Video: Connecticut Court Allows Gay Marriage + Why Gays Don’t Go Extinct

I’m a straight person who does not see any problem with gay marriage. We need less children in the world, not more. Let them.  Being gay has a genetic component so it is just part of who some people really are.

Homosexuality in males may be caused in part by genes that can increase fertility in females, according to a new study.

The findings may help solve the puzzle of why, if homosexuality is hereditary, it hasn’t already disappeared from the gene pool, since gay people are less likely to reproduce than heterosexuals.

A team of researchers found that some female relatives of gay men tend to have more children than average. The scientists used a computer model to explain how two genes passed on through the maternal line could produce this effect.

In 2004 the researchers studied about 200 Italian families and found that the mothers, maternal aunts and maternal grandmothers of gay men are more fecund, or fruitful, than average. Recently, they tried to explain their findings with a number of genetic models, and found one that fit the bill.

“This is the first time that a model fits all our empirical data,” said Andrea Camperio-Ciani, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy who led the study. “These genes work in a sexually antagonistic way — that means that when they’re represented in a female, they increase fecundity , and when they’re represented in a male, they decrease fecundity. It’s a trait that benefits one sex at the cost of the other.”

The researchers detail their findings in the June 18 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

If this scenario turns out to be true, it could help explain the seeming paradox of hereditary homosexuality. Since gay people are less likely to reproduce than heterosexuals, many experts have wondered why, if homosexuality is caused by genetic factors, it wouldn’t have been eliminated from the gene pool already.

But if the same genes create both homosexuality in men and increased fertility in women, then any losses in offspring that come about from the males would be made up for by the females of the family. – livesci

Golden Gate Bridge Directors Vote for Suicide Safety Net

The magnificent Golden gate bridge, for all its beauty, or maybe because of it, has always attracted those poor souls who saw no point in going on and decided they might as well make their exit spectacular. Almost two dozen people a year are reported to end their lives by jumping off the bridge which spans the San Francisco bay. Although official figures aren’t published, in order to not encourage potential jumpers, it’s estimated that roughly 1,300 unfortunate people plummeted to their deaths 200 feet below the bridge.

After decades of debate, the Golden Gate Bridge board of directors voted 14-to-1 on Friday to install safety netting 20 feet below the bridge’s deck. The net, made of metal wiring coated with plastic, will catch any jumpers and allow rescue teams to easily untangle them due to its design, which makes it partially collapse around anyone who jumped into it, according to Denis Mulligan, chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, the authority which oversees the structure.
The rope, which is the preferred solution out of five proposed suicide barriers, has the lowest maintenance cost of the five, and is considered the safest for bridge workers. Before it is installed however, it must pass a final environmental review, especially concerned with how the netting might affect pelicans and cormorants flying by. The engineering and design must be completed, and a contractor hired. The financing is also an issue, considering its projected cost of $40 to $50 million. This means that all-in-all it may take several years before the 3.4 miles of netting are installed, said bridge district spokeswoman Mary Currie, who remarked that “Our next big challenge is to come up with the money.”

Despite the potential stops, supporters of the suicide net have hailed the long-awaited decision. Net lobbyist Dr. Mel Blaustein, president of the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California commented on the move: “This is a red-letter day in the history of San Francisco,” he said, and said that the Golden Gate Bridge “[is] a suicide magnet. And sometimes all [suicidal people] need is a certain amount of time to stop and reflect and change their mind.”

Similar measures have been installed with some success on high structures at several sites in Europe, including a cathedral in Bern, Switzerland.

The Friday vote came a bit ahead of time as the meeting was supposed to be held to review public comments on the suicide barrier idea and consider preliminary environmental studies. The barrier issue received roughly 5,900 comments by 3,500 people and organizations and an online poll was held, on which 4,000 people voted, almost evenly split between building a barrier and leaving the bridge intact. Tom Ammiano, bridge director and San Francisco supervisor pressed for the vote to be held early after hearing speakers go on for an hour and a half about the high human toll of suicide and the need for the barrier.

