Citizens of the District of Columbia are now free to marry:
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to stop same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia, clearing the way for couples to register to wed beginning Wednesday. Equal-rights opponents in the capital had asked Chief Justice John Roberts to prevent the issuing of licenses until residents had voted on the issue. Lower courts had denied requests to place a moratorium on issuing of licenses.
"It has been the practice of the court to defer to the decisions of the courts of the District of Columbia on matters of exclusively local concern," wrote Roberts, who made the decision without bringing in the full court.
Roberts also cited the fact that although D.C. is autonomous, Congress could have passed a bill to disallow the city government from enacting the law, and it did not do so.
Marriages may be performed beginning March 9, as there is a waiting period of three business days after the issuance of licenses.
In response to the D.C. marriage equality law, Catholic Charities will no longer offer spousal benefits to any new or newly-married employees:
[On March 1st], Catholic Charities President and CEO Edward Orzechowski sent out a memo to staffers informing them of the change to the health care coverage, which will go into effect [March 2nd].
In short: If you and your spouse are already enrolled in Catholic Charities health coverage, your spouse will be grandfathered in. Starting tomorrow, however, new employees (or newly married employees, hint hint) will not be allowed to add spouses to the plan. So: Longtime employees will receive the spousal benefits they’ve always had; Catholic Charities will get to keep its pool of covered spouses gay-free; only fresh employees and gays will feel the sting on this one.
Orzechowski's memo to employees closes with, "Thank you for your understanding in this matter, and let me again express my appreciation for your support and patience over these past months as we have worked hard to arrive at a decision that allows us to continue to serve others in a manner that is consistent with our religious beliefs." Now, I'm not Christian, but I've read the instruction manual, and I'm not sure how exactly bigotry is consistent with it. But, you know, Orzechowski's a grown-up, he can make his own choices. Still, I'd pay real money to watch their financials over the next 24 months...
Columnist Jonah Lehrer thinks about insomnia:
[W]henever we try not to think about something that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. Our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation.
This human frailty has profound consequences. Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, refers to the failure as an "ironic" mental process. Whenever we establish a mental goal — such as trying not to think about white bears, or sex, or a stressful event — the goal is accompanied by an inevitable follow-up thought, as the brain checks to see if we're making progress. The end result, of course, is that we obsess over the one thing we're trying to avoid.
I will be thinking about that tonight, I'm sure.
"[I]f James Carville and Jim DeMint are correct to argue that failing to pass HCR will be 'Obama's Waterloo' then the converse must also be true and, therefore, passing the bill could also be 'Obama's Waterloo' because, you know, Waterloo was a significant victory for some of us." —British journalist Alex Massie.
She goes on to say: "And even if it's not a final, crushing victory on the scale of Waterloo, it might be considered 'Obama's Peninsular War.' That's not nothing, either. Right?"
Diane and I completely unplugged this weekend so I'm spending the evening catching up. I'll have photos probably Tuesday, depending how crazy tomorrow goes for me. Meanwhile, a joke from one of my clients:
A noob used the following password: "MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento" When asked why he had such a long password, he said he was told that it had to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.
Paul Krugman has a review posting explaining the concept:
Core inflation isn’t supposed to measure the cost of living, it’s supposed to measure something else: inflation inertia.
Think about it this way. Some prices in the economy fluctuate all the time in the face of supply and demand; food and fuel are the obvious examples. Many prices, however, don’t fluctuate this way — they’re set by oligopolistic firms, or negotiated in long-term contracts, so they’re only revised at intervals ranging from months to years. Many wages are set the same way.
Why the review? Because we're becoming like more Japan in the 1990s:
[I]nflation tends to be self-perpetuating, unless there’s a big excess of either supply or demand. In particular, once expectations of, say, persistent 10 percent inflation have become “embedded” in the economy, it will take a major period of slack — years of high unemployment — to get that rate down. Case in point: the extremely expensive disinflation of the early 1980s.
...And what these measures show is an ongoing process of disinflation that could, in not too long, turn into outright deflation.
It's not quite end-of-the-world stuff, but it does make one nervous.
Chicago Public Radio's David Hammond investigated raw-milk cheese, which is illegal to sell in Illinois:
HAMMOND: ...[W]e got together with a group of chefs and other food enthusiasts in Itasca at a wine bar called Wine with Me to sample both raw and pasteurized milk versions of camembert. No money changes hands, and we’re all consenting adults, so technically there’s no illegal activity taking place. Sitting around a big wooden table, we’re confronted by two very different looking cheeses. As part of this taste test, neither cheese was labeled, but the differences were very apparent. One cheese was rigid and uniform; the other was collapsing in on itself. We started by putting our noses into the stuff. Gary Wiviott is a Chicago food writer and author.
WIVIOTT: Of the two cheeses, one has a distinct ammonia smell and the other smells funky, earthy, almost a little mushroom-y, like a damp forest on a fall day, when the leaves are just starting to break down, very appealing, a very appealing aroma. And the other has a less appealing aroma…I just want to dive into the softer, slightly gooey looking one. I just want to take a big bite out of the darn thing.
Is there a black market for raw-milk cheese in Illinois? Or do I have to go to France to get some?
The Tribune today has a guide to pub trivia in Chicago.
With my nights free and my dog in another time zone (i.e., no need to rush home and walk him after work), I will try some of them. Any other recommendations?
Answer: Tallinn.
The epitome of overcompensating excess and planetary rape will soon fade away into memory:
The sale of the [Hummer] SUV brand with military roots to a Chinese heavy equipment maker has collapsed. GM said it would still hear offers for the company, but potential investors would have to move fast.
GM said Wednesday that its bid to sell Hummer to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines Co. fell through. The Chinese manufacturer said it failed to get clearance from regulators in Beijing within the proposed timeframe for the sale.
GM will continue to honor warranties for current Hummer owners.
One wonders what short, angry men will drive instead? I guess there's always the Escalade, or possibly the good ol' John Deere 9030.
There's one other consequence of this: once again, a hummer will be a good thing.
A winter storm off the coast of North Carolina has brought snow to both Chicago and Raleigh:
25 mm of snow had fallen at O'Hare by 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, with snow still coming down hard. That was enough to push the city's official seasonal snow tally above 127 cm for the third consecutive year. There's been only one other string of three consecutive 50+ inch seasons in 125 years of snow measurements here and it occurred between 1976 to 1979.
Lake effect snows occur in especially cold environments which, because of the efficiency of ice crystal formation at low temperatures, frequently produce larger than typical accumulations from the limited amount of water vapor available. This leads to snowflakes which exhibit maximum "fluff". Estimates of Wednesday's snow puts snow/water ratios at 30 to 1---indicating the system's snowflakes had almost three times the volume of those which come down in more typical 10 to 1 ratio snow events. One witness, in describing the rate of snowfall in Evanston, compared the scene to a "snow globe." Another described "pure whiteout conditions with snow coming in horizontally" and still another characterized the snowfall intensity at its height Wednesday evening as "this season's heaviest."
In North Carolina the snow is causing the same kinds of disruptions as in Chicago—slow traffic, nervous parents, confused dogs—but...well, it's not quite as much snow:
But I have to agree with my friend Jamie, who, when I mentioned the comparison, said "you picked a good winter to stay in North Carolina." I'm thinking she's right.