Month: January 2003

Giving new meaning to ‘best buddies’

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Given that young men and women are expected to delay marriage until their mid- to late-20s in lieu of college and career, it shouldn’t be surprising that more of them seek meaningless short-term sexual relationships with partners known colloquially as “fuck-buddies,” as explained in this story by Laura Sessions Stepp.

But the Bowling Green State research study the story takes as its launching point tells us good news about girls:

The Bowling Green researchers were surprised by how secure girls were about their relationships. Girls expressed significantly more confidence than guys that they could refuse a date, for example, or break up with someone they no longer wanted to go out with, or control what a couple did together.

Girls’ sexual confidence shows up in surveys. In the Toledo research, girls were more likely than guys to say they decided how far a couple would go. In a nationwide study soon to be released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young women ages 15 to 24 were less likely than young men to report feeling pressured to engage in intercourse.

The average age girls go all the way the first time? It’s the same as it is for boys, 16 1/2, according to a separate release from Kaiser. In addition, more young people are turning to oral sex as an alternative to intercourse because it’s safer and carries less risk of pregnancy. While oral sex isn’t fool-proof, that young people are finding ways to have fun sexually in a relatively smart way should be reassuring, not a harbinger of the decline of civilization.

Teen-age pregnancies and abortions are at 10-year lows and HIV has not struck American youth in the catastrophic way it’s torn apart sub-Saharan Africa. The only sad thing is that so many young men and women have decided that careers take precedence over romance. They know that any romantic attachment is bound to be broken once they graduate and move on with their careers.

It shows maturity in the sense that they’re not foolishly jumping into marriages that won’t last. But those years of loneliness must be tough. Even the sex must reinforce that emptiness after a time.

The new gig

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Pays better, has benefits and I get to work from home. I’m the newest addition to the staff of Insurance Journal, a trade magazine for property/casualty agents and brokers. IJ is based in San Diego, Calif., and its print edition is only distributed in the West and some Southern states, including Texas.

But IJ’s online news coverage is international in scope, and I’m the new man in Chicago to cover the goings on in the Midwest. The mag hopes to roll out a print edition for the Midwest by the end of the year, which means this is really a growth opportunity. Since there’s no IJ office in Chicago, I’m working from home. That has its pluses and minuses, but it does mean I can avoid the brutally cold five-minute wait on the “L” platform twice a day.

I flew out to San Diego last week and was offered the job at the end of lunch at King’s Fish House. I met the staff there and everyone was very laid back and friendly. The publisher, Mark Wells Jr., has been in the business for 30 years and was as friendly and nice as could be. I was a bit worried that the job might overwhelm me, seeing as how my knowledge of the industry is not deep. But from meeting some of the other staffers, it’s clear that IJ grooms their reporters into the magazine.

In my job search, I cast a very wide net for practical purposes. Limiting myself to Chicago and not having much experience, I couldn’t afford to be choosy. And I decided to essentially let my next job determine my career path, unless I absolutely hated it. But trade reporting is something that has appealed to me for a while. It allows me to really understand one sector or subject in-depth, to essentially become an expert.

That expertise can be rolled into freelance assignments of all kinds, and it will especially give me a leg up if I ever wound up in the libertarian policy-wonk world, which seems unlikely but one never knows.

By the way

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

The same issue of Liberty which published Gene Healy’s awesome piece lauded below also included this gem from its publisher/editor-in-chief R.W. Bradford:

For the past 25 years, Republicans have been more or less committed, in rhetoric, at least, to a more constrained government. When they’ve held the presidency, they’ve blamed the huge growth of government on the Democrats who controlled Congress. When they’ve controlled Congress, they’ve blamed the continued growth of government on the Democratic president.

Now the GOP controls it all. They no longer have any excuse for the growth of government and the erosion of liberty. It’s time for them to put up or shut up. Or it would be a time if politics took place in what we normally view as the real world, a world in which bullshit is not a major currency.

Fantastic!

I’m named after New Zealand’s national bird, the kiwi

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Dole has a great kids’ site promoting fruits and vegetables. Each item is made into a cartoon character. To wit: Kevin Kiwi. Each character’s page opens with a full-throated audio greeting which is without fail hi-larious.

