qatar Airways and Asiana remain much in demand but it seems when it comes to safety these airlines do not actually grab the top honours.

The Culture Is Going Down the Water Closet

I took a break from writing a post I'm not sure about and began reading The Case of the Gilded Fly, a 1944 murder mystery by Edmund Crispin, recently reprinted by Felony & Mayhem. This was Crispin's first book, and so far it's entertaining. The setting is Oxford during World War II, and some of the characters are academics and former academics. One of the former is Professor Gervase Fen, of whose friendship with a police constable the narrator tells us:

Their relationship was further complicated by the fact that Fen had solved several cases in which the police had come to a dead end, while Sir Richard had published three books of literary criticism (on Shakespeare, Blake and Chaucer), which were regarded by the more enthusiastic weekly papers as entirely outmoding conventional academic criticism of the sort Fen produced. It was, however, the status of each as an amateur which accounted for their remarkable success; if they had ever changed places, as a mischievous old don in Fen's college once suggested, Fen would have found the routine of police work as intolerable as Sir Richard, the niggling niceties of textual criticism; there was a gracious and rather vague sweep about their hobbies which ignored such tedious details. Their friendship was a longstanding one, and they enjoyed each other's company enormously [12].
An example of the ex-academics is Nicholas Barclay.

As an undergraduate reading English a brilliant academic career had been prophesied for him, and he had bought, and read, all those immense annotated editions of the classics in which the greater part of every page is occupied with commentary (with a slight gesture to the author in the form of a thin trickle of text up at the top, towards the page number), and the study of which is considered essential to all those so audacious as to aim at a Fellowship. Unfortunately, several days before his final examination, it occurred to him to question the ultimate aims of academic scholarship ... [14].
I enjoyed these digressions on English academia in the 1940s because to hear some people today tell it, you'd think that impenetrable and pedantic writing by academics was a recent development in the UK and the US, probably due to infection by French theory. (French theory I cannot possibly allow; people always think it is improper .... But German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed, I believe is so.*) But it's nothing new, and is a lot older than this book. I think I'll enjoy the rest of it.



*Yes, that's a deliberate misquotation.

The Culture Is Going Down the Water Closet

I took a break from writing a post I'm not sure about and began reading The Case of the Gilded Fly, a 1944 murder mystery by Edmund Crispin, recently reprinted by Felony & Mayhem. This was Crispin's first book, and so far it's entertaining. The setting is Oxford during World War II, and some of the characters are academics and former academics. One of the former is Professor Gervase Fen, of whose friendship with a police constable the narrator tells us:

Their relationship was further complicated by the fact that Fen had solved several cases in which the police had come to a dead end, while Sir Richard had published three books of literary criticism (on Shakespeare, Blake and Chaucer), which were regarded by the more enthusiastic weekly papers as entirely outmoding conventional academic criticism of the sort Fen produced. It was, however, the status of each as an amateur which accounted for their remarkable success; if they had ever changed places, as a mischievous old don in Fen's college once suggested, Fen would have found the routine of police work as intolerable as Sir Richard, the niggling niceties of textual criticism; there was a gracious and rather vague sweep about their hobbies which ignored such tedious details. Their friendship was a longstanding one, and they enjoyed each other's company enormously [12].
An example of the ex-academics is Nicholas Barclay.

As an undergraduate reading English a brilliant academic career had been prophesied for him, and he had bought, and read, all those immense annotated editions of the classics in which the greater part of every page is occupied with commentary (with a slight gesture to the author in the form of a thin trickle of text up at the top, towards the page number), and the study of which is considered essential to all those so audacious as to aim at a Fellowship. Unfortunately, several days before his final examination, it occurred to him to question the ultimate aims of academic scholarship ... [14].
I enjoyed these digressions on English academia in the 1940s because to hear some people today tell it, you'd think that impenetrable and pedantic writing by academics was a recent development in the UK and the US, probably due to infection by French theory. (French theory I cannot possibly allow; people always think it is improper .... But German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed, I believe is so.*) But it's nothing new, and is a lot older than this book. I think I'll enjoy the rest of it.



*Yes, that's a deliberate misquotation.

