Two 4-year-olds, two guns, two tragic shootings

By Daniel Arkin, Staff Writer, NBC News

Four-year-old boys in different states were involved in two separate shooting incidents in the last four days, with tragic results.

On Saturday, a Tennessee boy discharged a pistol at a sheriff's deputy's wife, killing her instantly. On Monday, a New Jersey boy left a 6-year-old neighbor in serious condition after a rifle fired at his head.

The Tennessee incident occurred during a family cookout at the home of Josephine and Daniel Fanning. He's a sheriff's deputy in Wilson County.

Deputy Fanning, 51, was in his bedroom showing his collection of weapons to a relative around 7:00 p.m. Saturday, when Josephine, 48, and the 4-year-old came into the room. The young boy grabbed a loaded handgun sitting on the bed and fired it once, striking and killing the deputy?s wife, according to Tennessee Bureau of Investigations spokeswoman Kristin Helm. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The incident appears to be an accident and no one has been charged, but the investigation is still open, according to Helm.

?It?s a sad, sad set of circumstances,? Sheriff Robert Bryan told NBC affiliate WSMV in Nashville.?"Nobody is immune to this. Nobody. It doesn't matter if you are a law enforcement officer. These things can happen in second."

The 4-year-old is a relative of the deputy and his late wife, WSMV reported. The weapon used by the 4-year-old boy was not Deputy Fanning?s service weapon.

Another tragic incident took place in New Jersey on Monday evening, when a 4-year-old boy accidentally shot a 6-year-old neighbor with a rifle he found in his parents? home.

Police said the two boys were playing with a .22-caliber rifle outside the 4-year-old?s home in Toms River, N.J., when around 7:00 p.m. the gun discharged and struck the 6-year-old in the head, NBCNewYork.com reported.

The 4-year-old's parents reportedly heard the shot and called 911.

According to NBCNewYork.com, the 6-year-old is in serious condition at Jersey Shore Medical Center. An investigation is ongoing.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653381/s/2a846008/l/0Lusnews0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A40C0A90C176713330Etwo0E40Eyear0Eolds0Etwo0Eguns0Etwo0Etragic0Eshootings0Dlite/story01.htm

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Hapyrus Launches Service For Amazon Redshift, An Emerging Alternative To Hadoop And Hive

Hapyrus has launched FlyData, technology that enables it to automatically upload and migrate data to Amazon Redshift, the data-warehouse service that can scale to petabyte size. Amazon has claimed that Redshift will increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools analysts use today. Hapyrus Co-Founder Koichi Fujikawa says their service, a big data router, makes Redshift even more effective and an alternative to Hadoop and Hive, the most widely recognized combination used for processing and analyzing data. After setup, FlyData runs in the background, moving the data to Redshift. Fujikawa said Hapyrus sets up a virtual private cloud on AWS. Customers can integrate their own virtual private network to transfer the data. Hapyrus competes against the likes of Informatica and Talend. Its current focus is on integrating with AWS, but going forward it will integrate data from a variety of sources. Fujikawa said in an email that Informatica and Talend provide complex data-integration solutions for big enterprise customers — mainly for on-premise systems. “We provide our data-integration service for cloud components like Redshift for any size of companies, from startups to relatively big organizations,” he said. Fujikawa says Redshift can be 10 times faster than?Hadoop?and Hive. Customers he hears from say they are seeking alternatives for the everyday kind of work that needs to get done. They can get stymied by the time and the expense that a query takes when using Hadoop and Hive. But there are also complexities with using Redshift, as Airbnb discovered: First, in order to load your data into Redshift, it has to be in either S3 or Dynamo DB already. The default data loading is single threaded and could take a long time to load all your data. We found breaking data into slices and loading them in parallel helps a lot. On its nerd blog, Airbnb said Redshift lacks some of the features that come with Hadoop. But data analysts are liking it so much that they want to use it pretty much exclusively. The Airbnb nerd blog makes the point that, in the end, Redshift and Hadoop may be more compatible than anything else. “Redshift, as a data warehouse, should be compared to Vertica, Greenplum, AsterData, Impala, Hadapt, and CitusData,” said Drawn to Scale Co-Founder Bradford Stephens in a recent email interview. “They’re just different things.” The smallest of startups take

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8LXyaBnQthk/

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Most of Mars' Atmosphere Is Lost in Space

The planet Mars lost most of its original atmosphere long ago when huge amounts of gas escaped into space, leaving only a wispy remnant behind, scientists say.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has revealed that a light variant of the gas argon is relatively depleted in Martian air, bolstering a longstanding belief that the Red Planet's current atmosphere ? which is just 1 percent as thick as that of Earth ? is a meager shell of its former self.

