ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Luke 16:19-31
‘There was a rich man who used to dress in purple and fine linen and feast magnificently every day. And at his gate there used to lie a poor man called Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to fill himself with what fell from the rich man’s table. Even dogs came and licked his sores. Now it happened that the poor man died and was carried away by the angels into Abraham’s embrace. The rich man also died and was buried. ‘In his torment in Hades he looked up and saw Abraham a long way off with Lazarus in his embrace. So he cried out, “Father Abraham, pity me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.” Abraham said, “My son, remember that during your life you had your fill of good things, just as Lazarus his fill of bad. Now he is being comforted here while you are in agony. But that is not all: between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to prevent those who want to cross from our side to yours or from your side to ours.” ‘So he said, “Father, I beg you then to send Lazarus to my father’s house, since I have five brothers, to give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too.” Abraham said, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.” The rich man replied, “Ah no, father Abraham, but if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent.” Then Abraham said to him, “If they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.” – The New Jerusalem Bible

What's the one thing that you want people to know about Senator Sam Brownback's run for President that they don't know about either who you are or what you would do? Why they should support you?

Well, it's why I'm running is what I would want them know, and I'm running to rebuild the family and renew the culture.

I will take, and have taken, a position on a broad set of issues, which I think are all very important. But, at my core, why I'm doing this is to rebuild the family and renew the culture. And that's what I'd want them to know.

Lieberman said Webb was off-base on his interpretation of his proposal.

"Our colleague (Webb) has given the darkest possible interpretation ... There is no intention of declaring war," Lieberman said.

Transcript:

MATTHEWS: Do you find it difficult to debate a woman?

DODD: No, not at all. I haven't faced one in the eight elections I've been involved in, but I think here this is a question of looking for leadership. There's no more important election, Chris, in our lifetime than the one that's going to be conducted about 14 months from now. […]

RUSSERT: What I want to hear is the conversation tonight between president Clinton Hillary Clinton about president Clinton's comments last year on MEET THE PRESS that we ought to have an exception that if we know the number three guy in Al Qaeda knows a bomb is going off and where it's going off, it's okay to beat the hell out of him. Have a presidential (inaudible).

MATTHEWS: Let me tell you how short Hillary's leash is. She was asked by you, sir, about whether we're going to get full disclosure of contributors to presidential libraries. And she did not feel that she had the latitude in her husband's absence to give you an answer. She said, you'll have to ask my husband, as if you're a guy going door to door trying to sell someone and says you'll have to wait for my husband to get home. It was unbelievable that she wouldn't answer that. Never mind, let's drop this.

Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon's mobile network available for a text-message program.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

"The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident," Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

"It was an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy," Mr. Nelson said. "That policy, developed before text messaging protections such as spam filters adequately protected customers from unwanted messages, was designed to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children."

Mr. Nelson noted that text messaging is "harnessed by organizations and individuals communicating their diverse opinions about issues and topics" and said Verizon has "great respect for this free flow of ideas."

The other leading wireless carriers had accepted the Naral program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

Text messaging is a growing political tool in the United States and a dominant one abroad, and such sign-up programs are used by many political candidates and advocacy groups to send updates to supporters.

But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The girl who was at the center of the case, now 21 and identified as Jane Doe by the court, testified that in 2001 she had been pressed by Mr. Jeffs into a marriage with a 19-year-old cousin she didn't want. Prosecutors said Mr. Jeffs had known that the marriage would lead to nonconsensual sex but pushed the union anyway.

When the verdict was read, just after 2:15 p.m. here, Mr. Jeffs showed no emotion, and his followers, who had filled the back rows of the courtroom, remained silent.

In the deeply isolated rural polygamy communities of Hildale, Utah, and nearby Colorado City, Ariz., residents said the verdict would probably just harden the lines of resistance and resolve.

"That just makes him all the more the prophet," said Isaac Wyler, who was kicked out of the church by Mr. Jeffs in 2004 but has remained in Colorado City.

Benjamin Bistline, a former member of Mr. Jeffs' church, said he thought the verdict would probably shift the balance of the church away from its historic base here in southern Utah to more recently established compounds in Texas, South Dakota and elsewhere.

