OVO

Some groups and individuals oppose legal access to same sex marriage.  This includes homosexual groups and individuals, some from the left, some from the right.  I predict they will be displeased if legal access to same sex marriage occurs in the United States.  There is no right to happiness.

According to the General Accounting Office [pdf], “as of 31 December 2003 [there are] a total of 1,138 federal statutory provisions classified to the United States Code in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving benefits, rights, and privileges.”  Due to the Defense of Marriage Act, these federal statutory provisions are available only to hetero married couples.  If legal access to same-sex marriage occurs in the United States, some or all of these federal statutory provisions will have to change.  I predict they will not change at the same time. I predict that they will not change to the same degree or in the same way.  I predict that sometimes a federal statutory provisions will cease to exist rather than be extended to same-sex couples.  I predict that they will not all change at the federal level, but rather at both the state and the federal level and that they will not be uniform in all states.  During the time these federal statutory provisions change, some same-sex couples will lose out while other same-sex couples will benefit.  Attentiveness now to these benefits, rights, and privileges might make their transitions more smooth.

Interracial hetero marriage was banned in some states as late as 1967.  The Loving v Virginia decision of the Supreme Court that year found miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional. Interracial marriage has been legal for over forty years. But it is not the case that interracial marriages occur with the same frequency as same-race marriages. According to the US Census for 2000, around 97% of whites married whites and around 96% of blacks married blacks. I predict these statistics will remain constant if legal access to same sex marriage occurs in the United States.  The State has no role in encouraging or discouraging marriage diversity.

Citizenship in the United States can be conferred by marriage.  I predict that legal access to same sex marriage will confer citizenship to some men and women who otherwise could not be citizens.  I predict this will be a small number and will not influence society much at all.  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Domestic violence occurs among same-sex couples as well as hetero couples.  According to the American Bar Association [pdf], “seven states define domestic violence in a way that specifically excludes same-sex victims.” I predict that legal access to same sex marriage will include an increase of reports of domestic violence.  This increase in reports of domestic violence may be caused by a change in the ability to report domestic violence as much as or more than an increase in actual domestic violence. Domestic violence among same-sex couples does not occur with the same frequency among all sexes.  According to the U. S. Department of Justice, 11.4% of same-sex cohabiting women report being victimized by a female partner while 15.4% of same-sex cohabiting men reported being victimized by a male partner. Men raping men occurs much more frequently than men raping women.  According to the U. S. Census Bureau, 78.3% of murder victims are male and 21.4% of murder victims are female.  According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics [pdf] 65.3% of murders involved a male offender and a male victim while 2.4% of murders involved a female offender and a female victim.  I predict that legal access to same sex marriage will show more domestic violence among men than among women.  Acknowledging a difference between men and women and funding State services accordingly might lessen the problem of domestic violence.

Same sex couples cannot conceive children.  Same sex couples who wish to raise children are limited in their ability to adopt in the United States.  Some states allow it, some forbid it, and federal law has said only that an adoption in one state must be recognized in other states.  (Compare this with the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law stating same-sex marriage in one state need not be recognized in other states.)  Many states that forbid adoption by same sex couples base their law on same sex couples being unable to legally marry.  I predict legal access to same sex marriage in the United States will cause changes in adoption laws.  I predict some states will make it no more or less difficult for same sex couples to adopt than for hetero couples to adopt, while other states will make all adoptions more difficult to make adoption more difficult for same sex couples.  Same sex couples who wish to raise children are limited in their ability to use birth surrogates or artificial insemination in the United States.  Legal limits on birth surrogates exist for hetero couples as well and vary by state.  There is no legal limit on artificial insemination but some insurance companies will not compensate single women who use artificial insemination.  I predict some states will make it no more or less difficult for same sex couples to use birth surrogates or artificial insemination, while other states will make using birth surrogates or getting artificial insemination more difficult to make these procedures more difficult for same sex couples.  I predict the number of children adopted will increase if legal access to same sex marriage occurs.  State by state differences in adoption, birth surrogates, and artificial insemination will be similar to the legality of abortion.  Abortion is legal at the national level but access to services varies by state and is not a service the state is compelled to offer.  Adoption laws should be inclusive of same sex parents.