"We found arguably the clearest and most robust signature of atmospheric loss on Mars," said Sushil Atreya, a SAM co-investigator at the University of Michigan, in a statement.

Curiosity used its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument to sniff a sample of Martian air and measured the ratio of two different argon isotopes, which are varieties of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. The instrument found that the lighter argon-36 is about four times as common as the heavier argon-38. [Latest Mars Photos by the Curiosity Rover]

That ratio is significantly lower than the ratio for the solar system at its birth, as estimated from argon-isotope measurements of the sun and Jupiter, researchers said. The new measurement is consistent with the idea that gas escaped from the top of the Martian atmosphere in the distant past, with lighter stuff leaving more easily than heavier atoms and molecules.

The Curiosity rover team reported the new results today (April 8) at the 2013 European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, where scientists also provided other updates about the rover's recent discoveries.

For example, Curiosity's onboard weather station, known as REMS (for Rover Environmental Monitoring Station) has shown that humidity varies from place to place along the robot's route inside Mars' huge Gale Crater. REMS' observations are the first systematic measurements of humidity on the Martian surface, researchers said.

And Curiosity's laser-shooting Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, has given the rover team insights about the coating of dust that gives the Red Planet its distinctive color.

"We knew that Mars is red because of iron oxides in the dust," ChemCam deputy principal Investigator Sylvestre Maurice, of the Research Institute of Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, said in a statement. "ChemCam reveals a complex chemical composition of the dust that includes hydrogen, which could be in the form of hydroxyl groups or water molecules."

Curiosity landed inside Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year surface mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life.

Rover scientists have already achieved this goal, announcing last month that an area called Yellowknife Bay was a wet, habitable environment billions of years ago. The team came to this conclusion after studying analyses Curiosity performed of material drilled from deep within a Yellowknife Bay outcrop in early February.

Researchers want Curiosity to drill another hole in the area, to confirm and build on what the rover has already found. But that won't happen until next month, as the team is sending no new commands to Curiosity for about four weeks, when Mars is passing behind the sun from Earth's perspective.

Our star can disrupt and degrade interplanetary communications in such an alignment, which comes along every 26 months or so and is known as a Mars solar conjunction. Until May 1, Curiosity will do stationary science work with REMS and two other instruments, its Radiation Assessment Detector and the water-hunting Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons, using commands sent up in March, scientists said.

"After conjunction, Curiosity will be drilling into another rock where the rover is now, but that target has not yet been selected. The science team will discuss this over the conjunction period," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall.?Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?or?Google+. Originally published on?SPACE.com.

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/most-mars-atmosphere-lost-space-105030414.html

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Plant proteins control chronic disease in Toxoplasma infections

Apr. 8, 2013 ? A new discovery about the malaria-related parasite Toxoplasma gondii -- which can threaten babies, AIDS patients, the elderly and others with weakened immune function -- may help solve the mystery of how this single-celled parasite establishes life-long infections in people.

The study, led by a University of South Florida research team, places the blame squarely on a family of proteins, known as AP2 factors, which evolved from the regulators of flowering in plants.

In findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate AP2 factors are instrumental in flipping a developmental "switch" that transitions the parasite from a rapidly dividing form destructive to healthy tissue to a chronic stage invisible to the immune system. They identified one factor, AP2IX-9, that appears to restrict development of Toxoplasma cysts that settle quietly in various tissues, most commonly the host's brain.

A better understanding of how the switch mechanism works may eventually lead to ways to block chronic Toxoplasma infections, said study principal investigator Michael White, PhD, professor of global health and molecular medicine at USF Health and a member of the Center of Drug Discovery and Innovation, a Florida Center of Excellence at USF.

White and his colleagues are among the world's leading experts in T. gondii, combining approaches from biochemistry, genetics and structural biology to look for new ways to combat the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis.

No drugs or vaccines currently exist to treat or prevent the chronic stage of the disease. The T. gondii parasites may remain invisible to the immune system for years and then reactivate when immunity wanes, boosting the risk for recurrent disease.

