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David Blankenhorn, in a conversation with Jonathan Rauch, worries about the marriage class divide:

[W]hile marriage equality is winning victories and gaining converts (like me), marriage overall in the United States is fracturing along class lines. Among the 30 percent or so of upscale Americans with four-year college degrees, marriage trends are looking pretty good! (If this group were the entire nation, I’d be as encouraged as I was in the late 1990s.) But among the 60 percent or so of Americans who have high school degrees but not four-year college degrees — the nation’s broad lower middle class and working class — marriage is disappearing, right before our eyes. More and more unwed child bearing, one-parent homes, serial love relationships, chaotic home lives for children, frustrated hopes, bruised lives — the whole sad shebang. And very few people in high places seem to give a damn about it, or even to have noticed.

Rauch adds:

Yes, class bifurcation is the marriage problem of our time. Family instability among the less-educated and rising inequality are two sides of the same coin, each perniciously feeding the other. Yes, it’s tough to do anything about. But yes, I have hope, because we’ve arrived at a moment when, as a society, we can finally take off the culture-war blinders and see the real problem, which is the sine qua non for doing anything about it.

For many years, liberals were loath to talk about marriage and family values because both were code for “beat up on homosexuals.” At the same time, conservatives were loath to talk about inequality and class because both were code for “beat up on free markets.” But the era of gay marriage raises the prospect of a pro-marriage agenda which liberals can embrace as not even slightly anti-gay. And the country’s rapid division into marital and educational haves and have-nots makes inequality a problem that family-values conservatives can’t ignore.

(Chart from (pdf) Pew)

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 Jacob Sullum summarizes a recent experiment (seen above) by a Seattle TV station:

The station enlisted three volunteers: Addy Norton, “a 27-year-old medical marijuana patient and heavy daily marijuana user who smoked pot before arriving at the test site”; Dylan Evans, a 34-year-old weekend pot smoker; and Jeff Underberg, 56-year-old who smokes pot occasionally. All three of them satisfactorily completed a driving course at THC levels far above the legal limit.

Norton arrived with a THC level of 16 nanograms, more than three times the DUID cutoff, but nevertheless drove fine, according to the driving instructor who accompanied her with his foot hovering over a second brake and his hand ready to take the wheel. After Norton smoked three-tenths of a gram, she tested at 36.7 nanograms, more than seven times the legal limit, but still drove OK. Even after she consumed nine-tenths of a gram, a “drug recognition expert” from the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office said her driving was merely “borderline.” Only after consuming a total of 1.4 grams of pot and achieving a THC level of 58.8 nanograms, almost 12 times the legal limit, was Norton clearly too stoned to drive.

Josh Harkinson looks at more research on the subject:

While booze can make people drive faster and more aggressively, marijuana has the opposite effect: Pot smokers, studies show, tend to compensate for their impairment by slowing down and leaving larger gaps between themselves and other cars. Still, Ramaekers cautions against thinking that stoners acting like Sunday drivers are safer. Marijuana users may “try to create their own box of safety, and within that world they can operate fine,” he says. “But there’s a lot of other information outside of that box that they can’t process, and that is a problem.”

Road tests and driving simulator studies have found that the more weed drivers inhale, the worse they do at essentials such as staying in their lanes, responding to sudden hazards (like a dog running into the street), and multitasking—for example, reading street signs on a twisty road while avoiding oncoming traffic. On average, drivers with blood THC levels equal to or in excess of 5 ng/ml cause crashes at 2.7 to 6.6 times the rate of sober drivers, and getting into the driver’s seat less than an hour after smoking a joint nearly doubles your risk of getting into a crash.

Earlier Dish on stoned driving here, here, and here.

A reader pushes back on my “personal note of thanks [to Obama] for using the words Rangoon and Burma” in his SOTU address:

I also used to make a big deal about using the terms “Rangoon” and “Burma”.  That was before I actually had been there. On each visit, I found that everybody in Myanmar says they live in Myanmar and that their capital is Yangon. Foreigners don’t get to decide that for them; they declare it stoutly, even if those changes were made by their despicable military regime.  We can all mourn the lost years in Myanmar, but we don’t need to fixate on the linguistics of their own place names. Several people, certainly not military sympathizers in any way, will point out that Myanmar is the country’s original name, that the Brits changed it to Burma to reflect the overweening power of the majority Bamar ethnic group in civic life.

One of the uses of the label Myanmar is to indicate inclusion of all the numerous ethnic groups as equal citizens.

Certainly it can be argued that that inclusion is by and large mere wallpaper, but what is also true is that little by little, many of the ethnic uprisings are quietly ending by treaties and peaceful means. Significant exceptions to that remain, such as the Kachin factions still boiling near Bhamo. (Apparently the old-school military fellows are continuing the battle despite orders from Naypyidaw to knock it off already.)