Gold Rush : the wholesale jewelry industry

About half of all of the gold in the world actually ends up as jewelry and for some investors, that's the way to go. own physical gold. Lafayette, Louisiana, is the home of stoler, the largest wholesale jewelry manufacturer in the united states. and what a home a 600,000 square foot facility, 1200 employees strong. this is where it all begins. gold is brought here in the form of these big gold bars and they weigh 400 ounces a piece and some of it is melted down to the bars sold to individual investors and the rest is combined with this gold from the manufacturing processes. all of it is destined for the melt house. only 60% of the supply of gold in the world comes from mines and the other 40% comes from people melting it down. melted gold, recyclable is 40% of the supply right now

Mining Gold Making | Minitip - Smelting Obsidium

Usually metal bars are more expensive than the ore, even if you take into account how many ores a bar requires. In this example I use Obsidium Ore. As you can see, on my realm the prices are currently the following.



Every realm has different prices
At least the more popular realms have lots of mining bots posting stuff and they rarely smelt the ore into bars. Sure the obsidium prospectors need a boatload of ores everyday, but there's still more gold to be made if more of the ores were turned into bars.

Currently it costs less than 2g to make a bar and bars go for 3g. From my experience during weekends the prices are lower and during peak hours they are usually even higher, but obsidium ore stays low almost everytime. In other words, there's a lot of profit to be made!

Protips
  • Use 12 hour duration when posting bars. You will get undercut and the fees are often high!

  • You need 425 skill in mining to make use of this.

  • Try other ores aswell. Copper, Bronze, Cobalt and Saronite often have even higher profits!


ATRA Releases Top 10 Safest Airlines List

If you’re an anxious traveller who gets all jittery when faced with the prospect of air travel, there is some good news and some bad news for you.



First the good news - Air Transport Rating Agency (ATRA), a Geneva-based rating agency that deals with aviation risk evaluation and advanced data analyses in the aviation sector, has come with a list that features top10 safest carriers. So, now whenever you are required to book cheap flight tickets you can opt for the airlines that are the ‘safest’ as per the list (check the list below).



Moving on to the seemingly bad news - this list released by the ATRA does not feature a single airline that has been awarded by Skytrax this year. So, basically it means that most probably you will not be flying with the carrier of your liking if you prefer to book cheap flights tickets keeping in mind ATRA’s top 10 safest airlines list. It seems flight quality and flight safety do not go together!



Another striking feature of this one of its kind list is there is no airline from Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East in the list. No Qatar Airways, No Qantas, No Virgin Australia, No Jetstar and No Air New Zealand! On the other hand, six US based airlines have made it to the list along with three European and one Asian airline.



World's 10 Safest Airlines (In Alphabetical Order)

Air France-KLM

AMR Corporation (American Airlines)

British Airways

Continental Airlines

Delta Airlines

Japan Airlines

Lufthansa

Southwest Airlines

United Airlines

US Airways

Dubai Airport sees record numbers of passengers

Dubai Airport has revealed that it saw a record number of people pass through the terminal in July.



People taking cheap flights to Dubai could find that there are a large number of other travellers in the terminal after it was reported the airport had seen a big boost in numbers last month.



According to figures released by Dubai International Airport, a record 4.7 million passengers passed through the terminal during July 2011.



This number was an increase of 400,000 people on the previous month and means that 29.2 million people used the airport during the first seven months of this year.



It was a nine per cent increase on the number of travellers recorded for the same period of 2010.



"This latest milestone further illustrates Dubai International Airport's emergence as a preeminent global hub," said Paul Griffiths, chief executive officer of Dubai Airports.



For more information visit here

POPSHOP009: THE KNOCKS + WYNTER GORDON.

Worried your Labor Day weekend plans will get in the way of Popshop this week? Well worry no more, as we're pushing things back a week to September 8th so as to maximize rage potential and make sure no one misses out. Trust us though, the wait is more than worth it, as this one may well be our biggest lineup ever.



