ON THIS DAY IN 1620, the Mayflower first sighted land in the New World (though it was a little while later before they came ashore). Unprepared for Massachusetts’ harsh climate, about half the passengers and crew were dead by Spring.

OBVIOUSLY, THIS MEANS THAT WE NEED TO KEEP MEN HAPPY, FOR THE GOOD OF FUTURE GENERATIONS: How Dad’s Stresses Get Passed Along to Offspring.

Be nice to men. For the sake of the children! Won’t someone think of the children?

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: MSM Claims, Without Evidence, That White House Acosta Tape Was ‘Doctored.’

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s a Legitimately Fun Car You Can Buy for Less Than $10,000?

BREAKING: Judge finds Broward County violated FL Constitution, orders elected officials to comply by 7pm.

BRUCE BAWER: Norway’s Mosques Are Multiplying, and Taxpayers Foot the Bill.

GET SCREENED REGULARLY: Skin Cancer Deaths Spike for Men in Developed World.

AT AMAZON, holiday savings in Kitchen and Housewares.

Plus, save on Software.

29 YEARS AGO TODAY, the Berlin Wall came down.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: ‘Remarkable’ decline in fertility rates.

There has been a remarkable global decline in the number of children women are having, say researchers.

Their report found fertility rate falls meant nearly half of countries were now facing a “baby bust” – meaning there are insufficient children to maintain their population size.

The researchers said the findings were a “huge surprise”.

And there would be profound consequences for societies with “more grandparents than grandchildren”.

The study, published in the Lancet, followed trends in every country from 1950 to 2017.

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. The fertility rate all but halved to 2.4 children per woman by last year.

But that masks huge variation between nations.

The fertility rate in Niger, west Africa, is 7.1, but in the Mediterranean island of Cyprus women are having one child, on average.

In the UK, the rate is 1.7, similar to most Western European countries.

The total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman gives birth to in their lifetime (it’s different to the birth rate which is the number of children born per thousand people each year).

Whenever a country’s rate drops below approximately 2.1 then populations will eventually start to shrink (this “baby bust” figure is significantly higher in countries which have high rates of death in childhood).

At the start of the study, in 1950, there were zero nations in this position.

This is unexplored territory.

WELL, GOOD: New antibiotic shows promise against ‘super gonorrhea.’

PHILIP WEGMANN: Broward County’s election division is a national disgrace: A history.

21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: Man who got penis fillers to boost his girth to 15cm says the procedure has boosted his confidence. “His penis now measures the same width as a bottle of Lea & Perrins sauce.”

HAVING REREAD MOST OF THE AUBREY/MATURIN NOVELS FROM PATRICK O’BRIAN, I’m now reading The Guineaman by Richard Woodman. It’s not O’Brian, but it’s pretty good.

PATRICK POOLE: Islamic State Claims ‘Known Wolf’ Terror Attack in Australia.

THE JUMBO SHRIMP OF SPACE: SpaceX is Fashioning a Miniature Big Falcon Rocket Out of a Falcon 9.

ALSO, ALIEN BASES: Long-Lost Continents Under Antarctica Revealed in Old Satellite Data.

SKYNET SMILES: Robot Reporters Are Here.

Based on the video at the link, I’d say there’s still a ways to go before digital TV news anchors make the leap across the uncanny valley.

THE DEMOCRATS’ BETO PROBLEM:

O’Rourke made no attempt to disguise his extremism during the campaign.

Like his funding, his ideas seemed to come straight from La-La-Land. He said he was open to the idea of abolishing ICE. He supports Medicare for All. He talked up gun control while opposing armed security officers in schools, an idea that enjoys 87 percent support in Texas. He praised NFL players who knelt during the national anthem. He openly called for impeaching President Trump, a position so tactically deranged that even Nancy Pelosi shies away from it. If he had simply pretended to swing right on such matters these past few months, he might have done what Barack Obama did: won over lots of moderates while liberals remained certain he was one of them. If you find yourself trying to win an election in Texas while swerving well left of Nancy Pelosi, you’ve become high on your own supply.

That’s the Democrats’ problem: They get so giddy about the next JFK that they don’t see the reality. Why should they? They live in enclaves where everyone is liberal. They get their information from media outlets in which illegal aliens are simply “migrants.” Within the bubble, everyone thought O’Rourke was a great candidate. The magazine profiles! The money pouring in from starstruck admirers! The shredding on a skateboard! The shredding on a guitar! By mid-October O’Rourke had raised an insane $70 million–plus and was outspending Cruz by two to one. Yet as a Politico pre-postmortem put it last weekend, “Democratic minds will want to know, what did he do with that $70 million? Why wasn’t he barraging persuadable Republicans with mail and phone calls and door knocks? . . . Did he consciously avoid playing on their issues, determining it was more profitable for his political future to lose as a liberal than compete as a moderate?”

Well, possibly. Could the Democrats really think they would fool the voters by repeating their 2006 pose as right-leaning moderates only to become Nancy Pelosi’s crash-test dummies?

DEB HEINE IS STAYING ON TOP OF THE FLORIDA RECOUNT SHENANIGANS at the PJMedia Live Blog.

LONGEVITY: Genetics play less of a role in lifespan than we thought.

The calculations are complicated, but the thinking behind them is simple: when genes play a role in a trait, you should be pretty similar to your siblings and parents, a little less similar to your cousins, less similar to your second cousins, and so on. Ruby and his colleagues used the family tree data to explore whether lifespans were similar between more closely and distantly related relatives. This produced heritability estimates similar to those calculated before: siblings’ lifespans were highly correlated, first cousins’ a bit less correlated, and so on.

But spouses’ lifespans were correlated, too. That could be easily explained by spouses sharing the same household and lifestyle: eating the same healthy diet or puffing on cigarettes together. But the researchers noticed something odd: the lifespans of other relatives related only by marriage also correlated. That can’t be explained by genes, and it can’t be explained by shared environment.

So Ruby and his colleagues started investigating the lifespans of in-laws. They looked at siblings-in-law, and first-cousins-in-law, and then further afield, at relationships like “the sibling of a sibling’s spouse” (your brother’s wife’s sister) and “the spouse of a spouse’s sibling” (your husband’s sister’s husband). Even at these distant relationships, lifespans were correlated—if your spouse’s sibling’s spouse lived to a ripe old age, that means you’re a bit more likely to do the same.

What’s going on here is assortative mating: people are likely to marry people who match them on certain characteristics, like education and wealth, and those traits are in turn related to longevity.

I’d wager that happiness plays a factor in this as well.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH: Colorado to adopt ‘Gender X’ option on driver’s licenses.