"They believe that polygamy is god's word, and they will still do underage marriages," said Mr. Bistline, 72, who has written about the F.L.D.S.

Basic principles of biology rather than women's newfound economic independence can explain why fewer of them are getting married and having children, and why the trend may only be temporary, says a Queen's researcher.

"Only in recent times have women acquired significant control over their own fertility, and many are preferring not to be saddled with the burden of raising children," says Lonnie Aarssen, a Biology professor who specializes in reproductive ecology. "The question is whether this is just a result of economic factors and socio-cultural conditioning, as most analysts claim, or whether the choices that women are making about parenthood are influenced by genetic inheritance from maternal ancestors that were dominated by paternal ancestors."

In a paper published in the current issue of Oikos – an international journal of ecology – Dr. Aarssen suggests that because of inherited inclinations, many women when empowered by financial independence are driven to pursue leisure and other personal goals that distract from parenthood.

"The drive to leave a legacy through offspring can be side-tracked by an attraction to legacy through other things like career, fame, and fortune – distractions that, until recently, were only widely available to men".

Dr. Aarssen speculates that the now widespread incidence of childlessness in developed countries will subside, not because of cultural evolution but because of biological evolution.

The women who leave the most descendants will be those with an intrinsic drive for motherhood. The ones who would rather forego parenthood in order to have a career, lavish vacations and leisurely lifestyles will of course leave no descendants at all. Over time those genetic traits that influence women away from motherhood will necessarily be 'bred out.'

My understanding of genetics is that when someone talks of "Genetic influences" (Especially in terms of sociobiology). I want to know which "genes" are involved, that is what region of DNA, what the structure of it is with regards things like coding regions, products of coding regions, base richness, promotor regions, mutational differences expressed in the sequence data. And how the product of that gene interacts with the rest of the genome, and also how the products of other genes interact with the gene itself. This level of detail may or may not shed light on complex human social trends, but simple Mendellian genetics with a Darwinian emphasis on natural selection do not cut it, it is that simple.

Dr. Aarssen says:

"Although many human behavioural domains are of course a product of sociocultural/economic context or 'the environment', many of them are also inevitably a product of genes/alleles inherited from ancestors
According to the central tenet of evolution theory, many of the traits that are common today within any species (human or otherwise) are the same traits that were also common in those predecessors that left the most descendants,
particularly with regard to traits that promote offspring production directly. The most obvious of these traits are associated in one way or another with attraction to sex, or 'sex drive', but equally important are traits associated in one way or another with
promoting the survival/well-being of the offspring that issue as a product of sex drive."

Well what would these genes/alleles be? I could make an educated guess, sex hormones are often steroids, so you need a gene to code for peptides that make up the enzymes to convert cholesterol to these steroids, then you need the genes to code for the peptides that make up the receptors of these steroids, you then need peptide hormones you need the genes to code for them directly, then you need the genes to produce the peptides that make up the proteins to regulate the expressions of these genes via various mechanisms. Before you know it there are so many genes involved and so many variants of these genes, you cannot rely on Darwinian natural selection alone to explain all this. Mendellian genetics gives you clues as to which genes are most likely to express. But putting it bluntly. If Dr Aarssen is saying these genetic influences are involved, I would like to know in more precise detail how they are involved.

The model presented in the Darwinian framework gets further undermined when you consider that genes could often have multiple functions. A gene does not work in some cases and you could get 20 proteins that have in them a peptide chain from that gene.

Having established that to some extent the discussion with regards the actual biology is lacking. That is it would need further investigation to serve as viable evidence to support the conclusions. What is being said?

Dr Aarssen states:

"The drive to leave a legacy has presented a unique challenge for males throughout most of human history: men could never be completely certain of their paternity
Women have always known exactly how many offspring they produced, but
men could never know for sure. Hence, a man could never truly escape from the agony of doubt about whether the children that he was investing all of his
resources in, and leaving an inheritance for, were really his"

This passage is actually very interesting because what it describes is past evolution. In fact it is a very good description of the social structure of a troop of apes for example, Take Dr. Aarssens' press statement

"In this way future generations of women will inherit a stronger genetic predisposition for mating and having children as a priority in their lives."

