I WON’T SAY THAT BIOETHICS IS AN ENTIRELY USELESS FIELD, BUT THE EVIDENCE LEANS THAT WAY: Standing Athwart Science, Yelling ‘Whoa’: I’m a bioethicist, and I am here to help slow down scientific and medical progress.

21ST CENTURY RESEARCH: Sex in the name of science: what we can learn from studying intercourse. “Who volunteers to have sex in a laboratory? I was struck by this question when reading about an experimental study of ideal sexual positions for men with back pain. For the purpose of the research, couples were filmed using motion capture and infra-red technology while they had sex.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Playing the ‘Bill card’ against Hillary: It’s what she gets for playing the ‘war on women card’ against Trump.

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITORS OF STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS. “The thing about having so many characters with masks on, is that even without re-shooting, you can change the content of the scenes with new lines [recorded after the original shoot and dubbed in]. And with characters who are CG or motion capture, you can change what they’re saying.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 966.

PRIORITIES: Just after worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11, Obama tapes show with comedian. “The two taped the segment at the White House on Dec. 7 — the day after Obama delivered a televised prime-time address on terrorism. Though Seinfeld taped footage around Washington for two days, the president never actually left the grounds of the White House with him.”

RACISM: From NYC to Harvard: the war on Asian success.

The outrage is that instead of embracing the example of these Asian families, school authorities and non-Asian parents want to rig the system to hold them back. It’s happening here in New York City, in suburban New Jersey and across the nation.

As a group, Americans need to take a page from the Asian parents’ playbook. American teens rank a dismal 28th in math and science knowledge, compared with teens in other countries — even poor countries. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are at the top.

We’ve slumped. For the first time in 25 years, US scores on the main test for elementary and middle school education fell. And SAT scores for college-bound students dropped significantly.

Could changes in these tests be to blame? That convenient excuse was torpedoed by the stellar performances of Asian-American students. Even though many come from poor or immigrant families, they outscore all other students by large margins on both tests, and their lead keeps widening.

Here in New York City, Asian-Americans make up 13 percent of students, yet they win more than half of the coveted places each year at the city’s selective public high schools, such as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant.

What’s at play here? It’s not a difference in IQ; it’s parenting. That’s confirmed by a recent study by sociologists from City University of New York and the University of Michigan, which showed that parental oversight enabled Asian-American students to far outperform the others.

No wonder many successful charter schools require parents to sign a pledge that they’ll supervise their children’s homework and encourage a strong work ethic.

That formula is under fire at the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in New Jersey. The district, which is 65 percent Asian, routinely produces seniors with perfect SAT scores, admissions to MIT and top prizes in international science competitions.

Why are Democrat-run institutions and cities such hotbeds of anti-Asian racism?

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: IRS Employee Whose Job Was Assisting Victims Of Identity Theft Charged In $1 Million Identity Theft Tax Fraud.

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THERE IS NO RACIST LIKE AN ANTIRACIST, writes Theodore Dalrymple. “That is because he is obsessed by race, whose actual existence as often as not he denies. He looks at the world through race-tinted spectacles, interprets every event or social phenomenon as a manifestation of racism either implicit or explicit, and in general has the soul of a born inquisitor.”

Read the whole thing.

(Via Ace of Spades.)

THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS “TRULY TOOK A VILLAGE:” New York magazine interviews Michael Burry, “the economic soothsayer portrayed by Christian Bale” in the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short. Kate McMillan of Small Dead Animals linked to his interview via the sentence we’re also quoting above in the headline:

The postcrisis perception, at least in the media, appears to be one of Americans being held down by Wall Street, by big companies in the private sector, and by the wealthy. Capitalism is on trial. I see it a little differently. If a lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it. And if I take it, I better understand all the terms, because there is no such thing as free money. That is just basic personal responsibility and common sense. The enablers for this crisis were varied, and it starts not with the bank but with decisions by individuals to borrow to finance a better life, and that is one very loaded decision. This crisis was such a bona fide 100-year flood that the entire world is still trying to dig out of the mud seven years later. Yet so few took responsibility for having any part in it, and the reason is simple: All these people found others to blame, and to that extent, an unhelpful narrative was created. Whether it’s the one percent or hedge funds or Wall Street, I do not think society is well served by failing to encourage every last American to look within. This crisis truly took a village, and most of the villagers themselves are not without some personal responsibility for the circumstances in which they found themselves.