Advocates of legal access to same sex marriage want treatment under the law identical to hetero marriage, and that includes legal access to divorce.  Making predictions about legal access to same sex marriage must include predictions about legal access to same sex divorce.  Statistics relating to hetero divorce have a limited value in making predictions about same sex divorce. According to the National Center for Health Statistics [pdf] “Approximately 61 percent of the divorces in 1988 were petitioned by the wife, 32 percent by the husband, and 7 percent by the husband and wife jointly.” More hetero couples are divorced today than in the past, and differences exist between the percentage of divorced men and divorced women.  According to the US Census Bureau: “Of the first marriages for women from 1955 to 1959, about 79 percent marked their 15th anniversary, compared with only 57 percent for women who married for the first time from 1985 to 1989. People born in the leading edge of the baby boom experienced high divorce rates in the 1970s and 1980s. About 38 percent of men born from 1945 to 1954 and 41 percent of women in the same age group had been divorced by 2004.”  The trend for women to initiate divorce more than men is also found in Denmark, where legal access to same sex marriage has been available since 1989. Male same sex married couples in Denmark seek a divorce 14% of the time, while female same sex married couples in Denmark seek a divorce 23% of the time. I predict legal access to same sex marriage in the United States will reveal that women seek divorce more than men in both hetero and same sex marriages.  According to the US Census Bureau [pdf], among hetero divorced couples in 2008 56.9% of mothers were awarded child support and custody while 40.4% of fathers were awarded child support and custody.  I predict custody and child support issues among divorcing same sex couples will incur less legal fees and occupy less court time among men than women.  I claim that some discontent to legal access to same sex marriage is caused by discontent with hetero marriage.  Discontent with hetero marriage comes in part from the prevalence of divorce.  No-fault divorce has existed in every state since 1985.  Discontent with hetero marriage comes in part from the disparity of who initiates divorce and who benefits from divorce.  Women initiate divorce more often than men, and benefit from divorce more often than men.  Divorce and women’s rights are largely spoken of as having only benefits, never any cost.  Divorce and women’s rights are largely spoken of as bringing about only equality, never inequality.  For these reasons, what might have been a debate about women and divorce has become a debate about homosexuals and marriage.  I predict legal access to same sex marriage will not bring about the former debate.  Acknowledging a difference between men and women and funding State services accordingly might lessen the problem of divorce.

See also: Three Predictions Part One, ‘Who’s That Girl?’

Imagine a world in which art is forbidden! Art galleries would close. Books would vanish. Pop stars would shed their glamour overnight. Advertising would cease, television would die. We could refocus our vision not on a succession of false images but on the world as it is. A stillness would fill the air. Art has provided us with fantasy worlds, escapes from reality. For whatever else it is, art is not reality. Soap operas, novels, movies; concerts, the theatre, poetry. None of these are real as a starving child is real, as a town without water is real. Art is the glamorous escape, the transformation that shields us from the world we live in. Injustice, endemic disease, famine, war. Those are real. Art has replaced religion as the opiate of the people just as the artist has replaced the priest as the voice of the spirit. Once we reached inside ourselves to find God / truth /really / etc. Now we find only art. We are regulated by our addictions and art hm become an addiction. We struggle through life in a drugged dream, searching for escape, for brighter fantasies, longer voyages of the imagination, louder music. Another’s life is always more interesting than our own. It is only those who have given up art who can experience the true nature of creation. Now, a self-perpetuating elite sell art as a commodity for the wealthy who have everything while making the artists themselves rich beyond their wildest dreams. Art is money. It is ironic that the myth of the artist celebrates suffering while it is those who have never heard of art, the poor and wretched of our earth, who truly suffer. To call one person an artist is to deny another the equal right of vision. Paint all the paintings black and celebrate the dead art: there is no booze in hell. We tum away from mountains of food that rot in storage while acres the globe humans grow too weak to eat because it is time for our favorite TV program. We live up to our knees in blood, wasting not only hours but days – whole lifetimes – in the bind belief that art is good, art is pure, art is its own justification – and a nightmare scourges our planet. Until we end famine there will be no peace. Artists are murderers! Artists are murderers just as surely as is the soldier who sights down the barrel of a gun to shoot an unarmed civilian. Without art, life would be unendurable! We would have to transform this world. Overnight, one person’s dream can become a nation’s future – but we do not seize power because we are enchanted by art. Forbid art and revolution would follow: the withholding of creative action is the only weapon left. Seeing and creating are the same activity. Those who create art are also creating the starving. In a world in which art is forbidden the deserts would flower. Give up art. Save the starving.