It seems evident that Dr. Aarssen is asserting that the mating rituals of apes, (Let's be truthful here) are going to re-assert themselves. Many of the press statements talk of the "mom gene" (Assertion a female behavior) but the paper talks more about male dominated social hierarchies. Of course the "politically correct" social commentator will point out that this is sexism, especially when reading the following.

"This was fairly obviously attainable through traits that promoted the subjugation of females, especially dominant control over their fertility and sexual activity, and through behaviours that promoted the acquisition of multiple sexual partners and the generation of dynasties, involving polygyny, concubines, mistresses, and rape including spousal rape The fitness benefit from these 'legacy drive' pursuits i.e. leaving many descendants would also, of course, have been promoted in males by a strong sex drive."

But this all seems to miss the point, Dr Aarssen is in effect saying that we have the social structures of evolutionary written into our genes. To some extent I would agree, but humans in general have evolved different strategies, You see what Dr Aarssen is presenting is an evolutionary paradox. You see the territorialism, the aggressive assertion of breeding rights and so on do manifest in human, the result would probably well be things like warfare. And this is not a vague statement either, warfare has been developed into a strategic art. There have been many books written about it. Go back to the animal kingdom and you will find that meerkats of all things are experts at it. And the whole thing is driven as Dr. Aarssen would agree, by mating and breeding rights, and the control of genetic legacy (There is a well publicized project that has studied this, which ended up with TV shows and spin offs). The point is I have yet to see a meerkat, or an ape or any mammal besides human beings gain the ability to sequence their own genome.

In the largest experiment on acupuncture for back pain to date, more than 1,100 patients were randomly assigned to receive either acupuncture, sham acupuncture or conventional therapy. For the sham acupuncture, needles were inserted, but not as deeply as for the real thing. The sham acupuncture also did not insert needles in traditional acupuncture points on the body and the needles were not manually moved and rotated.

After six months, patients answered questions about pain and functional ability and their scores determined how well each of the therapies worked.

In the real acupuncture group, 47 percent of patients improved. In the sham acupuncture group, 44 percent did. In the usual care group, 27 percent got relief.

Many researchers worry that needling at "non-acupuncture" points is not analogous to a dummy inert pill as a placebo control. The concern is that needling anywhere in the body (at both real acupuncture sites or non-acupuncture sites) may have physiological effects... These responses can modulate pain and might produce effects beyond what might be expected from an inert sham control.

The attack in a hotel parking lot here last month was remarkable not only because the victim, Juanita Bynum, is the most prominent black female television evangelist in the country, who is pals with Oprah, admired by Aretha, and who recently signed on to campaign for Obama.

It was shocking, especially to legions of women who had latched onto her message that only chastity and self-respect would bring true love, because the attacker who choked, stomped and kicked her, Ms. Bynum said, was her husband.

The episode has led to debate about domestic violence and how churches, particularly black churches, respond to it.

The couple separated in June, a fact not made public until the assault case arose. Mr. Weeks was subsequently evicted from his house and threatened with eviction from the space rented by his church.

Mr. Weeks has not granted interviews but has made several statements, saying there is more to the story and apologizing that Christians have had to endure this ordeal.

But during the marriage, Ms. Bynum publicly focused on the duties of a Christian wife, counseling women to give their husbands plenty of sex and to ask them, "Do I please you?"

About this time, Ms. Bynum glamorized her own look, trading a bun for a hair weave, picture-perfect makeup and plastic surgery that she discussed on the BET network. Her wardrobe went from ankle-length skirts to casual chic and glittering jewelry.

In the seminars, she sermonized, "I don't care what kind of husband you got, that's your covenant vow, and you have a responsibility to make him feel like he's a wonder when you know he ain't."

