IS ROBOSEXUALITY A CHOICE, OR IS IT INBORN? 1 In 5 People Would Have Sex With A Robot. Actually, if a vibrator counts as a robot, more than that already are.

MARGARINE CAUSES DIVORCE IN MAINE! Spurious Correlations.

I SEE A LOT OF PROMISE IN THIS SORT OF APPLICATION: Why Some Doctors Like Google Glass So Much. Integrate it with imaging and expert-systems stuff and you’re really getting somewhere.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Defaults on loans may cost LCC feds’ revenue. “Lane Community College risks a disastrous loss of money because students who left the school in recent years — by graduating or dropping out — are defaulting on federal education loans at high rates. The college is caught in a snare Congress set for some for-profit schools whose students learn little, owe much and default heavily.” The thing is, learning little, owing much, and defaulting heavily isn’t limited to for-profit schools.

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REASON TV: Reality Show President: Inside the White House PR Machine. “All over the world, heads of state are producing idealized versions of their own identities on social media, a technology that empowers leaders every bit as much as the rest of us. Heads of state and politicians are increasingly free to project their own self-image directly to the public, with less accountability than ever from an independent press. From the White House on YouTube to Ten Downing Street on Flickr to Bashar al-Assad’s Instagram page, we may never see our politicians in the way that we did just a few years ago.”

MARC THIESSEN IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Where was Obama during Benghazi? Ask the White House diarist.

What was President Obama doing during the eight hours that the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was under attack? Amazingly, we still do not know 20 months later.

But there is an easy way to find out — just ask the White House diarist. When trying to keep track of the president’s time, most observers look at “WAVE records” (the White House visitors log listing everyone who enters the White House complex) and the “President’s Public Schedule” (which selectively lists the president’s public activities). But there is another document that meticulously records all the president’s activities, public and private, every second of every day. It is called the “President’s Daily Diary.”

Just outside the Oval Office is a room called the Outer Oval, where the president’s secretary and personal aide sit and through which all visitors coming to see the president pass. Staff members in the Outer Oval keep track of the president’s location at all times. They carefully record the names of all individuals who walk into the Oval Office — when they entered, how long they stayed, what the topic of discussion was. They keep a record of all calls made and received by the president, including the topic, participants and duration. They even record the president’s bathroom breaks (they write “evacuating” into the log).

Congress could also subpoena his Secret Service detail. Plus: “During Watergate, Richard Nixon had his infamous 18 1 / 2-minute gap. When it comes to Benghazi, Obama has an eight-hour gap. That gap needs to be closed. If Obama has nothing to hide, then he has nothing to fear.” Obviously he has something to hide, or he wouldn’t have hidden it for 20 months.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What I Learned From My First One-Night Stand (in My 40s).

FASTER, PLEASE: Patient’s Cells Deployed to Attack Aggressive Cancer. “An article published Thursday in the journal Science describes the treatment of a 43-year-old woman with an advanced and deadly type of cancer that had spread from her bile duct to her liver and lungs, despite chemotherapy. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute sequenced the genome of her cancer and identified cells from her immune system that attacked a specific mutation in the malignant cells. Then they grew those immune cells in the laboratory and infused billions of them back into her bloodstream. The tumors began ‘melting away,’ said Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, the senior author of the article and chief of the surgery branch at the cancer institute.”

Immunotherapy has been a long-tried approach to cancer treatment — I remember they were trying it at Oak Ridge when I was in high school — but promising results often fail to pan out in larger trials. I hope this one does better.

PROGRESS: 5 Brilliant Military Gadgets Designed by Students.

WHY ARE WOMEN IN AFRICA MORE LIKELY TO GET AIDS THAN WOMEN ELSEWHERE? “The Norwegian team believes that African women are more vulnerable to H.I.V. because of a chronic, undiagnosed parasitic disease: genital schistosomiasis (pronounced shis-to-so-MY-a-sis), often nicknamed ‘schisto.’ The disease, also known as bilharzia and snail fever, is caused by parasitic worms picked up in infested river water. It is marked by fragile sores in the far reaches of the vaginal canal that may serve as entry points for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Dr. Eyrun F. Kjetland, who leads the Otimati team, says that it is more common than syphilis or herpes, which can also open the way for H.I.V.”

OUT: FACELIFTS. In: Handlifts. “What’s a hand lift, you ask? Why, just a little $1,200 cosmetic procedure that ‘restore[s] and replenish[es] lost volume in the hands’ via a filler called juvederm.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Day Obama’s Presidency Died.

