STUDY: Attractive Men Have Long Ring Fingers. “The results, published in the British Royal Society’s journal Biological Sciences, unveil intricate links between foetal exposure of males to hormones, the development of certain physical traits, and what turns on the opposite sex. It also adds to a growing body of research — conducted under the banner of evolutionary psychology — suggesting that the drivers of human behaviour are found, more than previously suspected, in ‘nature’ rather than ‘nurture.'”
Archive for 2011
April 20, 2011
PARENTS WANT TO BE ABLE TO DO genetic testing on their kids. The medical profession — perhaps fearing a wave of technology-induced disintermediation — wants to get involved.
THE NEW CIVILITY: University of Iowa Professor Tells College Republicans to “F” Off.
UPDATE: Her subsequent comments remind me of Forrest Gump: “It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch, Johnson! I would never hurt you. You know that.”
LAW PROFESSOR CALLS FOR BAN ON KORAN-BURNING. My sentiments are more in line with Cohen v. California.
SAVE MONEY ON GAS! With a hybrid Bugatti. Hybrid or not, a W-16 is not likely to be exactly fuel-sipping . . . .
REP. DARRELL ISSA THREATENS CONTEMPT CHARGES in ATF Mexican gunrunning probe.
VANDERBILT STUDENTS protesting the Abu Dhabi campus.
IN THE MAIL: From Paul Chafe, Exodus: The Ark.
GOLDEN PARACHUTES FOR EDUCRATS?
Did a top official from the Department of Education receive a ‘golden parachute’ upon his leaving the administration for a consulting gig?
Documents released Tuesday by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) show Robert Shireman, a top force at Education pushing “gainful employment” regulations, continued to receive generous federal benefits after he became an intermittent consultant for the agency.
A correspondence summary shows officials arranged to begin his consulting contract “immediately following his departure from his position as Deputy Undersecretary in the Office of the Under Secretary so he could retain his federal benefits.”
One hand washes the other.
UPDATE: Here’s a study on golden parachutes for bureaucrats.
WHITE HOUSE JAWBONE FAIL: WaPo: Obama administration officials tried to keep S&P rating at ‘stable’. But they were unable to hide the decline.
Reader Paul Jackson emails: “I wish the WaPo had been a tad more informative about this private urging that came from the Obama administration. I’m wondering if other administrations have tried this in the past, but we don’t know since the WaPo didn’t tell us. My cynical guess is that if say the Reagan or Bush41 or Bush43 admins had done the same thing, they would have pointed this out. These guys really do think they can run the country like a ward in Chicago….amazing. I now expect that Obama will start hurling negatives at them, as that’s SOP in his playbook that has become far too predictable for a man who thinks so highly of himself and his intelligence.” I don’t think prior administrations have tried this, because to my knowledge no prior administration has had to deal with a decline in the U.S. credit rating, perhaps because no prior administration has been so unrelentingly profligate.
UPDATE: A Wall Street reader notes that there’s a history of this kind of thing: “As Enron was imploding in late 2001, ex-Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin tried to get the Bush Administration to lean on the ratings agencies.”
Former Clinton Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin telephoned a top Treasury official last fall to explore whether the Bush administration could intervene on behalf of Enron Corp. as the giant energy company neared collapse, officials said yesterday.
Rubin, chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup, one of Enron’s main creditors, called Peter Fisher, Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, and asked “what he thought of the idea” of calling bond-rating agencies to help forestall a crippling reduction in Enron’s credit rating, according to a statement released by the Treasury Department.
Fisher told Rubin that he didn’t think it was advisable, and did not make a call, Treasury said.
The news of Rubin’s efforts concluded another day of disclosures at the Treasury Department, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about the extent of government contact with Enron executives in the weeks before the company’s filing for bankruptcy court protection.
It’s all about controlling the narrative, I guess.
MICHAEL BARONE: “Did Barack Obama take Tax 1 in law school? I did, and I remember the first day of classes, when mild-mannered professor Boris Bittker asked a simple question, ‘What is income?’ . . . Evidently he likes taking people’s money away. What he doesn’t explain is why this makes anyone better off.”
TRANSPARENCY: Secretive Obama Campaign Won’t Reveal Fundraising Numbers. Can you make a credit card donation from overseas, like last time?
