My colleague Asawin Suebsaeng missed the most important point about Duckpenisgate: right-wingers should like duck sex research, because it almost, kind of, makes Todd Akin look not-so-bonkers.
Unlike humans, female ducks actually do have a way to "shut that whole thing down" when raped by a male duck. As Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University, explained to Politifact:
In duck ponds, Prum said, a lot of forced copulation occurs. Forced copulation is what it sounds like—rape in nature. Even gang rape happens among ducks. And Prum found that while 40 to 50 percent of duck sex happens by forced copulation, only 2 to 4 percent of inseminations result from it (meaning times the female duck ends up with a fertilized egg).
"The question is why does that happen? How does a female prevent fertilization by forced copulation?" he said. "The answer has to do with taking advantage of what males have evolved—this corkscrew shaped penis."
Prum said the duck penis is a corkscrew whose direction runs counterclockwise. Female ducks, he said, have evolved a complex vagina also shaped like a corkscrew -- but a clockwise one.
"This is literally an anti-screw anatomy," he said.
Duck penii and sperm-ejecting chickens aren't some novelty. They actually raise fascinating questions about evolution and procreation. Even if humans can't "shut that whole thing down" (sorry, Todd), it's worth figuring out why our fowl friends can.
Fresh off his 13-hour drone-protesting filibuster of John Brennan's nomination as CIA director, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is threatening to do the same with the Senate's soon-to-be-debated gun control package, Politico reports. In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), co-authored by fellow Brennan-blocking senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), Paul wrote, "We will oppose the motion to proceed to any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions."
Paul's main gripe appears to be provisions drawn from Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) proposed assault weapons ban, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote but was dropped from the initial gun control package that is expected to get a vote in early April. Reid has promised to allow Feinstein's proposals—which include a ban on 157 specific models of assault weapons as well as magazines of more than 10 rounds—to be voted on as amendments.
Politico reports:
Though they don't use the word "filibuster" in the letter, the conservatives are leaving no doubt that they would filibuster on an initial procedural question—the motion to proceed.
Lee staged a test vote on the issue during consideration of the Senate budget last week. He tried to amend a point of order against gun control legislation to the budget but fell short. It needed a three-fifths supermajority and failed 50-49, needing 60 votes to pass. But the final tally emboldened Lee, Paul and Cruz because they were so close to a majority and a filibuster takes just 41 votes to sustain.
Even if Rand and his colleagues drop the filibuster threat and the assault weapons ban does manage to make it into the package, it will stand little chance of passing in the Republican-controlled House. Most gun control advocates now consider a bipartisan expansion of background checks as their best opportunity for reforming gun laws.
Last week, Cyprus begged Russia for help with its banking failure. They got nothing. Dan Drezner is intrigued:
This is not the first time a weak Western ally has sought out either China or Russia as a way of avoiding onerous financial strictures. Iceland begged Russia for financial assistance during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. At one point, the Icelandic President allegedly offered Russia the use of Keflavík Air Base. This possibility caused some mild consternation in Foggy Bottom. In the end, the Russians said they didn't need the base and proffered only a fraction of what Iceland wanted, leaving Reykjavik little choice but to cut a deal with the IMF.
One can tell a similar story with Pakistan and China. During the fall of 2008 Islamabad was facing a balance of payments crisis and sought out China as a benefactor. In the end, China was unwilling to offer Pakistan enough money to substitute for IMF support, forcing the Pakistani government to take out an IMF loan.
Why are Russia and China apparently so uninterested in building an empire? Dan offers three possibilities, and I'd pick Door #3:
Outside their own neighborhood, neither Russia nor China is really revisionist. As great powers, Moscow and Beijing will do what they gotta do in their near abroads. Globally, however, they have neither the ambition nor the interest in altering the current system of "good enough" global governance. After all, the current rules of the global game have benefited both of them pretty well over the past decade or so.
In the postwar era, this has pretty much been true all along. The Soviet Union picked up a few nonlocal client states during the Cold War, but mostly did so only because of its competition with America. Historically, it's always been more interested in controlling a buffer zone around its own territory than in truly becoming a global influence. Ditto for China.
Now, it's also true that neither country has ever really had the capacity to project power abroad in any great amount. In China's case, that could change. Still, they've got plenty of internal problems, plenty of regional problems, and the ability to see that a worldwide string of client states hasn't really helped the United States much. Dan is right: the current rules have worked out pretty well for them. Why fix something that isn't broken?
News of Duckpenisgate was broken to a shocked and outraged nation by CNSnews.com, a conservative news site run by the Media Research Center, an organization dedicated to raging against secularism and the mainstream media. From there, Fox Nation and Fox News radio host Todd Starnes picked up on the duck penis/federal waste exposé. The duck penis news easily found its way onto other conservative outlets such as Human Events and birther website WorldNetDaily.
If you think that less than $400,000 spent on a scientific study is a prime example of waste, it's worth noting that that's roughly 0.0000001 percent of what the federal budget is likely to be in 2013. Also, the study, funded by the National Science Foundation (a government agency responsible for assigning billions of dollars to research and education), is not actually a waste of tax dollars. Science writer Carl Zimmer explains:
Studying animals is also a way for us to look in the evolutionary mirror. We share a common ancestor with other animals, and the same kinds of evolutionary processes play out in both us and them. Now, you may wonder what ducks—with gigantic cork-screw-shaped penises and a gigantic cork-screw-shaped reproductive tracts—could possibly have to do with us. The manifestation of sex evolution may be different in different species. But the process is similar.
As in many other species, the evolution of ducks has been driven in part by something call[ed] sexual conflict...Other scientists first explored sexual conflict in many other species first—species including ducks. That's just how science works, no matter what culture warriors may claim.
(For related reality checks, click here, here, and here.)
There's really no reason whatsoever for any of the right wing's snarky outrage, no matter how ridiculous federally abetted duck-penis research may sound.
But hey, things could always be worse. It's not like we're all freaking out over how much it cost for the vice president to stay at a hotel in Europe, right?
Pregnant sows in gestastation crates at a Smithfield facility, 2010, documented by a Humane Society of the United States investigation. HSUS
Among all the various dodgy aspects of factory-style meat production, the use of tight cages to confine pregnant female pigs surely ranks among the most awful. The hog industry isn't keen on displaying this practice to the public, but in 2010, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) planted a camera-toting undercover investigator in a hog facility run by Smithfield Foods, the globe's largest hog producer and pork processor. You can read the report here, but you can't beat the video for sheer visceral effect:
In the wake of the exposé, Smithfield saw fit to recommit itself to phasing out the practice in its own hog-production facilities by 2017. (The company had made a similar pledge in 2007 and backed off from it in 2009, claiming that financial losses in its hog-production business made the capital investments necessary for the transition too expensive.) In 2012, its rival Hormel made a similar pledge; and Cargill, another massive pork processor and hog producer, says that it has already phased out gestation stalls in half of its hog facilities. A raft of high-profile companies that use pork in their products—including McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Subway, Oscar Mayer, Kroger, Safeway, Costco, Denny's, Jack in the Box, Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Sodexo, Sysco, ARAMARK, and Bon Appétit Management—have promised to stop buying from suppliers who treat pigs in this fashion. And no fewer than nine states have banned the practice, HSUS reports.
The states that have banned gestation crates do not include the four that produce 61 percent of US hogs.
So, gestation crates are on the way out, right? Well, maybe not. Consider that the states that have banned the practice do not include Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota, or Illinois—the four that produce 61 percent of US hogs*. The ban on gestation crates in Rhode Island is a nice gesture, but not likely to move the industry. Given the power the meat industry wields in these hog-heavy states, it's hard to imagine such a ban in, say, Iowa.
Now check out this column by Rick Berman, a notorious PR hired gun whose past clients include Big Tobacco, in the industry trade journal Pork Network. If the piece is any indication of the pork industry's commitment to banning sow crates, then the practice seems pretty entrenched for the long haul. Berman is a battle-scarred veteran of pork-industry battles. During its nasty and ultimately failed fight to stave off unionization at its vast Tar Heel pork-processing facility, Smithfield hired Berman to roll out TV commercials trashing union leaders, Bloomberg reported last year. And Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom even runs a website dedicated to "Keeping a watchful eye on the Humane Society of the US."
David Brooks writes today that violent crime has dropped tremendously over the past couple of decades despite the fact that it's gotten easier and easier to buy a gun. So maybe we should focus on something other than guns:
Now we are in the middle of another debate about violence. If we lived in a purely rational society, this debate would have started with a series of questions: What explains the tremendous drop in violence? How can we build on recent efforts to bring the murder rate even lower? These general questions would have led to a series of more specific questions about police procedures, probably the most direct way to prevent shootings.
For a longer and more comprehensive take on this, I recommend Mark Kleiman's piece on crime and punishment in the current issue of Democracy. It's well worth a few minutes of your time.
Ezra Klein writes about a small implant that monitors your bloodstream and automatically alerts paramedics when you're about to have a heart attack:
This particular device might prove, for one reason or another, to be bunk. Many seemingly magical inventions do. But it's not alone....And every major health device company knows there's billions and billions to be made here.
Consider how dramatically these devices will change medicine. Right now, the medical industry is fundamentally reactive. Something goes wrong, and we go to them to fix it. This will make medicine fundamentally proactive. They will see something going wrong, and they will intervene to stop it. It's like "Minority Report" for health care.
This is why I don't put much stock in projections of health-care spending that run 30 or 50 or 75 years into the future. Will biometric devices in constant communication with the cloud make medicine more or less expensive? Will driverless cars prolong life in a way that saves money or costs it? Will the advances in preventive technology make medicine so effective that we're glad to devote 40 percent of gross domestic product to it? Who knows?
I agree, and something similar to this needles me periodically whenever my mind drifts into dorm room bull session mode.1 You see, I believe that we're only a few decades away from true artificial intelligence. I might be wrong about this, but put that aside for the moment. The point is that I believe it. And needless to say, that will literally change everything. If AI is ubiquitous by 2040 or so, nearly every long-term problem we face right now—medical inflation, declining employment, Social Security financing, returns to education, global warming, etc. etc.—either goes away or is radically transformed in ways we can't even imagine.
So if I believe in medium-term AI, why do I spend any of my time worrying about this long-term stuff? The only things really worth worrying about are (a) how to adapt the economy equitably to an AI world, and (b) issues that are important but might not be affected much by AI—global thermonuclear war, for example. Everything else is just noise.
And yet—I do believe in AI, but I still worry about long-term economic issues like healthcare costs and banking stability as well. Maybe this is just an insurance policy: I believe we should keep working on the other stuff just in case the whole AI thing doesn't pan out. Or it could be pure empathy for the near term: we should keep working on the other stuff because it affects people over the next few years, and that's important even if ultimately it won't change anything.
Both of those are part of the answer, but they don't feel like all of it. There's more to it. In reality, I suspect a lot of it is just pure habit. I worry about the stuff I worry about because that's what I've always worried about. Besides, there's really nothing much I can do one way or another about artificial intelligence, so I might as well occupy myself with other things. Anyone got a problem with that?
1This is a hint not to take this post too seriously.
Now that big depositors in Cyprus's banks have been told they're going to lose a huge chunk of their money, what's next? Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who heads the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, says this might be the right template for dealing with future bank failures:
"If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be 'Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?'. If the bank can't do it, then we'll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we'll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders," he said
...."If we want to have a healthy, sound financial sector, the only way is to say, 'Look, there where you take on the risks, you must deal with them, and if you can't deal with them, then you shouldn't have taken them on,'" he said.
In one sense, Dijsselbloem is just saying the obvious: uninsured deposits are uninsured deposits. If a bank fails, you might lose some or all of the money you've deposited there.
In a way, this is a laudable reminder that you should be careful about where you put your money. On the other hand, telling everyone that, hey, what happened in Cyprus might happen again in Spain, or Portugal, or Greece, seems almost deliberately designed to create a huge bank run. At least, that's how everyone took it. As a result, Dijsselbloem quickly released a very brief statement: "Macro-economic adjustment programmes are tailor-made to the situation of the country concerned and no models or templates are used."
We'll see if that helps. The problem is that Dijsselbloem pretty obviously meant what he said, and no one has rushed out to say otherwise. What's more, as we all know, banking crises and sovereign debt crises are inextricably connected. Bank runs from big depositors would almost certainly lead to further sovereign debt crises, which obviously couldn't be solved by going after big bank deposits. At its heart, then, this is just a reminder that Europe's problems are far from over because it has so far refused to deal with its core issues of capital flows in a fixed exchange rate area. There's no telling which trouble spot will erupt next—there are too many to choose from—but erupt it will. One of these days, Angela Merkel is going to have to level with her constituents about exactly what this means.
NOM President Brian Brown at a 2010 rally in Wisconsin.
Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, which since 2007 has successfully fought to ban same-sex marriage in several states and fought to punish legislators and judges who have supported it, offered interesting analogy on the eve of Supreme Court arguments over the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. Friday, appearing on the show of conservative radio host Steve Deace, Brown argued for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, saying "We need a solution in this country, we cannot be, as Lincoln said, half slave, half free."
I think we're going to win these cases. But say the worst happens and we lose in a broad way—that means that the Court somehow does a Roe, a Roe v. Wade, on marriage and says that all these state constitutional amendments are overturned, gay marriage is now a constitutional right – well, we’re going to press forward on a Federal Marriage Amendment. We’ve always supported a Federal Marriage Amendment, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about it. Some people try and argue, 'Well, this is against federalism.' No, our founders gave us a system where we can amend the Constitution. We shouldn't have to do this, we shouldn’t have to worry about activist judges, you know, making up out of thin air a constitutional right that obviously none of our founders found there and no one found there until quite recently. But if we do, for us, the Federal Marriage Amendment is a way that people can stand up and say, 'Enough is enough.' We need a solution in this country, we cannot be, as Lincoln said, half slave, half free. We can't have a country on key moral questions where we're just, where we don't have a solution. And if the Court forces a solution, the way we'll amend that is through the Federal Marriage Amendment.
Brown is referencing Abraham Lincoln's famous "House Divided" speech, which was about the inevitability of conflict within the Union over the issue of slavery. In Brown's analogy, presumably, the states where relationships between same-sex couples are legally recognized are the "slave states."
The issue of same-sex marriage will most likely be resolved with less bloodshed than the abolition of required. But judging by the evolution in public opinion on the issue, the marriage equality "solution" won't be the one Brown is hoping for.
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Last week, Cyprus begged Russia for help with its banking failure. They got nothing. 
expensive? Will driverless cars prolong life in a way that saves money or costs it? Will the advances in preventive technology make medicine so effective that we're glad to devote 40 percent of gross domestic product to it? Who knows?
heads the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, says this might be the 