(from OVO 14 Suffering March 1992)

Why do the results achieved by a conspiracy as a rule differ widely from the results aimed at? Because this is what usually happens in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. And this remark gives us an opportunity to formulate the main task of the theoretical social sciences. It is to trace the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions. I may give a simple example. If a man wishes urgently to buy a house in a certain district, we can safely assume that he does not wish to raise the market price of houses in that district. But the very fact that he appears on the market as a buyer will tend to raise market prices. And analogous remarks hold for the seller. Or to take an example from a very different field, if a man decides to insure his life, he is unlikely to have the intention of encouraging other people to invest their money in insurance shares. But he will do so nevertheless.

We see here clearly that not all consequences of our actions are intended consequences; and accordingly, that the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all events, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.

It should be mentioned in this connection that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences, of these unintended consequences. In his more mature utterances, he says that we are all caught in the net of the social system. The capitalist is not a demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than is the proletarian.

This view of Marx’s has been abandoned – perhaps for propagandist reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it – and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy theory has very largely replaced it. It is a come-down – the come-down from Marx to Goebbels. But it is clear that the adoption of the conspiracy theory can hardly be avoided by those who believe that they know how to make heaven on earth. The only explanation for their failure to produce this heaven is the malevolence of the devil who has a vested interest in hell.

First published in the Library of the10th International Congress of Philosophy, 1948. From Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge 1989

via youtube.

In April 2008 I published OVO 18 MONEY. Following the pattern of many previous issues of OVO, I was using the publication of a magazine as a chance to learn about the theme found in that publication. In the course of putting that issue together I did learn a small amount about economics. Money is that which you want to own more of than get rid of. Banking and finance regulation and the stock market seem to be far more complex. Not long after that issue was published, the world economy took a turn for the worst. My understanding of what I do not know or understand is much greater now. All I can say about this video is it made me laugh.

The Guardian, Iraq nets handsome profit by dumping dollar for euro (16 February 2003):

A bizarre political statement by Saddam Hussein has earned Iraq a windfall of hundreds of million of euros. In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar – ‘the currency of the enemy’ – for the more multilateral euro. The changeover was announced on almost exactly the same day that the euro reached its lowest ebb, buying just $0.82, and the G7 Finance Ministers were forced to bail out the currency. On Friday the euro had reached $1.08, up 30 per cent from that time. Almost all of Iraq’s oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001. Around 26 billion euros (£17.4bn) has been paid for 3.3 billion barrels of oil into an escrow account in New York. [...] The marked appreciation of the euro, higher interest rates, and the ability to pay mainly European suppliers in euros is believed to have made hundreds of millions for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme.

The US went to war with Iraq in March 2003. “Since currently worldwide oil sales are denominated in U.S. dollars, changes in the value of the dollar against other world currencies affect OPEC’s decisions on how much oil to produce. For example, when the dollar falls relative to the other currencies, OPEC-member states receive smaller revenues in other currencies for their oil, causing substantial cuts in their purchasing power. After the introduction of the euro, pre-invasion Iraq decided it wanted to be paid for its oil in euros instead of US dollars causing OPEC to consider changing its oil exchange currency to euros, although after Iraq’s invasion, the interim government reversed this policy, and the subsequent Iraq governments stuck to the US dollar. Member states Iran and Venezuela have undergone similar shifts from the dollar to the Euro” (Wikipedia).