Fresh off a party rocking set at All Things Gold 002 last week in DC are our partners in crime The Knocks returning as headliners, and those who attended their first headline show at Popshop 002 last February will remember it as one of the craziest nights we've ever put on. Then bringing the heat in the main support slot is superpop vixen Wynter Gordon, whose omnipresent smash single "Dirty Talk" has had her living at the top of the charts so long she should be paying rent. Rounding out the lineup is NYC's own hometown hero and firstborn son of the HeavyRoc family Samuel, as well as London via Tel-Aviv electro types Tiger Love, hot on the heels of international dates supporting Mark Ronson & The Business Intl. And as if that live lineup wasn't massive enough, we've got a once-in-a-lifetime, I-was-there-when Goldsmith reunion on the decks, as our superstar alumni Ellie Goulding and Starsmith get together on the ones and twos in the headline DJ slot.



As is Popshop family tradition, we'll be providing an Absolut Vodka OPEN BAR from 8pm- 9pm and a FREE KEG of Heineken at 2am for our nearest and dearest who decide to rage with us well into the early morning. Changing up our ticket approach this time, the first 50 people to order online can cop $10 early bird tickets, after which all remaining tickets will be $13 in advance and $15 on the door. Tickets are available online from the Popshop site HERE, so move fast to cop that price break and don't sleep on this one, this will be another sell out.



09:00pm: Samuel // DOWNLOAD: "Champagne Kisses"



10:00pm: Tiger Love // DOWNLOAD: "Under Control"



11:00pm: Wynter Gordon // STREAM: "Dirty Talk" (Laidback Luke Remix)



12:00am: The Knocks // DOWNLOAD: "Sunshine"



01:00am: Goldsmith // DOWNLOAD: "Black & Gold"

The Trouble With Privilege Is That Everybody Doesn't Have It

I don't remember where I first heard the title of this post, but it seems to me that someone ascribed it to Virginia Woolf. Whoever said it, I think it's right.

One day about a week ago Homo Superior posted on same-sex marriage, attacking an article by the English writer and provocateur Mark Simpson. The article, which turns out to be two years old, argues that marriage is basically a religious institution and that same-sex couples don't need it if they can get marriage-equivalent civil unions, as they can in England. This displeased HS, who argued that
there is no progressive case against gay marriage as an issue of social justice, not unless progressive politics has stopped meaning the struggle for maximum freedom and full equality. One might make radical critiques against the institution of marriage — and please do so in the privacy of your own seminars — but all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions, not attempted to create new ones out of air, because that’s what equality requires.
Does it? And why should "radical critiques" of marriage take place only "in the privacy of your own seminars"? (And who's "you"?) Such critiques have been around for some time, and they don't have anything to do with same-sex marriage per se. The early Christian churches weren't big on marriage or on sex of any kind, and a radical critique of marriage was advanced by nineteenth-century feminists. It should also be remembered that heterosexual marriage is rather on the skids in the US, with many heterosexuals preferring to avoid legal bonds in favor or more informal arrangements. Domestic partnerships were first registered in the US by cohabiting heterosexuals. Simpson didn't claim in his article that new institutions should be created "out of air" -- he pointed out that different sexual and domestic arrangements already exist. He also argued that most British queerfolk were satisfied with civil partnerships, which would be one of those "new institutions."

It's also false that "all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions", though I must thank Homo Superior for giving me such an opening. The anti-slavery movement didn't seek to change access to an existing institution, it sought to abolish it. Slavery was very old and had a religious dimension as well: in the New Testament the Christian is a slave of Christ, and abolitionists have always had difficulty finding biblical support for their position because there really isn't any. (This counts against the Bible, of course, not in favor of slavery.) "Changing access" to the institution of slavery would have entailed something like subsidies to enable the less wealthy to have slaves of their own, and eventually to allow black people to own slaves too, including white ones. That would be "equality" in exactly the sense HS is talking about, but I don't think many people would see it as desirable.

The reason a radical critique of marriage is in order is that marriage has traditionally had nothing to do with equality. First, it existed, and still exists, to privilege some couples over others. If you're married, your sexual relations are licit; if not, they are fornication or adultery. Laws against fornication largely fell by the wayside in the United States in the late twentieth century, but some states still have laws against adultery. The children of married couples are also licit, or legitimate, and the aim has always been to privilege some children over others. The stigma of illegitimacy has diminished greatly in the past few decades, but it's not totally gone yet. Many "marriage equality" advocates talk about the "rights" that follow from marriage, but they are privileges and benefits, not rights -- if they were rights, it's a violation of the principle of equality to reserve them for married couples.