Was that last sentence a Freudian slip, or a deliberately underplayed comment referencing both the administration who gave the dominoes the biggest push and the woman who is now running for her husband’s old office?

Add the 2008 crisis to Clinton letting Osama bin Laden go a decade earlier and ABC doing its damnedest to bury this story, and much of the past 14 years can be seen as a hangover from the excesses of the Clinton administration — or at least it would be, if the MSM had any desire whatsoever to craft that narrative.

COLLEGE SPORTS BOOM, MINORITIES HARDEST HIT: Mother Jones: Racists Hate the Idea of Paying College Athletes.

I’m in favor of paying them, but I’m in more favor of simply abolishing college athletics. If the NFL and NBA want farm teams let the build their own.

TOP 6 MILITARY MISSTEPS OF 2015: “The U.S. military rightly remains one of the most respected of American institutions — our armed forces are as professional as they come. But let’s be honest, over the last year, the stewardship of the service has had its share of missteps.”

Read the whole thing.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: In Dallas, Armed Libertarians Openly Defy Law To Feed, Clothe Homeless.

TRUMP AND SANDERS BREAK THE MOLD FOR POPULIST POLITICIANS, Jonah Goldberg writes. “Populism is typically born in places like Nebraska, Louisiana, Kansas, and the other places given short shrift in that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cartoon showing the view of the world from Ninth Avenue. It’s not supposed to hail from Brooklyn or Queens, never mind Burlington, Vermont, or midtown Manhattan. But that’s where the two reigning populists of the 2016 cycle call home.”

But there is some overlap in the two men, who share a few of leitmotifs sounded by the left-leaning “Progressive” populists of old:

If you can ignore the fact that he’s a billionaire who brags about having been part of the corrupt political system he promises to overthrow, Trump resembles some of the great populists of yesteryear. He’s a nationalist who promises to restore the country to the greatness his followers nostalgically desire. He’s a nativist whose one core issue is stopping illegal immigration — and now any immigration of Muslims, “temporarily.” And he’s a consummate panderer — or, if you prefer, “fighter” — who channels and validates his supporters’ frustrations. As the fictionalized Huey Long character Willie Stark says in the novel All the King’s Men: “Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice.” Long promised to make “every man a king.” Trump promises to make everyone a winner.

Sanders, meanwhile, is all about populist economics — literally. With the exception of his pacifism, he is almost incapable of talking about anything else. But his worldview would be totally recognizable to William Jennings Bryan or Long or even Father Charles Coughlin. According to populist economics, the rich exploit the poor and the middle class intentionally. They leech off their hard work, and they send them to war.

The proper role for populist-run government is to make the puppet masters pay, literally and figuratively. Our economy is “designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else,” Sanders insists. The “billionaire class” has rigged it all, and he’s so angry about it, he often seems more interested in tearing down the rich than building up the poor. (To borrow a Seinfeldian phrase, Sanders sounds like an old man sending back soup at a deli.)

This is one place where Sanders and Trump overlap. They want to make the people ruining this country pay. Sanders wants to impose a cartoonish “speculation” tax on Wall Street; Trump wants to make the Mexicans pay for the wall that will keep them out.

But as Glenn has written in USA Today, as with the rise of the populists of the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century, “Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest.”

BUT IT PROBABLY WON’T BE, UNTIL 2017 AT THE EARLIEST: Why ISIS Needs to Be Destroyed Now.

JESSE SINGAL: Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals:

This should stand as a wake-up call, as a rebuke to the smugness that sometimes infects progressive beliefs about who “respects” science more. After all, what both the Bailey and Chagnon cases have in common — alongside some of the others in Galileo’s Middle Finger — is the extent to which groups of progressive self-appointed defenders of social justice banded together to launch full-throated assaults on legitimate science, and the extent to which these attacks were abetted by left-leaning academic institutions and activists too scared to stand up to the attackers, often out of a fear of being lumped in with those being attacked, or of being accused of wobbly allyship.

Everyone, of any political leaning, is vulnerable to such pressures. But lefties seem to care more about belonging.

The book is Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, by Alice Dreger.