"The evolutionary story of Toxoplasma is fascinating," White said. "We were blown away to find that the AP2 factors controlling how a flower develops and how plants respond to poor soil and water conditions have been adapted to work within an intracellular human parasite."

Ages ago the ancestors of malaria parasites genetically merged with an ancestor of plants, and the primitive plant donated its AP2 factors to the future malaria family.

"Our study showed that, like the AP2 factors help a plant survive a stressful environment, the AP2 factors of T. gondii help the parasite decide when the time is right to grow or when to form a tissue cyst that may lie dormant in people for many years," White said.

Toxoplasmosis, the infection caused T. gondii, is commonly associated with the medical advice that pregnant women should avoid contact with litter boxes. That's because infected cats play a big role in spreading the disease. The tiny organism thrives in the guts of cats, producing countless egg-like cells that are passed along in the feces and can live in warm moist soil or water for months.

People can acquire toxoplasmosis several ways, usually by exposure to the feces of cats or other infected animals, by eating undercooked meat of infected animals, or drinking water contaminated with T. gondii.

Up to 30 percent of the world's population is estimated to be infected with the T. gondii parasite. In some parts of the world, including places where sanitation is poor and eating raw or undercooked meat is customary, nearly 100 percent of people carry the parasite, White said.

Few experience flu-like symptoms because the immune system usually prevents the parasite from causing illness, but for those who are immune deficient the consequences can be severe.

The disease may be deadly in AIDS patients, organ transplant recipients, patients receiving certain types of chemotherapy, and infants born to mothers infected with the parasite during or shortly before pregnancy. Recently, toxoplasmosis has been linked to mental illness, such as schizophrenia and other diseases of dementia, and changes in behavior.

Because it is common, complex and not easily killed with standard disinfection measures, the toxoplasma parasite is a potential weapon for bioterrorists, White added.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of South Florida (USF Health). The original article was written by Anne DeLotto Baier.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/Q_jC33eXojY/130408152953.htm

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Asia stocks rise on heels of new Dow record high

BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets mostly gained Wednesday on the heels of a record high on Wall Street as traders waited for the latest Federal Reserve meeting minutes for insight into the U.S. economy's prospects.

Japan's stock market continued to rise on a wave of enthusiasm for the Bank of Japan's aggressive new approach to shaking the world's third-largest economy out of its two decade slump. The Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo rose 0.8 percent to 13,292.86.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng added 0.2 percent to 21,910.15. South Korea's Kospi advanced 0.8 percent to 1,935.74. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.1 percent to 4,971.90.

Investors are looking to the release later in the day of a transcript of last month's Federal Reserve policy meeting for insights into the Fed's latest views on the health of the U.S. economy.

"Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said this week that while the U.S. economy was significantly stronger than it was four years ago, it has yet to recover back to an acceptable state of health," said analysts at DBS Bank Ltd. in Singapore.

Mainland Chinese stocks fell after China released trade data for March. Some experts said the official figures didn't match up with information available in Hong Kong about goods going in and out of China. The export figure, in particular, raised skepticism.

The General Administration of Customs said export growth slowed to 10 percent from the previous two-month period's 23.6 percent. However, Francis Lun, chief economist of GE Oriental Financial Group in Hong Kong, said the actual figure was probably closer to 2 to 3 percent but was inflated by exporters seeking government rebates.

"Exports on the surface look good. But there are many people casting doubt on the accuracy of these figures," Lun said.

The Shanghai Composite Index was down 0.3 percent at 2,218.76.

Japanese heavy industrial shares posted strong gains. Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. jumped 6.8 percent. Kobe Steel rose 6.8 percent. Cosmo Oil soared 14.7 percent.

Australian surf wear retailer Billabong International dived 26 percent amid disappointment at its moves toward a $287 million takeover deal that is half of what was offered last December.

Apart from the Fed minutes, U.S. corporate earnings will draw attention later in the week. Banks Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are among the blue chips scheduled to issue reports.

Wall Street stocks ended higher Monday, as investors waited to see whether big U.S. companies would deliver on expectations of strong earnings in 2013. The Dow Jones industrial average hit another record Tuesday, rising 0.4 percent to close at 14,673.46. The Standard & Poor's 500 added 0.4 percent, to 1,568.61. The Nasdaq composite gained 0.5 percent to 3,237.86.