For what it’s worth, this appears to be the most exciting time to be a citizen of Myanmar in generations. One Burmese academic that a friend of mine interviewed said very eloquently that in the past, people in Myanmar “shuffled around” but now they are striding into the future. Even their gait and demeanor expresses that. Some of our American friends were cycling through Myanmar this winter and happened to be in Yangon when Obama arrived and witnessed thousands of people lining the streets thrilled to their bones at the ending of this long, brutal isolation. It’s beyond remarkable what has happened there in the last two years.

I think it’s fine to call it Burma or Myanmar, and certainly folks there wouldn’t bother to correct you.  I just think it’s time to stop being smug about using the term Burma to indicate a political viewpoint that in Myanmar itself is pretty irrelevant.

I wasn’t intending to be smug. I was resisting the re-naming of the country by a fascist junta. And the truth is that Burma and Myanmar are closely related and both exclude the long-brutally oppressed ethnic minorities:

Both these names are derived from the name of the majority Burmese Bamar ethnic group. Myanmar is considered to be the literary form of the name of the group, while Burma is derived from “Bamar”, the colloquial form of the group’s name.

The question of whether we should call foreign countries the same names they call themselves in their own language is a separate one. I’ll agree when my reader is fine visiting München and Москва with me. Till then I’ll call it Burma – which is an anglicized version of what Brits heard when they listened to the locals.

But first, holy shit:

The footage was taken last night in the Urals, where over 1,000 were injured from the impact. The meteor was likely related to the asteroid 2012 DA14, which is scheduled to barely miss our planet today. Phil Plait provides a primer:

[E]xcluding actual impacts, 2012 DA14 will be still only be the eighth-closest approach by a known asteroid on record. The closest on record without actually hitting us was 2011 CQ1, which, in 2011, passed us by about 5500 km (3300 miles)—less than Earth’s radius! It was only about a meter across, so even if it had hit us we would’ve gotten a spectacular fireball, but probably no actual damage.

However, this is the largest asteroid we’ve seen come this close. Even then, it’s only 50 meters across, which is small as asteroids go.

Update from a reader:

The meteor is “likely related to asteroid 2012 DA14”.  This is untrue.  In fact, they approached the Earth from completely different directions.  See the statement from Don Yeomans, head of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program: “This bolide event probably had nothing to do with the upcoming close Earth approach of asteroid 2012 DA14, which is due to pass closely (and safely) past the Earth at 19:24 GMT today [2:24 p.m. ET].” Yeomans added that the Russian bolide trail did not travel south to north as the asteroid will.

It won’t hit us, Plait argues, but it’s a sobering reminder of our weak NASA budget and our inability to deflect asteroids:

This threat is no joke. It’s quite real, and we need to take it seriously. We need more observatories watching the sky, and a plan in place in case we do see one with our number on it. Some new observatories will soon be coming online that will help. Also, both NASA and the privately-funded B612 Foundation have plans to launch space missions that can better look for near-Earth asteroids. B612 even has ideas on how to stop a potential impactor from ruining our day, too. I gave a TEDx talk on this very topic.

For more footage of that Russian meteor strike and its aftermath, including the sonic boom, go here.

Daniel Estrin spotlights a unique challenge for couples looking to get married in Israel – the proof of a matrilineal Jewish ancestry to satisfy the Orthodox tradition:

[T]hey call Har-Shalom, who runs a nonprofit detective agency that specializes in sniffing out long-lost Jewish ancestry. His agency, called Shorashim (Hebrew for “roots”), is funded in part by the Israeli government. Each year he takes on roughly 1200 cases that test his fluency in Yiddish and Russian dialects, his familiarity with czarist and Soviet history, and his patience for combing through old Soviet archives. He then presents his findings to a rabbinic court, which almost always accepts his expert opinion about a citizen’s Jewish identity.

Estrin followed a genealogist working with Har-Shalom and witnessed the depth of the detective work:

An archivist willing to breach protocol located Olga’s grandmother’s original birth registration, which identified her as Jewish. Olga then paid Paley another $400 to secure a copy of her great-grandfather’s KGB file, which classified her great-grandmother as Jewish. Although these documents bolstered his case, Har-Shalom’s investigation dragged on for two more years.

Finally, last month, Olga was summoned to an Israeli rabbinical court. A judge sat at a raised bench. He reviewed the report Har-Shalom submitted of the evidence he gathered. Then the judge held up an old family photograph. “Who is in this picture?” he asked the defendant. Olga identified her mother, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s friend. The hearing lasted 15 minutes, and at the end, the judge handed down his verdict: Olga is Jewish. By extension, her daughter is, too.