My other faves are Cornelius Corn and Kenny Canned Pineapple. Kenny sounds like he’s hopped up on goofballs but makes up for it by telling us his dream of someday being a mechanical engineer.

“My idol is a person named Henry Ginaca,” Kenny writes. “In 1913, Mr. Ginaca invented a pineapple cutting machine. The machine removes the shell, the core, and the ends of the pineapple so that the pineapple can be canned.” Fascinating. And educational, too!

Hands down, the best

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

The best argument against the coming war with Iraq, that is, has arrived. Actually, it arrived a while ago, but I’m finally getting around to linking to it.

Gene Healy’s “Iraq: Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong War” first appeared in the January issue of Liberty magazine, but only appeared online as a Cato commentary.

It’s really a fantastic piece, and addresses just about every pro-war argument in a mature, even-handed, intelligent way that doesn’t resort to ad hominem.

George Ryan’s national smackdown

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

While some naifs want Illinois Gov. George Ryan nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for enacting a moratorium on the death penalty in the state and issuing a blanket commutation to all those sitting on death row, Slate’s Chris Suellentrop knows better.

Most folks outside the state don’t know about Ryan’s ugly past, or about his impending indictment. Suellentrop offers a beginner’s version, and also lays out a case for why the same things that drove Ryan to abuse his political power in office also drove him to issue the blanket commutation.

Certainly, the commutation itself skirts the edges of the law, if it doesn’t outright break it. The governor has the power to pardon convicted criminals or commute their sentences based on careful review of each case, but Ryan admits he didn’t base his decision on the merits of individual cases but general flaws in the system. He simply judged that the system as a whole had failed.

That’s probably the correct judgment considering the 13 death row denizens who’ve been exonerated in the last few years. But was it within Ryan’s constitutional power to commute all these sentences on the judgment that the death penalty generally had failed? That’s a legitimate question, and an important one if you care abou the rule of law.

Chicago’s ‘dibs’ — a Hayekian tradition

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

The Tribune’s John Kass, a prominent defender of the “dibs” system which allows drivers to reserve a parking space on a public street with old furniture after digging their cars out of a heavy snow, cites some real intellectual ammunition in a recent column.

Apparently, everyone’s favorite libertarian legal theorist, Richard Epstein, wrote an essay about parking in 2000 and compared the “dibs” system to copyright and patent law, a kind of limited-time-only property right. Not bad.

He told Kass, “Dibs is an evolutionary system, and there is a Hayekian theory on this, which is that these spontaneous organizations ought to be presumptively respected, unless you can figure out some reason why it is that you ought to overrule them. And dibs is, of course, one of the wonderful illustrations of how that can actually work.”

Here’s what I wrote about the snow removal mess back in 2000 on the Free-Market.Net main forum.

The Blagovernor can’t make up his mind

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

First he wanted to tax services like auto repairs and haircuts and now he doesn’t. He’s not floated any spending-cut ideas, though. Hmph.

As for the supposed crises all the states are have trying to balance their budgets, state spending increased by an average of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to the USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon. I’m sure Illinois is no exception. (Link via Virginia Postrel’s The Scene.)

Failing calculus

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

I don’t understand why Dubya came out against the University of Michigan’s admissions program. He tried to split the difference, sure, inasmuch as the White House brief does not condemn racial preferences in all circumstances, but that certainly won’t matter to the Democrats trying to get out the black vote in
2004.

Jeez, the only reason Florida was so close in 2000 was because of the incredible black turnout after Jeb’s jettisoning of racial preferences in the state’s contracting and admissions programs.

And, certainly, lame damage control attempts such as placing a story in today’s Post claiming that Condi Rice played a key role in Dubya’s decision won’t help much to assuage the concerns of black voters, who already have an unfavorable opinion of Dubya and a majority of whom are against the coming war in Iraq.

After all the machinations to get steel votes in Pennsylvania and Ohio (assuming that strategy works to begin with, which is questionable), they’ll probably be offset by an increase in black votes for the Democratic nominee in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And all of this on top of the Trent “All These Problems” Lott debacle. Anyone care to explain this to me?