But even my comment veers unreasonably close to victim-blaming, because Bynum's patriarchal ideas did not bring this on her. I don't want to indulge the same mistake and suggest that being a feminist who rejects sexist teachings like "why buy the cow" will be any protection against domestic violence. It won't. The myth I struggle against is that women can do something definitive to protect themselves, that there's some sort of "good girl" ideal—feminist or patriarchal—that can prevent rape or domestic violence or other assaults upon your dignity. The abuse aimed at women comes because they are women and it is womanhood that's hated, not specific manifestations of it, whether they are the good girl manifestation or the good feminist one.

Like I said, I don’t know whether there have been previous violence in the relationship. But, oh, is she getting a blowback for reporting the incident:

Outspoken conservative minister and radio talk show host, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is asking: how can Juanita Bynum be the poster child for domestic abuse before we know the truth about her role in this altercation?

“Domestic violence is wrong whether the victim is a woman or man,” said Rev. Peterson. “Juanita Bynum, however, is not called by God and she’s hardly the ‘new face of domestic abuse.’ It’s impossible for a God-fearing woman to exploit her marital problems for personal gain and publicity. There are two sides to every story and like too many domestic abuse cases the husband is being tried and convicted based on a one-sided account.”

Peterson, a useful tool of the GOP, has a wee problem with women. He blames mean black women for fatherless homes (and, as a bonus, for New Orleans’ current problems). Not real fond of gays, either.

Peterson seems to be objecting to Bynum’s failure to meekly and passively accept that her husband has a right to stomp on her and choke her in an airport parking lot; instead, she’s decided to speak out and focus on intimate-partner violence:

Bynum, 48, is a national televangelist whose loud and aggressive style has become increasingly popular among black female churchgoers. At her press conference this week, Bynum stated, “My focus is not the marriage. My focus is me repositioning myself mentally to accomplish a new purpose [domestic violence cause] that God has given me.” . . .

Bynum reportedly attended a fundraising event for Barack Obama this past Saturday where she planned to talk with Obama about national domestic violence concerns. Oprah Winfrey was hosting the event.

Loud and aggressive women make Peterson’s, um, Peter unhappy:

“Juanita Bynum’s comments and actions prove that she’s an angry, out-of-control woman. God wouldn’t have her discard her marriage in order to promote the domestic abuse issue or any other phony cause,” Rev. Peterson said.

Ah, yes. She’s “angry” and “out of control.” Domestic violence is a “phony issue.” Sweep it under the rug, gentlemen!

Mr. Sterne, the titular bishop, was last week married to a very pretty woman, Mrs. Bateman, whom he fell in love with for falling backward from her horse leaping a ditch, where she displayed all her charms, which he found irresistible.

But do you know what has happened to the unfortunate authoress? People are offended at the liberty she uses in her memoirs, and she is taken into custody. Miserable is the fate of writers: if they are agreeable, they are offensive; if they are dull, they starve.

Correct me if I'm wrong here. But by my calculation, more U.S. senators (72) voted today to condemn a newspaper ad attacking Gen. Petraeus than voted yesterday (56) to lengthen the time off troops get from the frontlines in Iraq, thereby reducing individual soldiers exposure to actual attacks. Am I missing something, or is that about right?

Q: Do you see the world through the prism of gender?

A: No, the world looks at me through the prism of gender.

A soldier whose superior prevented him from holding a meeting for atheists and other non-Christians is suing the Defense Department, claiming it violated his right to religious freedom.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., alleges a pattern of practices that discriminate against non-Christians in the military. It was filed Monday to coincide with the 220th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Maj. Paul Welborne as defendants.

According to the filing, Spec. Jeremy Hall, a soldier assigned to Fort Riley's 97th Military Police Battalion, received permission to distribute fliers around his base in Iraq for a meeting of atheists and non-Christians.

When he tried to convene the meeting, Hall claims, Welborne stepped in, threatening to file military charges against Hall and block his reenlistment.

Attempts to reach Welborne through an Army spokesman weren't immediately successful.

Separately, seven Army and Air Force officers, including four generals, face possible punishment for violating ethics rules by helping a Christian group in the production of a fundraising video.