Benchmark oil for May delivery was down 28 cents to $93.92 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract gained 84 cents to finish at $94.20 a barrel on the Nymex on Tuesday.

In currencies, the euro fell to $1.3088 from $1.3099 late Tuesday in New York. The dollar fell to 99.04 yen from 99.28 yen.

___

Follow Pamela Sampson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pamelasampson

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/asia-stocks-rise-heels-dow-record-high-032421798--finance.html

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Reagan, Thatcher forged a close, lasting bond

FILE - In this Feb. 20, 1985 file photo, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets with her friend and political ally President Ronald Reagan during a visit to the White House in Washington. Thatcher, who led Britain for 11 years, died of a stroke Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)

FILE - In this Feb. 20, 1985 file photo, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets with her friend and political ally President Ronald Reagan during a visit to the White House in Washington. Thatcher, who led Britain for 11 years, died of a stroke Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)

FILE - In this July 18, 1987 file photo, President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz look on as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reads a statement outside the White House in Washington. Ex-spokesman Tim Bell says that Thatcher has died. She was 87. Bell said the woman known to friends and foes as "the Iron Lady" passed away Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/File)

FILE - In this June 23, 1982 file photo, President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher speak to reporters at the White House in Washington. Ex-spokesman Tim Bell says that Thatcher has died. She was 87. Bell said the woman known to friends and foes as "the Iron Lady" passed away Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/File)

FILE - In a June 10, 1984 file photo, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, second left, stands with, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, left, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, second right, and Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at London's Buckingham Palace, prior to a dinner for summit leaders. Thatchers former spokesman, Tim Bell, said that the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died Monday morning, April 8, 2013, of a stroke. She was 87. (AP Photo, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two self-assured and firm-speaking conservatives, joined forces in the early 1980s and drastically changed the economic and political landscapes in both of their countries.

Their calls for more-austere government and lower taxes still resonate with conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. And their side-by-side standing up to Soviet communism is credited by those of all political stripes as hastening the end of the Cold War.

Thatcher died Monday in London of a stroke at 87.

The British prime minister and the American president had the kind of personal bond that is extremely rare at such high levels of power.

She was the first and last White House State Dinner guest during Reagan's eight-year presidency. And when he died in 2004, at 93 after suffering for years with Alzheimer's disease, a frail Thatcher attended his state funeral.

"They had similar backgrounds and in some ways could understand what the other was experiencing," said Heather Conley, director of Europe programs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"And they had unique solidarity. They were tough, they were single-minded in many ways. Some have argued that that lack of complexity was their shortcoming. But in some ways, their focus was their strength," Conley said.

Reagan and Thatcher forged a special friendship "from the very beginning, the first time they met," former first lady Nancy Reagan said Monday.

"I loved it that she and Ronnie were as close as they were," she told Fox News.

Thatcher led Britain's Conservative Party to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990. Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989.

Both cut income taxes deeply and reined in national government spending. Both favored privatizing many government functions. Both stood up to organized labor. Both tackled inflation. Both were strong advocates of free markets and increased open international trade.

And both had a lasting ? and controversial ? impact on their own and opposing political parties in their respective nations.

Reagan's supply-side theories that lower taxes can stimulate growth ? like a rising tide that lifts all ships ? was derided as "Reaganomics" by critics and even once called "voodoo economics" by the Republican who went on to serve as his vice president and later as president himself, George H. W. Bush.

Even today, it is hard for American Republicans to support any increase in taxes ? a Reagan legacy that still makes it difficult for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on tax legislation.

In Britain, Thatcher's policies were dubbed "Economic Thatcherism."

"Using deregulation and privatization, she restored Great Britain, once dismissed as the 'sick man of Europe,' to its position as a world power. Indeed, her policies led the way and inspired other nations ? including those in newly free Eastern Europe ? to adopt similar reforms to boost their economies," Ed Feulner, former president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote Monday in a tribute.

"An intrepid warrior for freedom and human dignity, Prime Minister Thatcher stood with her 'noble friend,' President Ronald Reagan, to confront the Soviet empire when it was at its peak," Feulner added.

Thatcher's efforts in advancing conservative causes and programs in Britain may have strengthened Reagan's hand in selling his conservative agenda at home, and vice versa.

Conservatives at the time viewed the political victories of the two allies as part of a worldwide trend moving in their direction ? a trend that has since run into a lot of bumps in the road.