The Independent, The demise of the dollar (6 October 2009):

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.  Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

Will the US go to war with Iran soon? Maybe not, maybe these talks never happened.  Still… William Clark wrote: “Although completely unreported by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking – it is in large part an oil currency war.”

Previously in OVO on the topic of currency wars… Klint Finley contributed “The New Currency Wars” [revision] to OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008). This essay is reprinted in Digital Gold Currency Magazine (January 2009).

counting money — just handling the bills — can make things less painful.

Study: Your Brain Thinks Money Is A Drug : NPR

A Roman Catholic bank in Germany has apologised after admitting it bought stocks in defence, tobacco and birth control companies.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Catholic bank owned pill shares

Anonymous, Dmitry Babenko, Johnny Brainwash, Klint Finley, Witta Kelssling-Jensen, Vincent Al Ken, Ruggero Maggi, Mail Art Paul, Willi Melnikov, Thom Metzger, Emilio Morandi, No Institute, Wes Unruh, Carlos Valdez, Edward Wilson.

OVO is a collection of new works in the public domain edited and published by Trevor Blake. New issues are in progress. Past issues include…

OVO 18 Money (April 2008)
OVO 17 The Dreadlock Recollections (January 2007)
OVO 16 AntiChrist (January 2006)
OVO 15 Sperm (February 2005)
OVO 14 Suffering (March 1992)
OVO 13 Travel (January 1992)
OVO 12 Science (November 1991)
OVO 11 Control (September 1991)
OVO 10 Mayhem (July 1991)
OVO 9 (July 1991)
OVO 8 (May 1991)
OVO 7 Information (October 1989)
OVO 6 (Infinite)
OVO 5 (November 1988)
OVO 4 (May 1988)
OVO 3 (November 1987)
OVO 2 (July 1987)
OVO 1 (1987)

… and may be downloaded here.

In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day.

COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?MEET THE GUY WHO DOES: DETAILS Article on men.style.com

Taller men are able to earn more money than their shorter counterparts simply because taller people are perceived to be more intelligent and powerful

Does Size Matter? Study Shows Taller People Earn More Money

The US economy is lurching towards crisis with long-term interest rates on course to double, crippling the country’s ability to pay its debts and potentially plunging it into another recession, according to a study by the US’s own central bank

US lurching towards ‘debt explosion’ with long-term interest rates on course to double – Telegraph

AIG — read the federal government — now is in the business of selecting which sharia-adherent “authorities” shall be enlisted to determine whether or not a given product is sharia-compliant.

A Win for the Good Guys by Frank J. Gaffney Jr. and David Yerushalmi on National Review Online

Herb Stein, who served alongside me in the Nixon White House as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, once drily observed, “If your horse dies, I suggest you dismount.” And yet, we keep trying to ride this horse.

My Turn: Pete Peterson on Giving Away $1 Billion | Newsweek My Turn | Newsweek.com

Bringing Americans together to find sensible, sustainable solutions that transcend age, party lines and ideological divides in order to achieve real results.

Peter G. Peterson Foundation

One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls.

Millionaires Go Missing – WSJ.com

Having Little Money Often Means No Car, No Washing Machine, No Checking Account And No Break From Fees and High Prices

The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More – washingtonpost.com

Australian researchers have found that tall workers earn more than their shorter colleagues, especially among men.

Tall men earn $1000 more than short ones | Health & Lifestyle | News.com.au

Good-looking men and women have a greater confidence that gives them an edge in the job market

Study says beautiful people earn more – UPI.com

May 2009

Bontrust Finance – Increase In Currency

People with higher measures of cognitive ability are more likely to make good choices in several different types of economic decisions [isn't this what the authors of "The Bell Curve" were saying and were punished for saying?]

People With Higher IQs Make Wiser Economic Choices, Study Finds