UPDATE: Obama ‘transparency’ Executive Order targets administration enemies. Doesn’t everything, these days? And yet the number of “enemies” keeps growing.
TOM FRIEDMAN, 1999: “Amazon.com is doomed.” Eventually, perhaps, like all the works of man. But most likely much later than The New York Times, whose business and editorial judgment has been inferior to Amazon’s in recent years. “Friedman’s claim that an ordinary citizen can replicate Amazon in his living room was laughably wrong, but there is a delicious irony in the fact that there is indeed one industry with respect to which Friedman’s dire prediction came true: Friedman’s own industry, journalism. It turns out that amateurs, many of whom have far more expertise with respect to business, politics, the arts–you name it–than Tom Friedman and other pundits with newspaper columns can, almost for free, turn out exactly the same product that Friedman does. Only better. . . . The Times has declined for a number of reasons, but one of the important ones is that citizen journalism turned out to be not just a viable alternative, but a superior alternative, to the myopia that Friedman and his colleagues represent. Friedman was perceptive enough to diagnose the problem that micro-competition could cause for Amazon (albeit incorrectly) but not perceptive enough to apply the same reasoning to his own industry. That fact speaks volumes about how much trust we should put in the pundit class, especially when it opines about business matters.” Read the whole thing.
YA THINK? Higher Education: The Next Asset Bubble? “45 percent of college graduates earn less than $15,000.” Can this be true?
ON SALE, TODAY ONLY: A DeWalt cordless drill/driver kit.
MEGAN MCARDLE: MARKETS AND THE COMMON GOOD.
Does this mean that the government (or our employers) may properly restrict our sexual behavior to that of which a majority of our neighbors approve? That bed you’re having sex in probably travelled on the interstate highway system, so standby for government inspection . . .
No? The government can’t do that? Then why is this argument supposed to be a telling blow against arguments for strong property rights and freedom from interference in voluntary economic transactions? . . . All the activity of a modern human takes place in the context of society. That requires balancing of individual rights and the common good. But this is not a blank check for the government to trample rights as it pleases . . . nor a blanket answer when people complain that the government has gotten too intrusive.
Read the whole thing.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Obama: “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.”
Apparently, when Obama taught Constitutional Law he never got around to teaching the Texas White (Democratic) Primary cases. Or talking about which side was which in the Civil War . . . .
Updated to make clear to people who don’t click the link that it was the Texas Democrats who excluded black voters (and Mexican-Americans) from their primaries (and then dodged further with the Jaybird Democratic Association when the courts struck down the White Primaries). This is a major set of cases under state action, and I’m surprised that Obama is unfamiliar with this history. I wonder what he covered in his Constitutional Law classes?
KEITH HENNESSEY: Understanding The S&P Report On U.S. Creditworthiness. “Given the President’s apparent budget strategy, there is at the moment a vanishingly small chance of a big medium-term or long-term deal like that described by S&P as necessary to avoid a possible downgrade, ($3-4 trillion over 10 years, with even bigger long-term changes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). The greatest obstacle to constructive negotiations is the President’s attack rhetoric, in which he today accused Congressional Republicans of ‘doing away with health insurance for … an autistic child’ and potentially causing future bridge collapses like the one in Minnesota that killed 13 people. Maybe the S&P report will scare the President’s team into treating the long-term problem seriously rather than using it as a campaign weapon. I’m not holding my breath.”
CHUCK SIMMINS: “America is truly a wonderful country. Where else would you find a female Navy officer from Reno, Nevada, commanding the destroyer USS Decatur? Did I mention that she is of South Asian origin? Oh, and let us not forget that she is a graduate of the nation’s oldest private military academy, Norwich.”
WASHINGTON CAPITOL POLICE DEPARTMENT LIKE “a modern-day southern plantation.”
SELFISH REASONS TO HAVE MORE KIDS: A Thank-You To Bryan Caplan. Here’s Caplan’s book on the subject.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: When it comes to Presidential authority, Obama’s acting like Bush on steroids. But when it comes to criticisms of Obama, Bush’s critics are acting like they’re on Xanax.
MICKEY KAUS: Journolists Adrift. “If only these young journalists had some sort of private venue where they could iron out these complexities ahead of time.”