A Pentagon inspector general's report released this month found the officers were interviewed in uniform and "in official and often identifiable Pentagon locations."

The report found that none of the officers received approval from superiors to participate in video interviews in an official capacity or in uniform. Air Force and Army officials are reviewing that report.

The government is unlikely to respond because the issue remains so highly sensitive and divisive. But committee members say their petition will at least highlight what many Saudis - both men and women - consider a "stolen" right.

"We would like to remind officials that this is, as many have said, a social and not a religious or political issue," said Fowziyyah al-Oyouni, a founding member of the Committee of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars. "And since it's a social issue, we have the right to lobby for it."

Committee members want to deliver their petition to the king by Sunday, Saudi Arabia's national day.

The driving ban applies to all women, Saudi and foreign, and forces families to hire live-in drivers. Women whose families cannot afford $300-$400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor's.

The last time the issue was raised was two years ago, when Mohammed al-Zulfa, a member of the unelected Consultative Council, asked his colleagues to think about studying the possibility of allowing women over age 35 or 40 to drive - unchaperoned on city streets but accompanied by a male guardian on highways.

The suggestion touched off a fierce controversy that included calls for al-Zulfa's removal from the council and stripping him of Saudi citizenship, as well as accusations he was encouraging women to commit the double sins of discarding their veils and mixing with men.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."
The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.

Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. "People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual," Dr. Ioannidis said.

The problem was that unlike Galileo versus the Catholic Church, Summers provoked a debate in which his academic interlocutors were, if not smarter in the average, then smarter on the particulars of this issue. And so when the pundits thundered about academic freedom being imperiled after Summers was driven to apologize for his comments, it was a distinctly dumbed-down, esteem-raising vision of academic freedom that was being advanced: that of the amateur to expound without getting a slap down from an expert.

SIR —

Your otherwise fine magazine routinely loses its objectivity when discussing gender, descending instead into sloganeering and bias. Whenever you address the shortage of women at the top of corporate hierarchies, you blame bias, macho cultures, and taking clients to strip clubs. Somehow you forget your own prior reports that 80% of people who work more than 48 hours per week are men. I'll bet that if you spoke to corporate executives about how to succeed, both men and women there would tell you that 50-hour weeks accomplish more than visiting striptease clubs. If so, then ending the gender gap in pay will require a legislative commitment to equal pay for less work.

You find women victims but not male. It's surprising that you can end your report on how women will soon control most private wealth by whining that "It's still hard to be a woman," yet you pass over the apparent fact that many women still amass their wealth because their overstressed husband, who earned the money, dies prematurely. A more evenhanded approach might recognize the gender gaps in pay and longevity as related problems with related solutions, if any.

Roy F. Baumeister
Tallahassee, Florida

You're probably thinking that a talk called "Is there anything good about men" will be a short talk! Recent writings have not had much good to say about men. Titles like "Men Are Not Cost Effective" speak for themselves. Maureen Dowd's book was called "Are Men Necessary?" and although she never gave an explicit answer, anyone reading the book knows her answer was no. Brizendine's book "The Female Brain" introduces itself by saying, "Men, get ready to experience brain envy." Imagine a book advertising itself by saying that women will soon be envying the superior male brain!

I said that today most people hold more favorable stereotypes of women than men. It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version.

I suppose the stock explanation for any such difference is that women were not encouraged, or were not appreciated, or were discouraged from being creative. But I don't think this stock explanation fits the facts very well. In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new.

Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you'll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We're descended from women who played it safe.

Giving birth is a revealing example. What could be more feminine than giving birth? Throughout most of history and prehistory, giving birth was at the center of the women's sphere, and men were totally excluded. Men were rarely or never present at childbirth, nor was the knowledge about birthing even shared with them. But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.

The governor of a central Russian province urged couples to skip work Wednesday and make love instead to help boost Russia's low birth-rate.

And if a woman gives birth in exactly nine months time -- on Russia's national day on June 12 -- she will qualify for a prize, perhaps even winning a new home.

"It's normally something for the home -- a fridge or a television set," Yelena Yakovleva at the Ulyanovsk regional administration press office, said.