Grappling with her ongoing desire for an ex-flame, Natasha Vargas-Cooper is convinced by Blake and Rousseau that her feelings are something much darker than a search for acceptance:

Blake is the British Marquis de Sade, probing and exposing the tyrannical impulses behind misty emotionalism. Blake is interested in “coercion, repetition-compulsion, spiritual rape.” Like Rousseau, Blake wanted to free sex from religious and social restraints, but unlike Rousseau, Blake recognized there is no escaping the domination of nature and our own ignoble desires. His poems are filled with a latent human amoralism: men and women cannibalizing each other (“The Mental Traveler”), physically and psychologically exploited children (“The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Little Black Boy”), erotic ambivalence (“The Sick Rose”), and resentment towards the demonic power of sex.

She turns to literary critic Camille Paglia to make sense of her schemes to get the boy back:

In one liberating spank, Paglia’s reading of [Blake’s poetry] made me realize that my phone calls and romantic gestures were not noble or life-affirming but a perverse, coercive form of power. What I perceived to be my romantic idealism was actually a fascistic impulse to dominate, what Paglia describes as “sadistic tenderness”: “Every gesture of love is an assertion of power. There is no selflessness or self-sacrifice, only refinements in domination. …”

A revealing anecdote from theocon Rabbi David Novak:

The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. The time was 1988, and the place was St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. The occasion was a lecture by the cardinal arranged by Fr. (then Lutheran Pastor) Richard John Neuhaus. The occasion was memorable less for what the cardinal had to say (though it was typically learned, intelligent, and politically astute) than for the disruption of the lecture by a militant gay group, “Act-Up.” They were protesting what they claimed was the Catholic Church’s fault for the AIDS crisis by its designation of homoerotic acts as morally disordered. (Their “logic” then and now escapes me, since if most of those who have contracted AIDS followed the prohibition of homoerotic acts in the Hebrew Scriptures, which the Church accepted in its refusal to totally break with Judaism, there wouldn’t be an AIDS crisis at all.)

While most of the people at this lecture were too dumbfounded by this sacrilegious break-in to do or say anything, Cardinal Ratzinger “kept his cool” and (as I recall) he said (in perfect English like the lecture itself) in a clear, firm voice (and as one might say in his native German: mit brennender Sorge, i.e., “with burning concern,” the title of Pope Pius XI’s famous anti-Nazi encyclical of 1937): “We have now heard your voice; now listen to mine!” That, plus the quick arrival of NYPD, enabled us to hear the rest of the lecture. I greatly admired the way he stood up to these enemies of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

Based on a “clear correlation between increases in portion sizes and increases in obesity”, Cass Sunstein, Nudge co-author, suggests “attention to the subtle social cues that lead to excessive eating” as a starting point for improving public health:

Brian Wansink, a Cornell University professor of consumer behavior, helps to explain why portion sizes have such a large effect. He finds that much of our eating is mindless or automatic in that we tend to eat whatever is in front of us. If you are given a half-pound bag of M&M’s, chances are that you will eat about half as much as you will if you are given a one- pound bag. People who receive large bowls of ice cream eat a lot more than those who get small bowls.

The good news is that once we isolate the sources of excessive eating, we will be able to identify potential solutions. Google Inc. found that its New York cafeteria, which offered a lot of high-calorie items, was producing a lot of unwanted pounds. In response to employee complaints, it initiated changes to nudge people toward healthier choices. … The redesigned cafeteria took a number of smart steps to make healthy choices simpler and more convenient (and to make less healthy choices less so). As a result, it helped to produce big reductions in both calories and fat consumed from candy.

See the related Dish thread on Bloomberg’s soda ban here.

A recent National Intelligence Estimate determined that the US is “the target of a massive, sustained cyber-espionage campaign that is threatening the country’s economic competitiveness,” pointing to China as the country “most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions.” Just before his SOTU speech, Obama signed an executive order on cyber-security. Andy Greenberg examines its privacy implications and sees progress:

[T]he House of Representatives may have hoped the President’s own cybersecurity initiative would divert some of the attention away from the controversial legislation known as CISPA [Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act]. Instead, the White House’s long-awaited executive order on cybersecurity is actually scoring points with the privacy advocates–and putting CISPA in a worse light than ever. … [W]hile the order allows the sharing of government data with the private sector, the data sharing doesn’t flow back the other way. That means the order, unlike CISPA, doesn’t raise the hackles of privacy groups that have protested that CISPA could grant immunity to private sector firms who want to share their user’s personal information with the government.

The ACLU “welcomed Obama’s order.” Less than 24 hours after the president signed it, the House reintroduced the controversial CISPA with no changes.