The gap has narrowed somewhat in the past century, but marriage also enshrines inequality between the partners, with the wife losing much of her legal personhood when she marries. And those are just the legal disabilities. Until fairly recently, married women were less happy than unmarried women -- or married men. The change has been explained as a result of married women's increased autonomy, especially the freedom to earn their own money. But whatever the reason, women have been voting with their feet against heterosexual marriage, around the world. The real question ought to be why marriage still has so much prestige.

The legal and social disability of single people -- including unmarried couples -- compared to married ones isn't exactly a secret: "marriage equality" campaigners harp on the point constantly. But they aren't campaigning to increase access to marriage's privileges and benefits by single people -- only by same-sex couples. As IOZ asked once, "If they are, in fact, human rights, then why must you be married to acquire them?" To invoke equality in connection with an intentionally and functionally unequal institution such as marriage is dishonest.

Let's not forget divorce. Marriage makes it harder and messier for couples to separate, even when there are no children involved. It looks to me as though many couples stay together longer than they should, from a misplaced fear of being judged wanting -- selfish, lazy, immature -- because they didn't live happily ever after. I've succumbed to it myself, but I've also seen enough other people make the same mistake, at great emotional cost, that it bears stressing here.

I have a few bones to pick with Simpson, though. He begins his diatribe by objecting to religious opponents of same-sex marriage being called bigots.
It’s faintly absurd to have to even say this, but it isn’t bigoted to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s just being conventional.
We have a false antithesis here: a goodly proportion of bigotry is conventional, often obligatory. Like many people, Simpson mistakes bigotry for an individual pathology, not a social structure.

Nor is marriage a fundamentally religious institution (though see above, on the religious dimension of slavery). In un-secular societies, just about every aspect of life is sacralized, from birth to death. If marriage were basically religious, though, that would be an argument against government involvement in it -- in the United States, that is. Simpson seems to overlook the formal separation of religion and government in America, while England has a state Church. In European countries, even those with established churches, the distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage is often even more sharply drawn.

Besides, as I've pointed out before, the American separation of religion and government means that same-sex couples who want religious ceremonies can roll their own, as it were, and there's no legal barrier to their doing so; the legal barriers here are to same-sex civil marriage. The supposed non-bigots Simpson defended can wail and gnash their teeth, but they can't stop same-sex couples from redefining religious marriage to suit themselves.

I'd point again to Nancy Polikoff's book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008), which argues that all families should be valued, whether they involve married or quasi-married couples. Children need support and protection whether their parents are married to each other nor not. American and European society were already moving in that direction until the 1980s, when a pro-marriage backlash pushed by the religious Right tried to reverse the trend. The depressing thing is that so many gay people went along with it.

A common misunderstanding of second-wave feminism and gay liberation was that, because they made radical critiques of marriage, they were therefore against any coupling or relationships at all. It's important to recognize the validity of single life (and celibacy, for that matter), and of erotic life that doesn't involve exclusive couples, but many people have formed successful long-term couples that weren't formalized in marriage. (One researcher recently pointed out that non-marital couples don't last as long as married ones; but that may be not be a bad thing -- from what I've seen, a good many couples stay together a lot longer than is good for them.) The importance of friendship, whether or not it includes erotic relations, needs a lot more attention too. What matters is enabling and encouraging people to discover and choose what they really want from their relationships, and I believe one way to move in that direction is by decentering marriage, and making it one possibility among others for people who are getting intimate with each other.

The Trouble With Privilege Is That Everybody Doesn't Have It

I don't remember where I first heard the title of this post, but it seems to me that someone ascribed it to Virginia Woolf. Whoever said it, I think it's right.

