Intelligence as a display of healthy sperm

Psychologists found a strong correlation between high IQ and healthy sperm, as reported by the U.K. Telegraph:

The research, by the evolutionary psychologist Professor Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, centred around a study of 400 Vietnam War veterans who were put through extensive mental tests and were also asked to provide sperm samples. According to the test results, it was found that men who scored high on a battery of intelligence tests boasted high counts of healthy sperm. Whereas, low scorers tended to have fewer and more sickly sperm.
Miller points out that intelligence is sexually attractive to both sexes, and that intelligence co-evolved with sperm quality to advertise good genes.

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Elizabeth Warren faces fierce resistance to regulation of non-bank lenders

Elizabeth Warren is one of my heroes. Barack Obama appointed her to be Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created, which was established to oversee the banking bailouts. For many years, Warren has fought tough battles on behalf of consumers. [See the related posts to this post; and here's a video of Warren being interviewed by Jon Stewart that will give you an idea of what she is about (and especially consider Part II)]. Warren is now facing an incredibly tough uphill battle. Her main weapon is common sense. She wants to regulate banks and non-bank lenders, to stop them from defrauding consumers with their fine print, their outlandish fees and their arithmetical hocus-pocus. In a fair fight, her position should easily win the day. But it's not a fair fight, because the financial services industry owns much of Congress. Therefore, Warren has spent much time advocating for the need for a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Here's what Warren has to say about the need to regulate non-bank lenders:

There is more that we can do to deal with non-bank lenders, but only if Congress creates a strong CFPA. If we stick with the status quo -- which treats loans differently depending on who issues them and places consumer protection in agencies that consider it an afterthought - we know what will happen because we have seen it happen before. Lenders will continue their tricks and traps business model, the mega-banks will exploit regulatory loopholes, and the non-banks will continue to sell deceptive products. In that world, small banks will need to choose between lowering standards or losing market share, and they will still get too much attention from regulators while the non-banks and big banks get too little. Dangerous loans will destabilize both families and the economy, and we'll all remain at risk for the next trillion-dollar bailout. Regulating the non-banks hasn't been tried in any serious way. The CFPA offers a real chance to level the playing field, to add balance to the system, and to change the consumer lending landscape forever.

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Somalia as a libertarian paradise?

Believe it or not, some are claiming that Somalia is doing alright without any elected government, thank you. Somalian have access to fairly good cell phone service and one can hire private bodyguards. Prevalence of AIDS is extremely low compared to many other African countries (though many attribute this to strict Muslim practices regarding sexuality). As this same article points out, however, things are going so "well" that the Somali 2004 presidential election had to be held in Kenya. Consider, also, the BBC's 2009 country profile of Somalia:

Somalia has been without an effective central government since President Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. Fighting between rival warlords and an inability to deal with famine and disease led to the deaths of up to one million people . . . [Somalia is the] scene of arguably Africa's worst humanitarian crisis: a third of the population is dependent on food aid . . . No effective government since 1991.

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U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.

On September 4, 2009, Bill Moyers hosted Trevor Potter, president and general counsel of The Campaign Legal Center (and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission), and Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment attorney. You can view the entire discussion here. The topic is whether longstanding federal election laws should be held unconstitutional so that corporations can freely spend unlimited amounts of money (e.g., in the form of movies, books, and other private initiatives) in order to directly affect the outcome of federal political campaigns. The case is Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission. Many legal commentators are suggesting the Supreme Court has already suggested that it leaning in favor of the corporations on this issue. And we can almost guarantee how Chief Justice John Roberts is going to vote on this issue (and see here). I highly recommend viewing this discussion. I thought that Abrams looked very much like a man who was being paid big money to take position he knew to be reprehensible. On the other hand, Trevor Potter is taking a position that looks out for people like you and me. I realize that powerful corporate interests have already made puppets out of Congress, the SEC, the FDA and many other federal agencies (see these recent examples regarding tobacco legislation and the rejection of the bankruptcy cram-down option). With this as the context, I believe that Citizens United boils down to a simple question: Should our government be at least somewhat run by ordinary people or should corporate money flow even more freely at election time (much more than it flows already), allowing our federal government to be taken over entirely by powerful corporations driven almost entirely by the profit motive? Here are a few excerpts from Moyers’ discussion with Potter and Abrams:

TREVOR POTTER: This is a case about corporate money. If this case is won by the corporation, we will be in the ironic situation where corporations will have no limits on what they can spend in elections and unions still will. So, it's important to remember we're talking about corporations. Corporations exist solely to make money. Amassing economic power. They want, if they could get it out of government, monopolies. They want the ability to defeat their competitors. And if they can use government to do that, they will. Individuals have a whole range of interests. Individuals go to church, they care about religious and social issues, they care about the future of the country. They're voters.

So, they have a range of issues at stake that corporations don't have. Corporations just want to make money. So, if you let the corporation with a privileged economic legal position loose in the political sphere, when we're deciding who to elect, I think you are giving them an enormous advantage over individuals and not a healthy one for our democracy. . . . [C]orporations have a different status. And they ought to be focused on the economic marketplace and not the political marketplace.

FLOYD ABRAMS: You're opening the faucet, so to speak, so that more speech can occur. I don't think it's a can of worms to say that corporations, and it is unions as well, ought to be able to participate in the give and take of the democratic processes in the country. From my perspective, at least, the notion of saying that corporations and unions should be out of the picture either because they're too powerful, or because of the way their money has been created, is so inconsistent with the sort of First Amendment approach that we take in everything else, where we say over and over again, we don't care who the speaker is, we don't care where the speaker's coming from. And speech, we think, is, as a generality, a good thing . . .

BILL MOYERS: But we're not talking about free press issues here. We're talking about the power of an organized economic interest to spend vast sums of money that individuals can't spend . . . Would you disagree with the claim that big business dominates the political discussion today? Whether it's the drug industry or the health insurance industry? Big business is the dominant force in Washington. I mean, I see that as a journalist . . . we're not talking about free press issues here. We're talking about the power of an organized economic interest to spend vast sums of money that individuals can't spend.

It is important to deny powerful profit-seeking organizations the right to skew federal election results even more than they do currently. If the Supreme Court goes the wrong way on this issue, it would even make a mockery out of clean-money initiatives, such as this plan being promoted by Common Cause and this plan by Public Citizen.

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