"It doesn't matter if it's a girl or a boy."

Most employers think the burden of family duties reduces value of women as labor force and prefer to hire workers who are ready for harder and overtime work (i.e. males). Equal professional skills and qualification provided, 23% of the employers questioned would have preferred to dismiss a woman while only 12% - a man.

An analysis of job vacancy advertisements shows that up to 30% of these advertisements indicate a desired gender of applicants, even for professions for which distinguishing between the two sexes is not required at all.

Average wages are rising in Russia but not everyone is benefiting to the same extent. Women in Russia are paid around 40% less for their work than men, according to the Federal Statistics service and the gap has only been growing.

Less than a decade ago, women were paid 30% less.

Asked if education is a factor, Dr Elena Zotova of the Center for Strategic Research, says Russia is a special case: "The general education level of women is higher than that of a man. We have the wage gap in education in favour of women. But unfortunately this education has no consequences when men and women come to the labour market."

Research suggests one of the main reasons for the imbalance is that women mainly work in low-paying sectors and hold low-paying positions in the corporate hierarchy.

It also arises from a mentality that believes women are better suited to jobs in the home.

For the last decade number of child preschool institutions declined from 87,900 in 1990 down to 50,000 in 2001. In 1990 66.4% of all the children attended preschool institutions, in 1995 — 55.5%, in 2001 — 57.2 %.

In early 90s 10% of all families with children at the preschool age could not afford to send them to preschool institutions. In 1999 only 42% of the households with children of the corresponding age could have recourse to child preschool institutions. In 1998 the average pay for these services constituted 16% of the minimum subsistence level. According to the 1997 Rybinsk survey data,
average monthly earnings of a woman under 30 were less than 300 Roubles while monthly pay for the kindergarten – 600 Roubles. Such a ratio of earnings to costs on preschool institutions made it unreasonable for the young mother to seek employment.

MATTHEWS: OK. Can I sing your praises? I get in trouble for this, but you're great looking, obviously. You're one of the gods' gifts to men in this country. But also, you are a hell of a writer. Your books always do well. Your radio show -- I just looked at the numbers -- you are up there, one of the top most-listened to radio shows.

MATTHEWS: Well, the irony here -- and I want to be careful, without offending anybody -- but immigration is great for this country. You and I are all products of immigration, but --

INGRAHAM: Yeah.

MATTHEWS: -- it seems like people who are defending illegal immigration right now, a lot of liberals, don't like big families.

So, the irony is, we have this big labor shortage. We have a population shortage. People aren't -- we aren't growing in our own numbers, so we need to bring in people, even illegally, or guest workers, or all these gambits that are being talked about, because we don't have an adequate labor supply -- at the same time, let's not have kids.

INGRAHAM: Well --

MATTHEWS: It is an interesting sociometric overlay you've hit here.

INGRAHAM: Yeah, well, power to the people. That means you've got to have people to have power. And we're seeing, in Russia, Chris, they're actually paying people to have children. In Europe, the birth rate is so low that Europe is not going to reproduce itself, and so, Europe is ever dependent on immigrant labor and an immigrant workforce, and they're having trouble with assimilation in some quarters that, you know, I know you've talked about, so --

MATTHEWS: All right. You know what's interesting?

INGRAHAM: -- I just think it's something to celebrate children. I just --

MATTHEWS: People want to import labor and they love sex, but they don't like kids. Well, that doesn't surprise me, but --

INGRAHAM: Well, they're not convenient.

In her speech, Griffin said that 'a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.'

She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, 'This award is my god now!'

Some blame the outfit. Others point a finger at Sarah Silverman. Still others question MTV's judgment in the first place to open the show with Britney Spears.

But whatever the reason, the pop star's lackluster performance of her new single "Gimme More" is getting universally bashed the day after her supposed "comeback" in a sparkly black bikini and blonde weave on Sunday's Video Music Awards.

Britney's heel was broken. Pictured here, you can tell it's bent to the side. Her fat ass thunda thighs sexy legs were too much for it.