One day about a week ago Homo Superior posted on same-sex marriage, attacking an article by the English writer and provocateur Mark Simpson. The article, which turns out to be two years old, argues that marriage is basically a religious institution and that same-sex couples don't need it if they can get marriage-equivalent civil unions, as they can in England. This displeased HS, who argued that
there is no progressive case against gay marriage as an issue of social justice, not unless progressive politics has stopped meaning the struggle for maximum freedom and full equality. One might make radical critiques against the institution of marriage — and please do so in the privacy of your own seminars — but all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions, not attempted to create new ones out of air, because that’s what equality requires.
Does it? And why should "radical critiques" of marriage take place only "in the privacy of your own seminars"? (And who's "you"?) Such critiques have been around for some time, and they don't have anything to do with same-sex marriage per se. The early Christian churches weren't big on marriage or on sex of any kind, and a radical critique of marriage was advanced by nineteenth-century feminists. It should also be remembered that heterosexual marriage is rather on the skids in the US, with many heterosexuals preferring to avoid legal bonds in favor or more informal arrangements. Domestic partnerships were first registered in the US by cohabiting heterosexuals. Simpson didn't claim in his article that new institutions should be created "out of air" -- he pointed out that different sexual and domestic arrangements already exist. He also argued that most British queerfolk were satisfied with civil partnerships, which would be one of those "new institutions."

It's also false that "all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions", though I must thank Homo Superior for giving me such an opening. The anti-slavery movement didn't seek to change access to an existing institution, it sought to abolish it. Slavery was very old and had a religious dimension as well: in the New Testament the Christian is a slave of Christ, and abolitionists have always had difficulty finding biblical support for their position because there really isn't any. (This counts against the Bible, of course, not in favor of slavery.) "Changing access" to the institution of slavery would have entailed something like subsidies to enable the less wealthy to have slaves of their own, and eventually to allow black people to own slaves too, including white ones. That would be "equality" in exactly the sense HS is talking about, but I don't think many people would see it as desirable.

The reason a radical critique of marriage is in order is that marriage has traditionally had nothing to do with equality. First, it existed, and still exists, to privilege some couples over others. If you're married, your sexual relations are licit; if not, they are fornication or adultery. Laws against fornication largely fell by the wayside in the United States in the late twentieth century, but some states still have laws against adultery. The children of married couples are also licit, or legitimate, and the aim has always been to privilege some children over others. The stigma of illegitimacy has diminished greatly in the past few decades, but it's not totally gone yet. Many "marriage equality" advocates talk about the "rights" that follow from marriage, but they are privileges and benefits, not rights -- if they were rights, it's a violation of the principle of equality to reserve them for married couples.

The gap has narrowed somewhat in the past century, but marriage also enshrines inequality between the partners, with the wife losing much of her legal personhood when she marries. And those are just the legal disabilities. Until fairly recently, married women were less happy than unmarried women -- or married men. The change has been explained as a result of married women's increased autonomy, especially the freedom to earn their own money. But whatever the reason, women have been voting with their feet against heterosexual marriage, around the world. The real question ought to be why marriage still has so much prestige.

The legal and social disability of single people -- including unmarried couples -- compared to married ones isn't exactly a secret: "marriage equality" campaigners harp on the point constantly. But they aren't campaigning to increase access to marriage's privileges and benefits by single people -- only by same-sex couples. As IOZ asked once, "If they are, in fact, human rights, then why must you be married to acquire them?" To invoke equality in connection with an intentionally and functionally unequal institution such as marriage is dishonest.

Let's not forget divorce. Marriage makes it harder and messier for couples to separate, even when there are no children involved. It looks to me as though many couples stay together longer than they should, from a misplaced fear of being judged wanting -- selfish, lazy, immature -- because they didn't live happily ever after. I've succumbed to it myself, but I've also seen enough other people make the same mistake, at great emotional cost, that it bears stressing here.

I have a few bones to pick with Simpson, though. He begins his diatribe by objecting to religious opponents of same-sex marriage being called bigots.
It’s faintly absurd to have to even say this, but it isn’t bigoted to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s just being conventional.
We have a false antithesis here: a goodly proportion of bigotry is conventional, often obligatory. Like many people, Simpson mistakes bigotry for an individual pathology, not a social structure.

Nor is marriage a fundamentally religious institution (though see above, on the religious dimension of slavery). In un-secular societies, just about every aspect of life is sacralized, from birth to death. If marriage were basically religious, though, that would be an argument against government involvement in it -- in the United States, that is. Simpson seems to overlook the formal separation of religion and government in America, while England has a state Church. In European countries, even those with established churches, the distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage is often even more sharply drawn.

Besides, as I've pointed out before, the American separation of religion and government means that same-sex couples who want religious ceremonies can roll their own, as it were, and there's no legal barrier to their doing so; the legal barriers here are to same-sex civil marriage. The supposed non-bigots Simpson defended can wail and gnash their teeth, but they can't stop same-sex couples from redefining religious marriage to suit themselves.

I'd point again to Nancy Polikoff's book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008), which argues that all families should be valued, whether they involve married or quasi-married couples. Children need support and protection whether their parents are married to each other nor not. American and European society were already moving in that direction until the 1980s, when a pro-marriage backlash pushed by the religious Right tried to reverse the trend. The depressing thing is that so many gay people went along with it.

A common misunderstanding of second-wave feminism and gay liberation was that, because they made radical critiques of marriage, they were therefore against any coupling or relationships at all. It's important to recognize the validity of single life (and celibacy, for that matter), and of erotic life that doesn't involve exclusive couples, but many people have formed successful long-term couples that weren't formalized in marriage. (One researcher recently pointed out that non-marital couples don't last as long as married ones; but that may be not be a bad thing -- from what I've seen, a good many couples stay together a lot longer than is good for them.) The importance of friendship, whether or not it includes erotic relations, needs a lot more attention too. What matters is enabling and encouraging people to discover and choose what they really want from their relationships, and I believe one way to move in that direction is by decentering marriage, and making it one possibility among others for people who are getting intimate with each other.

Mumbai airport 'subject to new security measures'

People travelling from Mumbai have been advised that there have been new security measures put in place.



Travellers who take flights to Mumbai have been advised that when they come to depart the country there are a series of new security measures in place.



In the past, people did not experience any form of search until they reached the security hold area, the Times of India reported.



However, checks on passengers and their baggage will take place earlier, with the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security now requiring an X-ray system to be used for baggage and hand-held metal detectors which will be used by airport employees.



"Till now, there was no frisking or examining of luggage till one procured a boarding pass and moved to the security area. Now, most pieces of luggage will be screened at the entrance as well," an official at the airport told the newspaper.



For more information visit here

Nebraska Supreme Court rules nonbio mom entitled to hearing on custody and visitation

The facts are sad but common. Lesbian couple, Teri Latham and Susan Rae Schwerdtfeger, were together for 20 years and had a child born to Susan using donor semen about 15 years into their relationship, in 2001. They cared for the child as co-parents. In 2006 they split up. The child stayed with Susan but Teri claimed that she continued to see her son three to five times a week and to support him financially. According to Teri, in 2007, Susan began to cut down on her visitation time, and, in December 2009, Teri filed a petition for custody and visitation.



Although the trial judge initially gave her 30 minutes of visitation three times a week, six months later the judge dismissed Teri's case without a trial (although it appears the judge talked to the child in chambers), ruling that the doctrine of in loco parentis did not apply to her case. Teri appealed, and last Friday the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in her favor. Teri now has the right to a trial.



The court determined that no statute gave Teri standing to bring her action but that the common law doctrine of in loco parentis did give her standing. Previous Nebraska court rulings had used that doctrine to order both visitation and child support for a stepparent and to grant a grandparent custody. "The Legislature did not intend that statutory authority be the exclusive basis of obtaining court-ordered visitation," the Latham court held. "If Latham can establish that she has met the standard...for granting relief to one who stands in loco parentis, there is no reason to exclude this case from the benefits of the doctrine afforded to stepparents and grandparents who have created similar relationships with a minor." The court cited rulings in lesbian split-up custody cases from numerous other states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Washington; it did not acknowledge the states that have denied nonbio moms the ability to obtain custody or visitation.



The court continued:
The primary determination in an in loco parentis analysis is whether the person seeking in loco parentis status assumed the obligations incident to a parental relationship. Application of the doctrine protects the family from allowing intervention by individuals who have not established an intimate relationship with the child while at the same time affording rights to a person who has established an intimate parent-like relationship with a child, the termination of which would not be in the best interests of the child.