Today's widely held warm and fuzzy image of the Reagan-Thatcher alliance of three decades ago may have been fortified and blurred somewhat by the passage of time.

"They were actually very similar, but very different from what many people today think they did," said Bruce Bartlett, an economic adviser to Reagan and Bush.

While Thatcher and Reagan were both economic conservatives at heart, "they were also much more pragmatic about what could be done" than many of today's conservatives, Bartlett said. "And they both accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state. They just tried to make it work better and reduce its cost."

While both are known for slashing taxes and cutting spending, Reagan also supported many later tax increases and backed raising the government's borrowing authority many times. Thatcher raised her nation's value-added tax.

The two had vastly different governing styles. Reagan projected radiant optimism and cheerful agreeability. Thatcher, who came to be known as the "Iron Lady," exhibited relentless determination.

And they sometimes disagreed. For instance, Thatcher didn't get the level of support she wanted from Reagan during the Falklands War crisis. And Thatcher was miffed and annoyed by Reagan's 1983 invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada.

Still, "she was a great partner with the United States," said former top State Department official Nicholas Burns, including being the one who persuaded Reagan that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was "someone we can do business with."

Apparently her warmth with Reagan didn't fully convey to Bush, Reagan's successor.

While she fully supported Bush on confronting Saddam Hussein after Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, she was a little concerned about his resolve. "So this was the reason I said, 'Look, George, this is no time to go wobbly," she later recalled.

The elder Bush issued a statement Monday declaring: "America has lost one of the staunchest allies we have ever known."

___

Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-08-Thatcher-Reagan-Economics/id-7cb1aab1955849de9fc234d4bef95e3f

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Beaten on Gay Marriage, Rightbloggers Begin Berating Straights ...

Maybe it's because everyone's sick of fighting over gay marriage. Maybe it's because our rightblogger friends' tactic of Adam-and-Steving the issue hasn't helped their increasingly hopeless cause, even within the Republican Party. In any case some of the brethren are working a new angle.

Well, not totally new. There has long been a body of conservative thought about how it's actually straight marriage that needs fixing, and in these dark days for the anti-gay cause, that kind of thinking is catching on with rightbloggers. The basic premise: Straights better marry fast and early, because something something values.

Conservatives have been concerned with declining marriage rates for ages -- usually on goddamn-hippies, too-much-sex grounds. Some of them have called for laws to be changed to redress the balance. They've denounced no-fault divorce, for example, on the grounds that marriages are a pure social good even when they're miserably unhappy. "No-fault divorce laws were a mistake that encouraged marital irresponsibility," wrote some guy who's President of one of the hundreds of rightwing organizations that have "Marriage" in the title. "No Fault Divorce Was the Bullet to the Brain of Marriage," cried Mark Shea.

At World magazine, Alisa Harris told the heartbreaking story of a couple that got divorced, thereby transferring misery from the wife to the husband, which Harris seemed to find unfair; "It's just too easy [to divorce]," the husband told Harris. "She could literally change her life overnight." We can see how conservatives would find this frustrating.

Conservatives have even been willing to let the evil federal government intervene to encourage marriage, at least when they're in charge, as with George W. Bush's $1.5 billion "promotion of marriage" program in 2004, an expenditure which, so far as we remember, none of the currently budget-conscious Republicans complained about at the time.

Some of the brethren have defended such programs on the grounds that they're cost-effective -- because marriage by itself makes people rich. In 2002 small-government conservative Rich Lowry of National Review criticized a welfare bill that would "pay -- and reward -- single moms for being single moms"; if we stopped paying them, Lowry reasoned, they might get married, and that would be super: "If [unwed fathers] were to marry the mothers of their children, 75 percent of the mothers would be lifted out of poverty," he claimed. "In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the mothers would be lifted out of poverty without even having to work themselves." Lifted out of poverty without working? They should bottle this "marriage" stuff!

This idea has persisted, even, we might say, metastasized; when Katie Roiphe postulated in 2012 on a future world without marriage, at National Review Heather Mac Donald snarled that "actually, we know already" what such a world would be like -- "It's called the ghetto." So, just as marriage can make everyone rich, lack of marriage can make everyone poor. It's that powerful!

In recent years, the idea that marriage makes you rich has become an important part of the marriage-mania schtick -- as has a pretense, calculated to draw in more soft-hearted auditors, of concern for the poor.

Take Charles Murray. He's the author of The Bell Curve, a book beloved of rightbloggers because it implies black people are intellectually inferior to white people. This may be why, when Murray considered the fate of America's under-married working class in his 2012 book Coming Apart, he said he had deliberately left black people out of his projections "as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become," he said. Yeah, we get it, buddy.

Murray noticed that wealthier Americans were still getting married before having kids, while poorer Americans were not. But unlike you and us, Murray dismissed the idea that this had anything to do with the drastically reduced economic opportunities for blue-collar workers these days; rather, he thought it was because poor people didn't know that marriage and hard work are good for you -- because richer Americans had stopped telling them so, out of a "condescending 'nonjudgmentalism.'"

Murray suggested "the new upper class must start preaching what it practices," i.e. wealthier Americans should go out among the poor and prosletyze for "marriage and the work ethic," i.e., nag them about it, which if effective would then make everybody rich, or at least the white people.

Murray seems to have been inspired by W. Bradford Wilcox, director of something called the National Marriage Project, who said in 2010 that "family breakdown inhibits the accumulation of assets" -- that is, unwed parenthood leads to poverty, not the other way around.

Wilcox at least had a more entertaining, if no more believable, reason for the downtick in marriage than Murray: he said the lower classes had fallen victim to a sentimental idea about marriage -- a "soul mate" model rather than a more rugged "'institutional' model" (why, it even sounds like something used in factories!). "More and more Americans think that marriage is about an intense and fulfilling couple-focused relationship," complained Wilcox, which is ridiculous -- it's about pooping out kids and working till you have a stroke. But the poor insist on a soul mate thing they can't afford, said Wilcox, and since the "emotional and sexual intensity of the couple relationship waxes and wanes," they naturally wind up unmarried with squalling brats in a trailer, unlike those who never expected to quote-unquote love their partners.

Like Murray, Wilcox believed in nagging -- "highly educated Americans," he said, "need to put their privilege in service of the public good by doing a better job of extending their marriage mindset to the rest of America." He didn't say how it would work, but we like to think he sent troupes of pro-marriage troubadours to wander the hinterlands, singing songs of conjugal wealth transference.

Flash forward to 2013: As they found themselves in a post-gay-marriage-acceptance landscape, some rightbloggers who don't normally go on about straight marriage have been taking up the subject -- and from their writings we get the distinct sense that they don't mind switching targets as long as they still get to hector somebody about their personal lives.

Reihan Salam, one of the young rightbloggers promoted by the praise of David Brooks and others, took a Wilcoxian view: Degenerate moderns, he complained, had abandoned a "conjugal view of marriage, in which procreation and lifelong marital fidelity are central," and adopted one whereby "children, once at the center of marriage, have now become negotiable, and what used to be negotiable -- love, companionship, sex -- has moved to the center."

So, said Salam, maybe conservatives should forget about gay marriage and get to work on straight marriage. His buddy David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute of Buzzword Buzzword -- who Salam said has "emerged as one of the leading critics of same-sex civil marriages," so you know he's hardcore -- had in a recent op-ed "called for a kind of truce. 'Instead of fighting gay marriage,' he wrote, 'I'd like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.'" Gays and straights, scolding together! Unfortunately, Salam reported, "Many of Blankenhorn's erstwhile allies saw his op-ed as a capitulation, and as a result the Institute for American Values lost several members of its board." Maybe we should build him a statue.

At The Umlaut, Eli Dourado offered a Murrayesque explanation for why the poor weren't getting married: "A marriage is like a job -- financially lucrative, but inconvenient at times," he said, "so it could make sense that those who are especially averse to inconvenience would forgo both jobs and marriages and end up poor." Those marriage-shirking poors! Maybe this calls for a government marriage-training program? Doubtful -- in Dourado's view, government intervention has only made the situation worse: "Welfare policy has reduced the opportunity cost of childbearing out of wedlock for the poor," he wrote; "consequently, it makes sense that the poor are doing more of it." Maybe if we made them sing hymns first...

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who normally focuses on how everything is Obama's fault, also caught marriage fever, telling readers of USA Today that "marriage inequality is one of the biggest things making people less equal, accounting for as much as 40% of the difference in incomes." (Lest you question his sincerity, Reynolds added, "I've been supporting gay marriage for a long time --? much, much longer than Barack Obama." Ah, good for him, he got it in there!)

Source: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/04/beaten_on_gay_m.php

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