MTV has always tried to pump up its annual Video Music Awards with momentous live performances. But in an era when fans can watch concerts on their cellphones and spy on hours-old gigs by way of YouTube, it's harder than ever to arrange a performance that feels like a big deal.

That's where Britney Spears comes in. Thanks to her annus horribilis — or, more accurately, anni horribiles — she was one of the most anticipated V.M.A. performers in years. Voyeurs around the world were ready to see a fallen star back onstage.

She didn't disappoint: she was awful. Visibly nervous, she tottered around the stage, dancing tentatively and doing nothing that sounded or looked like real live singing. It's too bad, because the song itself, "Gimme More," is a pleasant surprise: brash and sleek and unapologetic. But Sunday's performance in Las Vegas didn't seem very likely to stem the tide of mean-spirited jokes about Ms. Spears.

Sure enough, when it was over, Sarah Silverman, the host, smiled cruelly and said, "She is amazing! I mean, she is 25 years old and she's already accomplished ... everything she's going to accomplish in life."

There's no real estate slump for Cecily Tippery.

...


The worse times get in the housing market, the better they are for Tippery.

That's because she specializes in selling foreclosed homes that have been repossessed by lenders.

Tippery, 56, who projects the pleasant demeanor of a soccer mom but has a steel-trap memory for all the details about her numerous listings, has built a mini real estate empire in less than a year.

She went from a single-person operation to a staff of seven. She went from having four to six listings a year to sometimes getting a dozen a week. She's sold 29 properties this year and has 17 in escrow. She works 12 hours a day, almost every day.

"Luckily, I have a very understanding husband," she said with a chuckle. Her son is grown.

Her outfit aboard a Southwest Airlines plane two months ago first earned her a flight attendant's reprimand and now has sparked a decency debate that may result in a lawsuit.

Kyla Ebbert, a blond, shapely 23-year-old San Diego coed who also works shifts at a Hooters restaurant, boarded the flight to Tucson, Ariz., on a one-day round-trip visit to an Arizona doctor's appointment. She had settled into her seat when a flight attendant confronted her about what was later described by the airline as "revealing attire."

Ebbert's so-called objectionable attire included a white, tight-fitting shirt, a green cropped sweater, and a white denim skirt cut high on her thighs.

Ebbert appeared on NBC's "The Today Show" today wearing the same outfit and said that she was asked by a male flight attendant to come to the front of the plane by the door to the jetway. There, Ebbert said that she was told she would have to catch a later flight because she was showing too much skin and Southwest is a "family" airline.

The Senate succeeded last night in passing, 53-41, a complete repeal of the Global Gag Rule, which bars American foreign aid from supporting organizations that provide contraceptives, abortion services, or teach a sexual ideology other than abstinence.

Actually, we looked up a few years of People Magazine's 50 most beautiful people, and they were as likely as anyone else to have boys:

One way to calibrate our thinking about Kanazawa's results is to collect more data. Every year, People magazine publishes a list of the fifty most beautiful people, and, because they are celebrities, it is not difficult to track down the sexes of their children, which we did for the years 1995–2000.

As of 2007, the 50 most beautiful people of 1995 had 32 girls and 24 boys, or 57.1% girls, which is 8.6 percentage points higher than the population frequency of 48.5%. This sounds like good news for the hypothesis. But the standard error is 0.5/sqrt(56) = 6.7%, so the discrepancy is not statistically significant. Let's get more data.

The 50 most beautiful people of 1996 had 45 girls and 35 boys: 56.2% girls, or 7.8% more than in the general population. Good news! Combining with 1995 yields 56.6% girls—8.1% more than expected—with a standard error of 4.3%, tantalizingly close to statistical significance. Let's continue to get some confirming evidence.

The 50 most beautiful people of 1997 had 24 girls and 35 boys—no, this goes in the wrong direction, let's keep going . . . For 1998, we have 21 girls and 25 boys, for 1999 we have 23 girls and 30 boys, and the class of 2000 has had 29 girls and 25 boys.