Susan disputed a number of facts that Teri asserted, primarily after the couple split up. The case, therefore, returns to the lower court for a trial. And here the Nebraska Supreme Court opinion gets a bit murky. Although there is lots of talk about determining whether it is in the child's best interests for Teri to receive visitation, the court also acknowledges the factual dispute about the time Teri spend with the child after the couple split up and the nature of Teri's relationship with the child. This makes it seems as though the trial judge could believe Susan's version of the facts and determine that after the break up there was no in loco parentis relationship and then not consider whether visitation is in the child's best interests. But the court also notes that the diminished visitation in the two years before the case was filed reflected Susan's decision, not a lack of desire on Teri's part to be in the child's life. Presumably this means the trial court has to take into account Susan's obstruction of Teri's relationship with the child.



Even on a pure "best interests" basis, Teri faces a problem when the case returns to the lower court. There is no evidence she has seen her child for more than a year. There was little contact for some time before that. What's in this child's best interests at this moment will look different from the way it would have looked when the couple first split up. To that extent, Teri may fare less well than will future nonbio moms in Nebraska. But Teri will always be one of those "pioneering parents" whose contribution to LGBT family law is being honored at this year's Lavender Law conference.



One other comment, which I've made before. So-called "gay friendly" states are not necessarily good states for respecting the families formed by same-sex couples having children. And so-called "not gay friendly" states can get it just right. For other examples, compare New York and Kentucky.

Bangkok to welcome festival of music and dance

Bangkok is shaping up to host this year's music and dance festival in September.



Travellers on cheap flights to Bangkok could enjoy taking a trip to the city's 13th International Festival of Music and Dance during their stay.



Taking place from September 9th to October 16th 2011, the event is the country's biggest festival celebrating the art forms and provides an insight into both traditional and contemporary music and dance.



There is a huge number of events taking place across the course of the month, with everything from Swan Lake on Ice to the contemporary styles of Casa Azul.



Music lovers will also have the chance to see a live orchestra accompanying a film of the BBC's Blue Planet series.



The Vienna Boys Choir will also be showcasing their abilities.



For more information visit here

The Trouble with Separatism

The other issue I meant to write about yesterday was racial (and other) separatism, but I figured that post was long enough already.

One major item on the Nation of Islam's wishlist was a black-only state, possibly a state within the US to be handed over exclusively to the Black Man. As this idea recurred in Marable's account, I began wondering what it would have helped. In a racist country -- as the United States is, and was even more in the early days of the Nation -- a black-only state would have been isolated economically from outside. Would the Interstate Highway System have included the black state? I didn't quite figure out whether Elijah Muhammad had in mind an independent, sovereign nation, which would have been even more isolated. Even if the new black nation wasn't landlocked, its larger, richer, vastly more powerful white neighbor would have kept it under strict surveillance.

White racists would have been quite happy with such a situation. While black self-sufficiency was also a plank of the Nation's platform, self-sufficiency is largely an illusion. I imagine at least some traffic in "guest workers" from the black nation to the white, to maintain a basement for white workers' wages and working conditions. (Sound familiar?) It would also bring some income to the black nation. If we're talking about simply a black state within the Union, the permeability of the border would be even greater. No doubt there would also be frequent "incidents" at the frontier, blamed by each side on the other.

One of the selling points of this vision was that blacks would treat one another well in their own state or nation, and be able to live proudly by contrast to their lives in a white supremacist state. By comparison, maybe so. But Elijah Muhammad doesn't seem to have had much interest in democracy for blacks. He ran the Nation of Islam as his own personal fief, from the top down. Discipline was maintained by the paramilitary Fruit of Islam, with corporal punishment the norm. But I suppose it's less bothersome to be thrown down the stairs or beaten within an inch of your life by Your Own. No doubt the Bonus Marchers, white World War I veterans trampled by police horses and shot down in the streets by white soldiers, would have agreed.

