NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Women DO judge men on their penis size: Researchers say it is ‘as important as a man’s height.’

But while there’s not much you can do about height or penis size, there’s this: “Torso shape was by far the most important determinant of attractiveness.” So get with the Rippetoe and Taubes if you want to improve that.

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AND, IN FACT, I DO: Andrew Klavan: Blame the Left for the deteriorating tone of our political discourse.

In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”

Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?

When it comes from the left it’s “passion.” When it comes from the right, it’s “hate.”

SCIENCE UNSETTLED: Health Officials Split Over Advice on Pregnancy in Zika Areas. “As the Zika virus bears down on the United States, federal health officials are divided over a politically and ethically charged question: Should they advise American women to delay pregnancy in areas where the virus is circulating? Some infectious disease experts are arguing that avoiding conception is the only sure way to prevent the births of deformed babies, according to outside researchers who serve on various advisory panels. Women’s health specialists, on the other hand, counter that the government should not tell women what to do with their bodies.”

So I guess smoking during pregnancy is okay, too.

OUCH. FROM IOWAHAWK:

HENCE, ALL THEIR CRIES OF “TRIGGER WARNINGS” AND “SAFE SPACES” FREE OF NEW IDEAS: “University students are struggling to read entire books.”

AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: If politicians want to be trusted, they should stop lying to us.

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Winter’s over. What with all the Zika news, I’m guessing that the mosquito control stuff will be a big item this year.

AS ALWAYS, REAL LIFE CATCHES UP TO THE RAMBLINGS OF THE EARLIER, FUNNIER WOODY ALLEN.

Shot:

“I have never in my life had difficulty with the cops. I had difficulty with the cops, that’s not…no actually I didn’t have difficulty with the cops. I was once sitting home in my house, and a lot of cars pulled up around the house. They shined in searchlights, and I heard a voice over the loudspeaker say “We have your house surrounded. This is the New York public library” They wanted their books back, y’know, and the little librarian was lobbing grenades over the house. I came out with my hands up, y’know, kicking the book ahead of me. They took me down to the main branch on Fifth Avenue in New York, and they took away my glasses for a year.”

—From Woody Allen, Standup Comic, a collection of the Woodman’s original mid-’60s nightclub routines.

Chaser:

A Michigan couple faces more than three months in jail and hundreds of dollars in penalties for two overdue library books.

Catherine and Melvin Duren were arraigned Thursday in Lenawee County Court on a misdemeanor charge of failure to return rental property. If convicted, they could be sentenced to 93 days in jail and fined $500 for a Dr. Seuss title that’s missing and for a novel that they returned late.

—“Couple Threatened With Jail For Overdue Library Books,” HuffPost Crime, yesterday.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT HAS AN AIRBRUSH, AND SHE’S NOT AFRAID TO USE IT. Albright: ‘War on Terror’ Bad Term for ‘Just Murderers:’

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she dislikes the use of the phrase “war on terror,” arguing that it makes terrorists look like warriors.

“For me, I’ve had a very hard time with the vocabulary of all of this and I have not liked the words ‘war on terror’ because it makes those that are fighting us warriors when they are actually just murderers and they get a greater kind of reverence in their societies if we make warriors out of them. They are murderers, plain and simple,” Albright said during a discussion about religion, peace and world affairs at Georgetown University.

While she did not mention any presidential candidates by name, Albright criticized Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. as a way to combat Islamic extremism.

Yes, Allah forbid anyone connect the dots here. Or as Tim Blair wrote a few years ago in a post titled “Message Unheard:”

You can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for your average Muslim terrorist. They go to all the trouble of blowing up children in Boston, killing US Army personnel in Texas, detonating bars in Bali, flying jets into New York skyscrapers and now basically removing a soldier’s head in a London street, all in the holy name of Islam.

But where’s the credit?

Where’s the respect?

It’s underneath the ash heap at the bottom of the Memory Hole deep within the basement of the Ministry of Truth. I’m sure Albright’s former colleague Sandy Berger could have found it — if only to bury those archives even more deeply.

Related: Brendan O’Neill on “Charlie Hebdo, Terrorism, and the Culture of ‘You Can’t Say That.'”

CHANGE: The ghost of Aereo rises: Local TV streaming coming to Sling TV, sources say.

START SPYING ON JUDGES, SEE HOW FAST THIS CHANGES: Sixth Circuit Says Cell Site Location Data Just A Business Record; No Warrants Required.

HE’LL GO IN HIS OWN SPACESHIP: Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos Turned Down a $200 Million Trip Around the Moon.

CIVIL RIGHTS CONSPIRACY UPDATE: U.S. state prosecutors met with climate groups as Exxon probes expanded.

A coalition of U.S. state attorneys general received guidance from well-known climate scientists and environmental lawyers in March as some of them opened investigations into Exxon Mobil for allegedly misleading the public about climate change risks, documents seen by Reuters showed.

Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has urged action on climate change, and Matt Pawa, who litigated against Exxon in a global warming case, were listed as presenters at a March 29 meeting of more than a dozen state prosecutors, according to emails between the offices of attorneys general in New York and Vermont.

The previously unknown level of coordination with outside advisers offered a glimpse behind the scenes in an increasingly pitched battle between Exxon and environmental groups.