“I want the kind of testimony we heard today to stop,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it again, and I don’t want future boards to have to hear it. It’s time to make a decision.”
Although it remains a controversial decision with the public, the board of directors stated that it was the morally correct thing to do.  – eflux

The net should funnel jumpers into a long slide which lands them in a padded room in an underground mental health hospital.

Nearly 300 New Marine Species Found Near Australia

Scientists have found 274 new species of corals, starfish, sponges, shrimps, and crabs 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) beneath the surface of the ocean around Antarctica. (See photos.) “We know very little about the deep sea,” said lead scientist Nic Bax, a marine biologist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Hobart, Tasmania.

“Finding out how much live coral is down there, and how large those communities are, is very exciting,” he added.

Some of the corals were found to be about 2,000 years old, said Bax.

CSIRO made the discoveries in two separate voyages to marine reserves located 100 to 200 nautical miles off the southern coast of the island of Tasmania, Australia.

This is the third large group of marine species recently discovered in Australian waters. (See “113 New Sharks and Rays Announced in Australia” [September 21, 2008] and “Hundreds of New Reef Creatures Found in Australia” [September 18, 2008].)

Jackpot of Marine Life

Using powerful cameras, scientists shot 8,000 pictures and more than 100 hours of video footage of the seafloor.

They also discovered 145 undersea canyons and 80 new seamounts, or underwater mountains. … – natgeo

Inside Operation Highlander: the NSA’s Wiretapping of Americans Abroad

A top secret NSA wiretapping facility in Georgia accused of spying on Americans illegally was hastily staffed with inexperienced reservists in the months following September 11, where they worked under conflicting orders and with little supervision, according to three former workers at the spy complex. …

Now a second former Arabic linguist with the Navy has corroborated her claims to ABC, and to NSA expert James Bamford, who includes the story in his upcoming book Shadow Factory.

If the allegations are true, it would seem to indicate that warrantless spying of Americans approved by President Bush following 9/11 expanded rapidly beyond U.S. borders to citizens overseas, notwithstanding United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, or USSID 18 — an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause.

… At first, Kinne didn’t think they were doing anything wrong because in mid-2002, several months after the surveillance began, a supervisor told her group of linguists and analysts that they had received a “waiver” that allowed them to intercept and listen to the conversations of Americans. The waiver also gave them permission to spy on British, Canadian and Australian citizens Kinne said.

Under federal law, such a waiver would usually require special national security circumstances –- such as an imminent threat of death or attack. But Kinne said the people whose conversations she targeted didn’t discuss information of a military or terrorist nature, and the interceptions occurred over the entire Middle East –- not just in war zones. The surveillance was still going on when Kinne left active reserve duty in August 2003. …

Kinne filed several reports about the aid workers and gave their location to her supervisor, believing that U.S. military personnel might help the aid workers, or at least refrain from shooting their vehicle. But while she was monitoring the workers, a fax arrived, several pages long and written in Arabic. Even though the fax was from a phone number with a higher priority, Kinne ignored it because she felt the lives of the aid workers were more important.

When another worker later read the fax and realized its significance, all of the workers were instructed to drop everything to translate it. Kinne said the fax purported to describe the location of chemical, biological and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As soon as her group completed the translation, she said it was sent to the White House -– the only time information was sent directly in this manner.

After the information was on its way, Kinne looked at the source of the document and began to doubt its authenticity. She said it came from the Iraqi National Congress or Iraqi National Accord — she couldn’t remember which.

Kinne said she expressed doubts to her commanding officer, John Berry, about the authenticity of the information and was told that her job was to collect the information, not analyze it. “He said I didn’t care about our mission or our country … and I needed to stop asking questions,” she said.

Kinne was written up in an incident report for having ignored the fax when it came in.

When she later read news reports confirming that an Iraqi group had fed the military intelligence false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, she suspected the fax had been deliberately sent through an open satellite network so that her unit would intercept it and give it to the White House.

The only other conversations Kinne recalled with any detail involved journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad around the time of the U.S. invasion. The journalists revealed their location in calls to U.S. family members. Kinne said she’d been monitoring the conversations of journalists at the hotel for a while, when the name of the hotel appeared on a military list of targets for bombing. Kinne said she brought the information to Berry’s attention.