Leave aside the question of intraracial conflict and oppression, though. I kept wondering about travel to and from the black state or nation. Would blacks be under an outright ban everywhere else in the US under this arrangement, and would whites be utterly excluded from the black state? (And what about people of "mixed race"? Malcolm X himself was light-skinned, and harped in his Autobiography on the blood of the "devil" he carried. Should he have been allowed into the Promised Land?) Would having a black state justify the other forty-nine's being all white? That wouldn't have been the result in any case: if all African-Americans magically disappeared overnight, the growing Latino minority would still be giving white racists the megrims, along with Asians and the traditional Irish, Italians, and Jews. One of the notable things about these kinds of exclusions is that they are ultimately a game of Musical Chairs: get rid of the blacks, and the remainder would still be divided against itself, as it had been throughout American history. It would then be necessary to expel one more group after another, until the Anglo-Saxons were driven back across the ocean. But in that case, shouldn't the entire human species return to Africa?

This is why the quest for separation makes no sense to me. The Nation of Islam, as far as I could tell, agreed that it was legitimate for people to reject those whom they defined as different from themselves, and to try to drive them out. Certainly this was a very American sentiment. But if one accepts the necessity of racially uniform states, it's longer valid to condemn whites for their racism: on this construction they are simply conforming to human nature, black no less than white. Yet no society, no country, is really uniform, and every society manages to deal with some differences. It's not clear to me what determines the threshold at which difference starts to matter; it varies within the same society from time to time under different conditions.

The same consideration applies to Israel, many of whose apologists postulate the universality and inevitability of anti-Semitism and claim that Jews, no less than Christians, are entitled to their own homeland, But Christians don't have their own homeland, and aren't entitled to one. The history of Christianity is marked by the same infighting between sects: Which Christianity? Were Catholics right to try to purge Protestants, Lutherans to burn Anabaptists, Anglicans to disenfranchise Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and other dissenters? Aren't Christians entitled to a homeland free of heretics? The Zionist claim only makes sense on the assumption that they are; but remove the Jews and Christians will be at each other's throats, and in their new homeland Jews will be divided among themselves. If Zionists want to argue that religious or racial uniformity is legitimate, then anti-Semitism (along with every other form of bigotry) ceases to be illegitimate. It's striking that Zionism should have borrowed the assumptions of racism and religious bigotry as justifications for its own national project. At a time in history when bigotry was under attack and pluralism became a desirable principle, Zionism came down on the side of the racists. (See, for example, Paul Breines's Tough Jews.) The black nationalism of the Nation of Islam seems to have come from the same sources.

The evolution of gay identity politics has exhibited the same contradictions. The mainstream of gay politics in the US has adopted a quasi-ethnic model, sometimes merely from expediency but also from conviction. This connects to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's universalizing vs. minoritizing schema: are homosexuals a discrete, even racially distinct human subgroup, or are we more like a religion, a potential for conversion that exists in every person? The minoritizing, quasi-ethnic model would seem to imply that we are cuckoos in the heterosexual nest, who must come out and rejoin our original group; yet the minoritizing gay movement also is assimilationist, embracing reactionary notions of family and social acceptability. The anti-assimilationists often share the biological model of homosexuality as a genetic difference, but (maybe more consistently) stress that it makes us different, invoking Jungian mysticism and notions of inherent gay culture. Given Jung's racial and racist mysticism, we come full circle. Harry Hay reportedly used to say that gay boys "smell wrong" to our fathers, which is why they reject us. Well, if we're biologically different, and if it's natural to shut out what is different, why shouldn't they reject us? Again, the differences between the assimilationists and the anti-assimilationists look less important to me than their similarity.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I wanted to highlight the contradictions that make it impossible, in my view, to follow these theories of racial / religious / erotic difference to any logical end. But as a Darwinian, I don't assume that underneath it all, human beings must have evolved to be able to come together despite our differences. There's no reason to believe so. It may be that we are driven by powerful, conflicting impulses towards inclusion and exclusion that can't be resolved. But it seems clear to me that these impulses produce division in any human group, no matter how uniform it may seem at first. For that reason, separatism won't work. We have two main choices: either to privilege separation, which ends in smaller and smaller warring communities, or to work toward connection and inclusion -- not to believe we're all the same, but to recognize what we have in common. I think it is possible through education and conscious social engagement to get people to embrace difference and incorporate more of it in any group, but it will always be a dynamic, ongoing process, never to be finally settled. Still, I'd rather proceed on the presumption that it can be managed, and that engagement with difference is both workable and satisfying.