The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of the Obama presidency as clearly as a milepost. We are told by the papers that nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away country. A few people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but from that day the administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The Secretary of State ‘resigned’. The CIA Director was cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to withdraw his Red Line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose eulogy he had pronounced appeared with disturbing force throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return to the world stage, first in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

Worse was to follow. America’s premier intelligence organization, the National Security Agency, was taken apart in public and the man who took its secrets, Edward Snowden, decamped to Moscow with a laptop full of secrets. But it was all just a curtain raiser to the dismemberment of Ukraine and the disaster in Eastern Europe. . . . And still there’s no acknowledgement of anything being fundamentally wrong.

Read the whole thing. Including this: “The lie is much more dangerous than the truth. America can live with an Obama mistake. But it can’t live with an Obama who cannot acknowledge his mistakes.”

RICHARD BENEDETTO: On Benghazi, Which Democrat Will Play the Role Howard Baker Played In Watergate? My guess: None. Howard Baker had scruples.

ELIANA JOHNSON: A Rubio Resurgence. He made a rookie error by trying to do an immigration deal with Chuck Schumer. That’s cost him. I do think that he could still be a viable candidate, but the GOP establishment’s liking for him isn’t necessarily a plus.

UPDATE: Not much charity for Rubio in the comments here.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 368.

SO EXCEPT FOR THE LIBERAL PART, THAT’S BASICALLY WHAT THEY THINK THE TEA PARTY IS LIKE: Report: Journalists Are Miserable, Liberal, Over-Educated, Under-Paid, Middle-Aged Men.

Journalists have long been more educated than the typical American. In the period that college graduates went from 11 percent to about 30 percent of the country, the share of journalists with a college degree went from 58 percent to 92 percent. (Editorializing side note: Do keep this in mind when you read journalists making the case that college is a waste of time. Maybe this is self-deprecating, or perhaps it even qualifies as a “lesson learned.” But a profession where non-college grads are so scarce they practically qualify as endangered instructing the country at large to not go to college is a weird phenomenon.)

Well, not if all that education leaves you miserable and underpaid. I think that one problem with today’s journalism — and its practitioners’ gullibility regarding various income-inequality demagogueries — is that journalists feel particularly underpaid with regard to their self-assessed status, which in part comes from their extensive education.

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: The Unbearable Whiteness of Liberal Media: If left-leaning publications value diversity, why don’t they have any? For the same reason MoveOn, et al., don’t.

AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Rape on Campus Belongs in the Courts.

The idea of universities as being somehow outside of the normal justice system, with their own police and disciplinary procedures, is a survival of the era when they were ecclesiastical institutions. Its persistence into the present day serves no real social purpose.

Related: Rape And the College Brand.

That the activists’ moral outrage is justified does not mean, again, that their prescriptions are correct. Their fatal conceit in many cases is the idea that by sweeping away misogyny they can resolve the internal contradictions of social liberalism, and usher in a world where everyone can be libertines together, and a hard-drinking, sexually permissive culture can be experienced identically by male and female, rich and middle class and poor.

This is a utopian, ahistorical vision, and its pursuit is fraught with peril: like many revolutionaries, today’s campus activists might well end up toppling a corrupt order only to install a kind of police state in its stead.

The lefty stuff always leads to the same place. But you’re crazy to go to these schools if you’re a man. And women don’t want to go to schools that men avoid. So I predict either an eventual equilibrium, or a collapse.

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OVERSIGHT: Rand Paul Wants Drone Killing Memos Released to Public, Patrick Leahy OK With Just Senate Seeing Them.

WITH OVER 3,700 DOWNLOADS, my The Second Amendment As Ordinary Constitutional Law is still holding firm at #1 on SSRN.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF CORRUPTION EDITION: Sallie Mae Spin-Off Expects $103 Million Hit From Probes. “Navient, the loan-servicing company formerly known as Sallie Mae, disclosed to investors Friday that it expects to pay an additional $103 million to settle two federal investigations, on top of the $70 million it already set aside last year for that purpose. The company is facing investigations from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Department of Justice, and other federal and state agencies over how it managed and processed the payments of student loan borrowers, including active-duty servicemembers.”

IF ONLY THEY TOOK A HANDS-OFF APPROACH TO THEIR POLITICAL OPPONENTS: Grassley still pushing for answers on DHS’ alleged terrorist ‘hands off’ list.