Two worlds and in between

Another school offers gender-neutral housing

gaywrites:

Grand Valley State University in Michigan has started offering its students gender-neutral housing. The change is the result of a student-led initiative and is now in effect.

Gender-neutral housing won’t be limited to certain buildings on campus; only rooms. Students who have requested gender-neutral housing will be paired together as roommates.

Beechnau also said Housing and Residence Life has started training housing staff on gender and sexuality issues.

“We’ve made some very positive strides in training and partnering with some resources on campus,” he said. “But given this, it will be something we’ll continue to train on.

“The response I’ve received, both internally and externally, has been very positive. And it kind of makes sense. You want all of your students to be able to succeed, and that’s just what we’re about.”

Awesome! 

Meanwhile, the student housing at Oxford was all single rooms - no roommates (although sometimes this meant the rooms were as small as closets), no sex segregation, everybody was mixed together on the same floor, and bathrooms were all unisex (with only one toilet and one shower or bathtub per bathroom; usually there was one bathroom for every five rooms, although in the more posh student lodgings, where each private study/bedroom came with its own sink and toilet and possibly even a shower, the public bathrooms were less plentiful - more like one per floor).

And nobody seemed to care.

I rather preferred this to the American approach of sex segregation and shared large rooms in large single-sex or mixed-sex-but-segregated-by-floor-or-wing dorms.

The Political Notebook: Nobel Peace Prize highlights role of women in achieving peace, democracy

thepoliticalnotebook:

csmonitor:

The award sets a historic precedent by going to three women for the first time. In the history of the prize, only 12 out of the 97 individuals who have received the prize were women.

Really pleased with this prize. It went to three women who not only work for women’s rights,…

(Source: csmonitor.com, via thepoliticalnotebook)

Taking Stock of the Long Wars: A Proposal

theatlantic:

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan War. This occasion should prompt Americans to consider a simple question: How’s it going?

“It,” of course, refers to much more than Afghanistan.

After all, the campaign launched on October 7, 2001 to destroy Al Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban soon metastasized. Beyond the unnecessary diversion into Iraq, the enterprise once known as the Global War on Terror now finds U. S. military and intelligence forces engaged in places as far afield as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.

Over the past decade thousands of American soldiers have been killed, and thousands grievously wounded in body and spirit. Pentagon spending has more than doubled, reaching levels not seen since World War II. Estimated costs of “the long war” now reach well into the trillions. And there is no end in sight. Senior military officers no longer bother to promise victory. Instead, in the words of General George Casey, they consign the United States to an era of “persistent conflict.”

That American warriors are brave and skillful is beyond doubt. Still, as presently configured, our armed forces achieve indifferent results while costing American taxpayers exorbitant amounts.

So again: How’s it going?

Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla, Boston University’s  Andrew Bacevich, national correspondent James Fallows, and former United States Senator. Gary Hart evaluate the War in Afghanistan, 10 years later. Read more at The Atlantic

“It” (war in Afghanistan and Iraq) is a large reason for our atrocious deficit. (The other reason is the trickle-down policies of George W. Bush, who made tax cuts for the rich while simultaneously passing high spending on munitions, military supplies, prescription drugs for Medicare, and assorted corporate welfare pork sandwiches for various industries and cronies.) “It” was supposed to be over. So what about “it?”

Obama's Press Conference Remarks on Occupy Wall Street

youngmanhattanite:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. As you travel the country, you also take credit for tightening regulations on Wall Street through the Dodd-Frank law, and about your efforts to combat income inequality. There’s this movement — Occupy Wall Street — which has spread from Wall Street to other cities. They clearly don’t think that you or Republicans have done enough, that you’re in fact part of the problem.

Are you following this movement, and what would you say to its — people that are attracted to it?

THE PRESIDENT: Obviously I’ve heard of it. I’ve seen it on television. I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel — that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street, and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place.

So, yes, I think people are frustrated, and the protestors are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works. Now, keep in mind I have said before and I will continue to repeat, we have to have a strong, effective financial sector in order for us to grow. And I used up a lot of political capital, and I’ve got the dings and bruises to prove it, in order to make sure that we prevented a financial meltdown, and that banks stayed afloat. And that was the right thing to do, because had we seen a financial collapse then the damage to the American economy would have been even worse.

But what I’ve also said is that for us to have a healthy financial system, that requires that banks and other financial institutions compete on the basis of the best service and the best products and the best price, and it can’t be competing on the basis of hidden fees, deceptive practices, or derivative cocktails that nobody understands and that expose the entire economy to enormous risks. That’s what Dodd-Frank was designed to do. It was designed to make sure that we didn’t have the necessity of taxpayer bailouts; that we said, you know what? We’re going to be able to control these situations so that if these guys get into trouble, we can isolate them, quarantine them, and let them fail. It says that we’re going to have a consumer watchdog on the job, all the time, who’s going to make sure that they are dealing with customers in a fair way, and we’re eliminating hidden fees on credit cards, and mortgage brokers are going to have to — actually have to be straight with people about what they’re purchasing.

And what we’ve seen over the last year is not only did the financial sector — with the Republican Party in Congress — fight us every inch of the way, but now you’ve got these same folks suggesting that we should roll back all those reforms and go back to the way it was before the crisis. Today, my understanding is we’re going to have a hearing on Richard Cordray, who is my nominee to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He would be America’s chief consumer watchdog when it comes to financial products. This is a guy who is well regarded in his home state of Ohio, has been the treasurer of Ohio, the attorney general of Ohio. Republicans and Democrats in Ohio all say that he is a serious person who looks out for consumers. He has a good reputation. And Republicans have threatened not to confirm him not because of anything he’s done, but because they want to roll back the whole notion of having a consumer watchdog.

You’ve got Republican presidential candidates whose main economic policy proposals is, we’ll get rid of the financial reforms that are designed to prevent the abuses that got us into this mess in the first place. That does not make sense to the American people. They are frustrated by it. And they will continue to be frustrated by it until they get a sense that everybody is playing by the same set of rules, and that you’re rewarded for responsibility and doing the right thing as opposed to gaining the system.

So I’m going to be fighting every inch of the way here in Washington to make sure that we have a consumer watchdog that is preventing abusive practices by the financial sector.

I will be hugely supportive of banks and financial institutions that are doing the right thing by their customers. We need them to be lending. We need them to be lending more to small businesses. We need them to help do what traditionally banks and financial services are supposed to be doing, which is providing business and families resources to make productive investments that will actually build the economy. But until the American people see that happening, yes, they are going to continue to express frustrations about what they see as two sets of rules.

He sounded firey and progressive and supportive in 2008, too. You’ll forgive me if I withhold my applause for now.

(via inothernews)

A tiny Canadian island gives proof that humans are still evolving . . .

jtotheizzoe:

The tiny island of Île aux Codres in the St. Lawrence River kept detailed records of all its inhabitants from 1799 to 1940.

The age at which a woman has her first child is highly heritable due to the genetics of fertility. By studying the birth records of the women on the island, scientists noticed that the age fell from 26 to 22. This allowed the women to have more children during their lifetime and was a clear example of selection in a modern human population. This particular island group was free of many social effects that could have tainted the data.

The idea that human evolution has slowed or stopped with the dawn of modern civilization is falling by the wayside.

I keep saying my autism is a genetically passed trait that is like the “X Factor,” and can be as enabling as it is disabling, and because nerds tend to breed with other nerds, and a lot of nerds are autistic to some degree, the trait is becoming more dominant.

But Autism Speaks doesn’t want to listen. Fancy that.

(Source: jtotheizzoe)