Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Whew, what a day!
There are days when I trawl the Web, and nothing of any significance seems to be happening. And then there are days when I am overwhelmed. Today was one of the latter. Way too much information!! Here’s a sampler of the headlines (mostly without comment):
By edict of its Supreme Judicial Court, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began today to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
This is no minor change. As Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation says, "It does not expand marriage, but alters its core meaning." To so redefine marriage is to "sever the institution from its nature and purpose." Spalding does an excellent job of piecing together how this has all come about.
How long these “marriages� will last only time will tell. But the evidence from Sweden is not encouraging. A study there found that gay male couples were 1.5 times as likely (or 50 percent more likely) to divorce as married opposite-sex couples, while lesbian couples were 2.67 times as likely (167 percent more likely) to divorce as opposite-sex married couples over a similar period of time.
While the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in New Zealand have been moving closer towards fully accepting homosexual ministers, the Methodist Church in the USA has ruled that active homosexuals, as determined by a church court, may not serve in pastoral leadership within the United Methodist Church.
Transexuals will be able to compete at the Olympics if they have had appropriate surgery and are legally recognised as members of their new sex, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said today. The rule will cover both male-to-female and female-to-male cases and will be in place before the Athens Games in August.
Can you believe it, the Law Society has finally decided that maybe it’s not a particularly good look when a successful defence lawyer hosts the jury that acquitted his client to a jolly old knees-up afterwards. One presumes he didn’t issue the invitations before the 12 men good and true retired to consider their verdict.
The head judge of the Youth Court is suggesting that young lawbreakers should be removed from the care of Child, Youth and Family and put into the charge of a new Youth Justice department. A separate government department specialising in youth justice would be better resourced and more focused, Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft said. (Why, when we run up against a problem, do we have to create yet another government department to solve it???)
Some MPs are questioning the decision to lower the drinking age to 18 as new figures show more drunk teen drivers are killing others on our roads.
But staying off the hard stuff may be just as dangerous to your health. Carbonated drinks (eg, Coca Cola) may raise the risk of esophageal cancer, a usually fatal disease, researchers reported on Monday.
If you want to take your solace in music, you could be in danger of losing everything there, too. CD rot is being discovered in early CDs, as the aluminium layer corrodes. Those “lifetime� recordings are anything but. I have also heard that the ink from felt pens will corrode the CD (for those of you who have a large collection of “otherwise obtained� and home-burned CDs).
Former All Black Craig Dowd says the Super 12 is a bore. I’ve certainly been finding it a lot easier to not watch this year. Graham Henry would do well to listen to Dowd’s reasons why New Zealand Rugby teams are not doing so well this year. If the Crusaders are to beat the Brumbies in the final on Saturday, they will have to make some big changes to the way they run the game.
Since the middle of the last century a debate has been raging about what’s there in the dark places of the universe, those vast areas of blackness that account for the great bulk of the gravitational force of the universe. That something is in there, they have no doubt. But just what that something is, no sound scientific conclusions have yet been reached. More and more scientists are using the terms, “dark matter� and “dark force,� to describe the gravitational force that keeps the cosmos from flying apart. There isn’t enough visible mass in the universe – planets, stars, comets, dust, and all the rest – to create gravitational attraction strong enough to maintain the integrity and operation of the whole. T.M. Moore finds that when physicists begin talking about this “dark matter�, they can sound downright religious.
To end on a light note, we had a debate around the morning tea table in our office yesterday about what the initials “MG� (as in sports cars) stand for. I didn’t know. The answer is very mundane – but it might win you a trivial pursuit game some time.
There are days when I trawl the Web, and nothing of any significance seems to be happening. And then there are days when I am overwhelmed. Today was one of the latter. Way too much information!! Here’s a sampler of the headlines (mostly without comment):
By edict of its Supreme Judicial Court, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began today to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
This is no minor change. As Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation says, "It does not expand marriage, but alters its core meaning." To so redefine marriage is to "sever the institution from its nature and purpose." Spalding does an excellent job of piecing together how this has all come about.
How long these “marriages� will last only time will tell. But the evidence from Sweden is not encouraging. A study there found that gay male couples were 1.5 times as likely (or 50 percent more likely) to divorce as married opposite-sex couples, while lesbian couples were 2.67 times as likely (167 percent more likely) to divorce as opposite-sex married couples over a similar period of time.
While the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in New Zealand have been moving closer towards fully accepting homosexual ministers, the Methodist Church in the USA has ruled that active homosexuals, as determined by a church court, may not serve in pastoral leadership within the United Methodist Church.
Transexuals will be able to compete at the Olympics if they have had appropriate surgery and are legally recognised as members of their new sex, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said today. The rule will cover both male-to-female and female-to-male cases and will be in place before the Athens Games in August.
Can you believe it, the Law Society has finally decided that maybe it’s not a particularly good look when a successful defence lawyer hosts the jury that acquitted his client to a jolly old knees-up afterwards. One presumes he didn’t issue the invitations before the 12 men good and true retired to consider their verdict.
The head judge of the Youth Court is suggesting that young lawbreakers should be removed from the care of Child, Youth and Family and put into the charge of a new Youth Justice department. A separate government department specialising in youth justice would be better resourced and more focused, Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft said. (Why, when we run up against a problem, do we have to create yet another government department to solve it???)
Some MPs are questioning the decision to lower the drinking age to 18 as new figures show more drunk teen drivers are killing others on our roads.
But staying off the hard stuff may be just as dangerous to your health. Carbonated drinks (eg, Coca Cola) may raise the risk of esophageal cancer, a usually fatal disease, researchers reported on Monday.
If you want to take your solace in music, you could be in danger of losing everything there, too. CD rot is being discovered in early CDs, as the aluminium layer corrodes. Those “lifetime� recordings are anything but. I have also heard that the ink from felt pens will corrode the CD (for those of you who have a large collection of “otherwise obtained� and home-burned CDs).
Former All Black Craig Dowd says the Super 12 is a bore. I’ve certainly been finding it a lot easier to not watch this year. Graham Henry would do well to listen to Dowd’s reasons why New Zealand Rugby teams are not doing so well this year. If the Crusaders are to beat the Brumbies in the final on Saturday, they will have to make some big changes to the way they run the game.
Since the middle of the last century a debate has been raging about what’s there in the dark places of the universe, those vast areas of blackness that account for the great bulk of the gravitational force of the universe. That something is in there, they have no doubt. But just what that something is, no sound scientific conclusions have yet been reached. More and more scientists are using the terms, “dark matter� and “dark force,� to describe the gravitational force that keeps the cosmos from flying apart. There isn’t enough visible mass in the universe – planets, stars, comets, dust, and all the rest – to create gravitational attraction strong enough to maintain the integrity and operation of the whole. T.M. Moore finds that when physicists begin talking about this “dark matter�, they can sound downright religious.
To end on a light note, we had a debate around the morning tea table in our office yesterday about what the initials “MG� (as in sports cars) stand for. I didn’t know. The answer is very mundane – but it might win you a trivial pursuit game some time.
