On being forced to bake erotic cakes

Michael Morris at Funmentionables bursts right out of the gate on his most recent commentary on religion:

Evidently some conservative Christians have completely run out of actual things to fear. Judson Phillips, the president of Tea Party Nation, worries that without the ability to discriminate against gays, Christians may become “slaves” who could be “required to create a cake for a homosexual wedding that has a giant phallic symbol on it.” You would have to be the world’s worst slave owner, or the most profligate anyway, to use the slaves at your disposal just to create erotic wedding cakes—as if people do that for weddings! I don’t want to know what else Phillips thinks goes on at gay weddings.

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The importance of picking one’s partner carefully

Huffpo quantifies the meaning of a romantic relationship:

When you choose a life partner, you're choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you'll hear about 18,000 times.

Intense shit.

So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?

Instead of doing serious research, most of us do our search haphazardly, falling prey to the availability heuristic:
In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down -- our dating choices are "98 percent a response... to market conditions and just 2 percent immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what's on offer that night." In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might to be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.

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Mid-life lessons

At the NYT, Pamela Druckerman tells us some of the lessons we finally pick up in mid-life. Many of these are easier to state than to put into practice, but it's a worthy list.

If you worry less about what people think of you, you can pick up an astonishing amount of information about them. You no longer leave conversations wondering what just happened. Other people’s minds and motives are finally revealed. • People are constantly trying to shape how you view them. In certain extreme cases, they seem to be transmitting a personal motto, such as “I have a relaxed parenting style!”; “I earn in the low six figures!”; “I’m authentic and don’t try to project an image!” • Eight hours of continuous, unmedicated sleep is one of life’s great pleasures. Actually, scratch “unmedicated.”
I posted this at Facebook, and a friend posted an article titled, "What you Learn when You're 60." It contains a lot more good advice, including the following:
Death is not distant, it’s inevitable, and ever-closer. No one knows anything. Confidence is a front. Everybody is insecure. No one cares about your SAT scores unless they aced the test. We’re all lonely looking to be connected. . . . You’re never going to recover from some physical ills, aches and pains are part of the process of dying, and that’s what you’re doing, every day.

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We’re in the Age of the Anthropocene

People are now in charge of the Earth and we are destroying it. Robert Krulwich writes that Planet Earth is Under New Management. We are no longer in the age of the Holocene.

Earth is being dramatically changed, and the changer, this time, is us: humankind ("anthro" in the Greek). "We are no longer in the Holocene," he told the group. "We are in the Anthropocene." It's a coinage he may have borrowed from biologist Eugene Stoermer, but here's the logic: The Earth is no longer being shaped mainly by natural forces, forces that operate on their own with a logic of their own. Our little blue dot is now, increasingly, sculpted by one of its inhabitants. This is our planet now. We've taken over.

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