So prosecutors “coordinated” with their targets’ political enemies to punish those targets for speech they disagreed with. Sounds like a conspiracy to deprive people of civil rights to me.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: NYU’s New President Plans to Major in Cost Control. I don’t think student loans whose repayment is contingent on student income are a good idea; they’re basically a subsidy for uneconomic courses of study.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Prosecutors say teacher accused of sex with teen boy “begged his parents not to report her.” “Charges have been filed against a female teacher accused of having sex with a teenage boy. Elizabeth Dillett is both a kindergarten teacher and St. Peter-Immanuel Lutheran School’s athletic director. . . . The boy admitted to police, Domres sent selfies (to him) while she was on her honeymoon.”

MIKE ROWE, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Patti Smith Tells You Why Acting Is ‘the Worst F—ing Job in the World.’

Shouldn’t Hillary, who cackled gleefully last month that she promises to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” also work on eliminating this Dickensian era “dirty job” as well?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LAW SCHOOL NON-TRANSPARENCY EDITION: UCLA Law Prof’s Long Legal Fight Over Access To California Bar Admissions Data Headed To Trial.

It was a decade ago when a UCLA law professor known for his critique of affirmative action first asked the State Bar of California to give him a trove of data on people who applied to practice law in the state.

Professor Richard H. Sander still hasn’t gotten the state bar to turn over the information he wants. But his long legal effort in pursuit of it may have reached a turning point this week when a judge said his case could go to trial over the objections of the state bar.

Mr. Sander is the academic most associated with the “mismatch” theory about affirmative action, the idea that racial and other kinds of admissions preferences can have unintended consequences by putting students in academic settings for which they’re not prepared.

In 2006, he asked the state bar to disclose bar exam scores, grade point averages and LSAT scores of everyone who applied for bar admission between 1972 and 2007, along with each bar applicant’s race and gender. All of the information is stored on the state bar admissions database.

His request didn’t seek disclosure of anyone’s names, but sought admissions data on much more granular level. Mr. Sander has said his request had to do with his research into “the large and persistent gap in bar passage rates among racial and ethnic groups.”

My take: They wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep this stuff under wraps if it made them look good. It must be just terrible.

THE BATHROOM FREEDOM FIGHTERS: “Back in the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen and other rock stars formed Artists United Against Apartheid and performed a song proclaiming ‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City,’ referencing a resort in South Africa,” Brent Bozell and Tim Graham write in their latest syndicated column:

The song mocked the Reagan administration’s “constructive engagement” policy in South Africa, but rock stars routinely performed in the totalitarian Soviet Union, believing that was incredibly constructive.

One wonders: will these people ever stop complaining? Today, Springsteen and other Artists of Conscience have a burning new cause of injustice. Why, “transgender women” with male anatomy must be allowed to celebrate their chosen identity in the girls’ bathroom. The state legislature of North Carolina attempted to retain the silly old notion that “single-sex, multiple-occupancy bathroom and changing facilities” should be entered based on a person’s actual gender, not what they imagine it to be, and the Left has gone berserk.

As Jonah Goldberg notes in his latest G-File on Bernie Sanders’ desire to not only literally yell at clouds, but then spend billions of taxpayer dollars fighting global cooling/warming/climate change/climate chaos, “Liberalism Is War by Other Means.” And it has been ever since “the founding father of liberalism,” William James, “coined the phrase the ‘Moral Equivalent of War’” well over a century ago, as Jonah writes:

James thought war was fantastic for getting the masses to abandon the personal pursuit of happiness and rally around the state. The one problem with it was all the killing. If only we could come up with some cause or crisis that caused the people to abandon individuality and rally to Large Causes as defined by progressives.

The problem for the left in the 21^st century is that having successfully made what Roger Kimball would call the long march through all the institutions, and having passed so much legislation under Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and ironically enough Richard Nixon (who domestically governed as an extension of LBJ’s Great Society), the search for new battlefields to wage war by other means is becoming increasingly thin. Thus the left is currently overreaching badly on an issue that alienates wide swatches of the American public.

At least for now. Given sufficient time and pressure, their calculus is that “you will be made to care,” as Erik Erikson would say.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1073.

GOOD: Oil’s Price Collapse Is Quickly Draining Petrostate Coffers.

The petrostates assembling in Doha to discuss a potential output freeze two days from now aren’t coming together in a show of solidarity or out of some sense of duty towards one another, but rather as an act of desperation. Bloomberg ran the numbers, and found that the oil price collapse has collectively cost the 18 countries involved in this meeting nearly one third of a trillion dollars . . . .

$315 billion is an enormous sum, and it represents the cost of OPEC’s Saudi-led plan not to cut production at any point during oil’s period of sliding prices these past 22 months. Until this February, this seemed like a price Saudi Arabia was willing to pay—though it’s been paying it dearly. Now, though, the Saudis are finally looking to coordinate production with other petrostates, spurred on by the speed at which their rainy day fund is being depleted.

And with Riyadh ready to play ball, there’s not much more in the way of a deal to limit output…except for Tehran, which is looking to boost its own production to the levels it was posting before Western sanctions were enacted. Iran is one of many reasons why this Doha meeting looks unlikely to produce the sort of price rebound those 18 assembled nations really want, but Bloomberg’s data give us a better idea of why these petrostates are finally trying something.

All the money transferred to the OPEC nations has mostly funded terrorism and war against the West. Bring on the fracking!

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Germany Flooded with Under-Age Migrants They Can’t Deport.

FIGHT THE POWER: Milo Yiannopoulos Leads Emory Students on ‘Chalkening’ Crusade Around Campus.

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