“I told him, you realize there are journalists staying in that hotel and we have just said that we are going to bomb it,” she said. “I assumed that … whoever made the targeting list didn’t know journalists were staying there.”

She didn’t know if the information was passed on to anyone, but in April 2003, a U.S. tank fired on The Palestine hotel, which was serving as a base for many journalists. Two journalists were killed. Two subsequent investigations by the army and the Committee to Protect Journalists concluded that the gunners had never been told journalists were at the hotel. … – wired

Fark headline: Virgin turns down $1,000,000 for out-of-this-world sex

The British firm that plans to launch tourists into space from Spaceport America has turned down a $1 million offer to shoot a sex video in space.

Space.com reported on its site Thursday that Virgin Galactic declined the offer to film sex scenes while the participants are floating in zero gravity. Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn told the Web site that the offer from an unidentified party “was $1 million, up front, for a sex-in-space movie. That was money we had to refuse, I’m afraid.”

Virgin Galactic plans to base its operations at Spaceport America, a state-built facility planned for southern Sierra County, north of Las Cruces. When it opens in 2010, Virgin Galactic will charge $200,000 per passenger for two-hour sub-orbital flights aboard its SpaceShipTwo vehicle. – lcsun

Space begins 62 miles up. The MIR space station is 150 miles up. Slate’s Christopher Beam discusses the possibility that  Astronauts have had sex in space:

Former and current astronauts don’t like to talk about space-shuttle sex, and NASA says that if it’s ever happened, the agency doesn’t know anything about it. (NASA has never conducted official experiments on animal reproduction in space, says a spokesman.)

If astronauts have had space sex, it would have been very difficult. First off, there isn’t much privacy up there. A regular shuttle is about as big as a 737, and the two main areas—the crew cabin and middeck—are each the size of a small office. The bathroom is little more than a seat with a curtain, and there aren’t any closed rooms where two people could retreat. The space station, on the other hand, has a little more room to operate. The three-person crew generally splits up for sleeping time: Two of them bed down in a pair of tiny crew cabins at one end of the station, and the third might jump in a sleeping bag at the other end, almost 200 feet away. (The panel-and-strap design of a space bed might not be that conducive to lovemaking.) Astronauts also have a demanding work schedule, leaving them with little time or energy for messing around. Space-station crews do get time off on weekends, though, when they can watch movies, read books, play games, “and generally have a good time.”  – slate

Oil falls below $78, a 13-month low, on global slowdown

The stunning collapse in oil markets accelerated Friday, with a barrel plunging below $78 as investors grow more pessimistic about a mushrooming global economic crisis.

A barrel of oil hasn’t been this cheap in 13 months — a rare silver lining for consumers amid a rapidly imploding financial landscape.

Crude’s steep losses came as Wall Street headed for its worst weekly drop ever. The Dow Jones industrial average fell as much as 700 points earlier in the day but swung in and out of positive territory as investors grappled with whether the market has finally hit a bottom.

“There’s so much fear out there and that’s really gripping the oil market. People are just afraid to hold a position so they’re closing out and selling off,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Mass.

Light, sweet crude for November delivery fell $8.63 to settle at $77.99 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was the lowest settlement price for a front-month crude contract since Sept. 10, 2007.

Crude has now lost 47% of its value since hitting a record $147.27 on July 11 as a deepening credit crisis sparked by the subprime mortgage fiasco wreaks havoc around the globe and drives down energy demand.

Investors have shrugged off an array of market-stabilizing efforts by world governments, including a $700 billion U.S. financial rescue plan, several bank bailouts and a coordinated interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve and central banks around the globe.

Underscoring Americans’ waning appetite for fuel, a gallon of regular gasoline dropped 5.3 cents overnight to a national average of $3.35 a gallon, according to auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express.

Prices dipped below $3 a gallon on average in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. If crude keeps falling, the rest of country should see sub-$3 gasoline in the next few weeks if not sooner, experts say. – usatoday

Pentagon Wants $450 Billion Increase Over Next Five Years

Pentagon officials have prepared a new estimate for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than previously announced figures.