Putting all the years together and removing the duplicates, such as Brad Pitt, People's most beautiful people from 1995 to 2000 have had 157 girls out of 329 children, or 47.7% girls (with standard error 2.8%), a statistically insignificant 0.8% percentage points lower than the population frequency. So nothing much seems to be going on here. But if statistically insignificant effects with a standard error of 4.3% were considered acceptable, we could publish a paper every two years with the data from the latest "most beautiful people."

Why does this matter? Why are we wasting our time on a series of papers with statistical errors that happen not to have been noticed by reviewers for a fairly obscure journal? We have two reasons: first, as discussed in the next section, the statistical difficulties arise more generally with findings that are suggestive but not statistically significant. Second, as we discuss presently, the structure of scientific publication and media attention seem to have a biasing effect on social science research.

Before reaching Psychology Today and book publication, Kanazawa's findings received broad attention in the news media. For example, the popular Freakonomics blog (Dubner 2006) reported,

"a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests...there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men. Why? Kanazawa argues its because good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son - which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology."

ruling that such research is dangerous and out of bounds, an attitude deplored by Pinker (2007). The aforementioned Freakanomics article concluded, "It is good that Kanazawa is only a researcher and not, say, the president of Harvard. If he were, that last finding about scientists may have gotten him fired." It should be possible to criticize large unproven claims in biology and social science without dismissing the entire enterprise.

"It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words 'They wore no clothes!' Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet." (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man)

The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

Science is confirming what most women know: When given the choice for a mate, men go for good looks.

And guys won't be surprised to learn that women are much choosier about partners than they are.

"Just because people say they're looking for a particular set of characteristics in a mate, someone like themselves, doesn't mean that is what they'll end up choosing," Peter M. Todd, of the cognitive science program at Indiana University, Bloomington, said in a telephone interview.

Researchers led by Todd report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that their study found humans were similar to most other mammals, "following Darwin's principle of choosy females and competitive males, even if humans say something different."

Men's choices did not reflect their stated preferences, the researchers concluded. Instead, men appeared to base their decisions mostly on the women's physical attractiveness.

The men also appeared to be much less choosy. Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold, Todd said.

Women's actual choices, like men's, did not reflect their stated preferences, but they made more discriminating choices, the researchers found.

The scientists said women were aware of the importance of their own attractiveness to men, and adjusted their expectations to select the more desirable guys.

"Women made offers to men who had overall qualities that were on a par with the women's self-rated attractiveness. They didn't greatly overshoot their attractiveness," Todd said, "because part of the goal for women is to choose men who would stay with them"

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can't confirm his friend's story; neither can I. But it's worth a heads-up:

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

...

Postscript: Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: "I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I'm not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic."

MEN might be better at reading maps, but women have an in-built sense of direction for good food.

Research suggests that, contrary to the stereotype, women's navigation skills can be better than men's. But this ability comes to light only when there is food to be found — in particular, items laden with calories.

It is thought the gender differences may be a legacy of the ancient hunter-gatherer way of life on the African savanna.

Men, the hunters, honed their spatial skills as they chased their prey "over erratic and unpredictable courses". But women, the gatherers, had to remember the locations of stationary food resources, such as fruits and berries, more accurately than men.

But Dr Monica Minnegal, a senior lecturer in anthropology at Melbourne University, is sceptical about suggestions humans have stopped evolving. "To reduce everything to what happened on the savanna way back then is, for me, problematic," she said.

The Democrats' own views of what counts for "women's issues" are stuck back in the disco days, about the time Ms. Clinton came of political age. Under the title "A Champion for Women," the New York senator's Web site promises the usual tired litany of "equal pay" and a "woman's right to choose." Mr. Richardson pitches a new government handout for women on "family leave" and waxes nostalgic for the Equal Rights Amendment. Give these Boomers some bell bottoms and "The Female Eunuch," and they'd feel right at home. Polls show Ms. Clinton today gets her best female support from women her age and up.

She is billed as the world's oldest blogger. At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard María Amelia López has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger internet chroniclers can only dream of.

López, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren just eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

"My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxía (A Coruña - Spain) on December the 23rd of 1911," she wrote as her first post on amis95.blogspot.com. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog."