For no reason whatsoever, I am reproducing below the results of a decade-old bit of research that uses student scores from RateMyProfessor.com to construct average hotness scores for different academic disciplines. The authors used a scale from -1 to 1, which is entirely nonstandard in the field, so I’ve renormed the scores to the more generally accepted scale of 1 to 10. I assume professorial hotness is, in fact, average, which means the various disciplines should probably range from about 3 to 7. But not a single one even breaks 5.

What does this mean? University professors are slobs? 18-year-old students have really high standards? Movies and television have conditioned us to think of really hot actors as average, thus making us all disappointed with real life? I dunno. What’s your guess?

With oil prices plummeting below $40 per barrel, OPEC is meeting to decide what to do. The answer is…. probably nothing:

Oil prices dropped Friday as traders braced for official word out of a highly anticipated meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Prices slid following conflicting media reports that OPEC had either kept its oil-output target unchanged or increased it. There was also confusion as to whether production in Indonesia, which just rejoined the group, will be included in the target.

….An internal OPEC document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that, if current production remains unchanged, markets will still be oversupplied by 700,000 barrels a day in 2016….The key issue for OPEC is Iran, which is expected to return to the global oil market after the lifting of the international sanctions early next year. Analysts say the country could quickly ramp up production by around 500,000 barrels, adding to the oversupply of crude.

Between fracking, Iran, and slow demand growth thanks to the sluggish global economy, oil prices just aren’t likely to increase in the near future. This is:

• Good news for consumers, who get cheaper gasoline.
• Probably bad news for global warming, since it makes cleaner fuel sources uncompetitive with oil.
• Bad news for OPEC members, which might be bad news for the rest of us. Low prices probably mean cutbacks in government services, which in turn could lead to more widespread unrest. Needless to say, this is not something the Middle East needs right now.
• Good news for Hillary Clinton, since the fortunes of the incumbent party have historically been better when gas prices are lower.

Oh: and bad news for us peak oil folks. I don’t have any worries that we’ll hit peak oil eventually, but the Great Recession sure put off the date. I had long figured that 2015 was going to be the peak date, but it now looks like it will probably be 2020 at the earliest, and maybe more like 2025 or so.

The American economy added 211,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at a brisk 121,000 jobs—nearly all of it in the private sector. The headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 5.0 percent. All of this gain was because more people were employed, not because folks were dropping out of the labor force. In fact, the labor participation rate inched up a bit, and the number of people not in the labor force inched down. This number is genuinely due to more people getting jobs.

Unfortunately, this didn’t translate into good wage growth, as it did last month. Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees were up imperceptibly and weekly earnings were essentially flat too. Still, this report is basically good news, and certainly good enough for the Fed to go ahead and raise rates for the first time in a decade. This may not be a good idea, but it was inevitable in the face of anything other than an economic collapse, and it probably isn’t really all that big a deal. It won’t help things, but I doubt that it will hurt much either.

Donald Trump has been grumbling that CNN should pay him for being in their debate a couple of weeks from now. He says he’s been talking with CNN about this, but today he caved:

“When you’re leading in the polls, I think it’s too big of a risk to not do the debate,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. “I don’t think I have the kind of leverage I’d like to have in a deal and I don’t want to take the chance of hurting my campaign. So I’ll do the debate.”

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: your master negotiator at work. The guy who’d get Mexico to pay for a wall. The guy who’d squeeze Iran like a grape. The guy who’d save us from the wily Chinese. The guy who thinks we got taken for a ride in the TPP talks. The guy who insists he could do better on all these things because our current government is full of very stupid people.

But when it comes to pressing CNN for a bit of chump change, he can’t pull it off. He can’t even get a face-saving little tidbit out of it. CNN told him to get lost, and he promptly folded. He was bluffing the whole time and everyone knew it.

Trump’s record makes it pretty clear that every deal he’s ever negotiated has been pretty routine. His buildings are no more successful than anyone else’s. His golf resorts are, perhaps, a little less successful than average. The only thing he’s been really good at is reality TV. What a blowhard.

This is pretty big news:

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Thursday he will formally end the Pentagon’s ban on women serving in combat jobs…. “There will be no exceptions,” Carter told a Pentagon news conference. “This means that, as long as they qualify and meet the standards, women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could not before.”

First blacks, then gays, now women. And mirabile dictu, Republican opposition so far appears to be fairly muted. Next up: will women be required to register for the draft on their 18th birthday? Carter says that will be evaluated within a few weeks.

This is yet another big win for our lame duck president. He’s making quite a go of things in his last two years.

A few days ago, like an evil mastermind on 24, Donald Trump declared that if we wanted to fight terrorists we needed to target their families for death. Today he gave a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition and told the crowd, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.” Ha ha. Stupid money-grubbing Jews. As Judd Legum pointed out, this means that Trump has now insulted blacks, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and Jews.

I’m now going to double down on my belief that Trump is running the world’s greatest reality show here. I think he got bored one day and came up with an idea that tickled him: “I wonder just how deranged you can get and still retain the support of the tea party wingnuts?” So he made a $1 bet with some of his Democratic friends and performed a test run in 2012 with his maniacal birther stuff. But all that did was show the depth of his challenge. He’d have to do a lot more than that in 2016. He started off slow with wild claims about immigrant Mexican rapists, knowing it would draw in the rubes. Then he laughably claimed that he’d get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Nothing happened. He insulted John McCain for being a POW. Nothing happened. He started telling obvious lies. Nothing. He lied on national TV and was called on it a few minutes later. Nothing. He all but admitted that he knows diddly about the Bible. Nothing. He called evangelical darling Ben Carson a nutcase liar. Nothing. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City celebrated 9/11. Nothing. He mocked a disabled reporter in front of the cameras. Nothing. He suggested taking out terrorist families. Nothing. He appeared on the radio show of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Nothing. Now he’s insulted an audience of conservative Jews.

Trump is probably frustrated. He’s basically dialed it up to 11 already, and the crowds are still swooning. What does he have to do? Tell a story about how he was abducted by aliens back in the ’90s? Promise to nuke Tehran if he’s elected president? Suggest the world would be a better place if we’d never invented any HIV treatments?

Even Trump must be scratching his head wondering what to do next. There’s gotta be something that finally goes too far. Right?

Politico has a fascinating story today. It’s all about Mitch McConnell’s months of LBJ-worthy maneuvering to get legislation passed that would repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood, thus paving the way for a clean budget bill later this year. But here’s the kicker: he wasn’t engaged in Herculean negotiations with Democrats. He was engaged in Herculean negotiations with his own party. The goal was to somehow trick them into supporting the Obamacare/PP bill, which was entirely symbolic since President Obama would veto it instantly, paving the way for a budget bill later this month that Obama could sign.

How did he do it?

McConnell marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.

Since the summer, the Senate majority leader had spoken with influential organizations opposing abortion such as National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List to ensure they would back his move to link the Obamacare repeal with a measure to defund Planned Parenthood….Anti-abortion groups vowed to score against any senator who rejected the anti-Planned Parenthood provision, exerting additional pressure on conservative lawmakers who would have seen their sterling pro-life ratings tarnished if the defunding language was dropped.

Apparently McConnell persuaded the anti-abortion folks that their cause was better served by electing a Republican president in 2016, and the best way to do that was to avoid a protracted government shutdown over a budget bill that Democrats would fight if it included the PP defunding language. Instead, he proposed a symbolic standalone bill that allows everyone to vote against Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. Obama will veto it; everyone will shrug and say “we tried”; and then a clean budget bill will be negotiated and signed.

This is a strategy that firebrand conservatives opposed, but apparently they aren’t willing to risk their 100 percent scores from anti-abortion groups. So they caved.

And that’s that. In today’s Washington, passing bills isn’t a matter of getting Republicans and Democrats to agree. They can usually manage that. The trick is somehow neutering the wingnut faction of the Republican Party. Once that’s done, negotiations between the two parties are (relatively speaking) a piece of cake. Welcome to 2015.

A leveraged loan is sort of like a junk bond: a high-interest loan provided to a company already deep in debt. The loans are typically tranched and then syndicated to various investors by a commercial bank. They’re non-investment grade, and in today’s low-interest environment where everyone is chasing yield, they became increasingly popular in 2012 and 2013.

Except with federal regulators:

“We learned a lesson” from the financial crisis, says one former regulator who pushed for a crackdown when leveraged loans surged in 2013 and standards slipped. “You can’t wait.”

….In response, the Fed, OCC and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. strong-armed U.S. banks for the first time ever to comply with minimum underwriting standards on leveraged loans no matter who shoulders the credit risk….Regulators were explicit about loan characteristics that would grab their attention, such as lax repayment time lines and the absence of loan covenants. Any loan that left a company with debt exceeding six times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, known as Ebitda, “raises concerns for most industries,” regulators wrote in the guidelines.

Lenders seemed to shrug—and kept on making leveraged loans….Starting in late summer, roughly a dozen big banks received a “Matters Requiring Attention” letter from the OCC and the Fed. The letters chided the banks for putting the financial system at risk because of lax and inadequate application of the leveraged loan guidelines, regulators claimed.

Banks, naturally, argue that tighter standards will deny credit to people who need it. And this is true. But just as there were lots of people who shouldn’t have bought houses in 2005 even though they really, really wanted one, the same is true of firms. Deteriorating lending standards are a normal sign of a frothy market, and we’re best off keeping a rein on bad loans now, instead of waiting for the market to collapse when a recession suddenly produces a string of defaults that ripple through the whole financial system.

Of course, if US regulators won’t allow these loans, it’s possible to go elsewhere. “The crackdown also has encouraged companies to take their leveraged loan business to firms that aren’t regulated by the Fed and OCC, such as Leucadia National Corp.’s Jefferies Group LLC and Nomura Holdings Inc. of Japan.” Stay tuned.

Dahlia Lithwick thinks that pro-life politicians are lying when they say that Planned Parenthood sold baby parts. So far, she says, every state investigation has found no violation of the law by Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that it is, indeed, illegal to sell baby parts. Ramesh Ponnuru disagrees:

Assume that all of these states went through an active and thorough inquiry, though, and Lithwick’s conclusion still isn’t correct. That we do not have proof of lawbreaking by Planned Parenthood does not mean we do not have evidence that it participates in the exchange of fetal tissue for money. Planned Parenthood, after the videos came out, announced that it would stop taking money for fetal tissue, which would seem to be conclusive evidence that it previously did so. As for whether this was merely “reimbursement,” we have the videos themselves, in which a Planned Parenthood official says that abortion clinics “can do a little better than break even” from this market, and another one says they can make “a fair amount of income.”

There is, of course, no question that Planned Parenthood (a) received money and (b) provided fetal tissue for research purposes. Nobody has ever denied it. The question is whether they broke the law, which forbids “any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration.” But what, exactly, is valuable consideration? Well, here’s the law:

The term “valuable consideration” does not include reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.

Regardless of what’s on the videos, every investigation of Planned Parenthood has concluded that this is all they did: they accepted reasonable payments to reimburse them for their actual costs of extracting and preserving the tissue. So does that constitute “exchange of fetal tissue for money”?

This starts to get abstract pretty quickly, but as always, I’m eager to help. Here’s an analogy. Suppose you want a can of soup. I’m going shopping today, so I volunteer to pick up a can of soup for you. It costs a dollar. When I get home, I give you the soup and you give me a dollar. Did I exchange soup for money?

I don’t think so. Now try another one. Instead of going to the store, I call an Uber driver, who goes to the store for me. I give him a dollar for the soup and he charges me a dollar for the trip. I’m out two dollars, so this time you give me two dollars for the soup. Did I exchange soup for money?

Nope. Now let’s try a final example. A surgeon performs an abortion at my clinic. I ask him to take some extra time to extract specific pieces of fetal tissue. His fee for this is $50. Then I have to package it, label it, fill out some federal forms, and store it in a purpose-built freezer. That costs me $20. Then I have to ship it. The medical transport company charges me $40 for this service. In return, you give me $110 for the tissue. Did I exchange fetal tissue for money?

Common sense says I didn’t. Ramesh Ponnuru thinks I did. I’ll let you decide who’s right.

After seven years of work, Montenegro has finally been invited to join NATO:

NATO announced plans on Wednesday to enlarge its membership, a move that brought an angry response from Moscow….In Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, said that NATO’s expansion would be met with retaliatory measures from Russia, Reuters reported, and Russia was also reportedly planning to halt joint projects with Montenegro.

In case you’re geographically challenged, the map on the right shows NATO’s current members (in dark blue) as well as the location of Montenegro. As you can see, Montenegro is across the Adriatic from Italy, about 500 miles from Ukraine and a thousand miles from Russia. Joining NATO is not exactly a threat either to Russia’s borders or to its sphere of influence.

But it used to be part of Yugoslavia, which was a Soviet ally back in the day. So this requires Vladimir Putin to stamp his feet and claim that Russia’s heritage is being attacked by the West, blah blah blah. You may safely ignore it. This hardly came as a surprise to the Russians, and it hardly represents a threat to them. It’s just an opportunity for a bit of jingoism to shore up the home market.