The new estimate, which the Pentagon plans to release shortly before President Bush leaves office, would serve as a marker for the new president and is meant to place pressure on him to either drastically increase the size of the defense budget or defend any reluctance to do so, according to several former senior budget officials who are close to the discussions.

Experts note that releasing such documents in the twilight of an administration is a well-worn tactic, and that incoming presidents often disregard such guidance in order to pursue their own priorities.

And with the nation’s economy caught up in a global financial meltdown, it remains unclear whether either Sen. John McCain , R-Ariz., Sen. Barack Obama , D-Ill., or a Democratic Congress would support such large increases for defense next year.

“This is a political document,” said one former senior budget official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It sets up the new administration immediately to have to make a decision of how to deal with the perception that they are either cutting defense or adding to it.”

Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s top budget official from 2001 to 2004, who is not involved in the current discussions, agreed.

“The thinking behind it is pretty straightforward,” Zakheim said. “They are setting a baseline for a new administration that then will have to defend cutting it.” – cq

See: Secret Pentagon Funding Near All-Time High

Bush’s Iraq Madness helped destroy the US financial system

Foreclosure-proof homes?

Who owns your home?

That seems like a pretty straightforward question. But the answer might not be as clear-cut as you think.

A U.S. District Court judge in Cleveland tossed out 14 foreclosure cases Oct. 31 on the grounds that the bank suing to repossess the properties, Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., didn’t actually own them. Deutsche Bank held debt securities that were linked to the mortgage loans on the properties, not the mortgages themselves. And the judge ruled that a security backed by a mortgage is not the same as a mortgage.

That’s a distinction that could make all the difference in the world — especially to the millions of Americans facing potential foreclosure in our crumbling housing market.

Most people in the U.S. buy houses using mortgage loans from banks and other lending institutions. In theory, the firm that issues your mortgage owns your property until you pay off the loan. In practice, however, that’s not how the modern mortgage business works.

Instead, mortgage lenders typically pool collections of loans and then sell off pieces of the portfolios to Wall Street investors in the form of mortgage-backed securities. Basically, mortgage-backed securities enable lenders to spread the risk so one institution isn’t on the hook when a few people can’t make their monthly payments.

… we’ve seen an explosion in mortgage securities. In 1981, there were $367 billion of these debt instruments outstanding; by the end of last year, there were roughly $6.5 trillion. Mortgage-related securities account for nearly a quarter of today’s total U.S. bond market, more than any other debt sector, including Treasuries and corporate bonds. …The trouble is, these securities are now so complex that it’s become nearly impossible to know who actually owns the underlying properties in a typical mortgage pool. The mortgages are like sticks of chalk pounded into powder. When the dust settles, no one can tell what the original pieces looked like.This, in effect, is why Judge Christopher A. Boyko of the federal District Court in Cleveland dismissed those foreclosure cases. Boyko had asked Deutsche Bank to produce documentation proving that the company held the mortgages on each property it wanted to seize. But after reviewing the paperwork, Boyko ruled that “none [emphasis his] of the assignments show [Deutsche Bank] to be owner of the rights, title and interest under the mortgage at issue.” Essentially, Boyko found that the people who believed they owned the rights to the mortgages couldn’t prove it. And without a legal owner, there was nobody to foreclose on the properties, even if the borrowers had violated the terms of their loans. Case dismissed.

Boyko’s decision challenges one of the central tenets of mortgage-backed securities: The holders have the right to foreclose on delinquent properties. Since the ruling, other Ohio judges have thrown out more than 50 other foreclosure cases on similar grounds.

… if you’re having trouble making your mortgage payments, before you start preparing for the worst, you might want to do a little digging and see who actually owns your home. Because you never know, it may turn out to be no one. – lat

Financial Plan World Reports * US Bankrupt

“The United States is bankrupt and is essentially in the hands of its creditors. The Refunding Program, which should have been kick-started in June 2006, will address and rectify this state of affairs, providing both immediate and long-term relief to the American people and the whole world.” — Christopher Story FRSA, Editor and Publisher, International Currency Review, World Reports Limited, London and New York