Links and Minifeatures 05 18 Thursday

Carnivals



Carnival of The Vanities Recommended: Fearless Philosophy (Cory Maye)



Carnival of The Capitalists Recommended: Professor Bainbridge (amending Sarbanes-Oxley) Insureblog (how transparency in medical billing is important)

**********



Okay So I'm Not Really a Cowboy has an excellent article about marginal tax rates, who pays taxes, and all that sort of stuff.



**********



Definitely good news 'Triple Neptune' find raises hopes about extra-solar planets



**********



Interesting: Giant Slab of Earth's Crust Found Near Core So the Continental Drift theory may need to be modified.



**********



Are commercial real estate loans going to hurt banks? Doubt it. I'm not an expert, but the few times I've had a client who wanted one, I've learned that they usually require about 40% of the money to come from the borrower, and I've never seen less than 20. Remember that the loan always gets paid first if something happens. The commercial market is not overheated like the residential market, if at all.



**********



Does this actually surprise anyone? A world of spies has its eyes trained on USA



**********



Too much information: DNA study maps human-chimp split

The researchers, from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, propose that humans and chimpanzees first split up about 10 million years ago. Then, after evolving in different directions for about 4 million years, they got back together for a brief fling that produced a third, hybrid population with characteristics of both lines.



That genetic collaboration then gave rise to two separate branches â€" one leading to humans and the other to chimps.



The work has inspired both admiration and skepticism. Many paleontologists have a hard time believing that some of the fossil humans that are known to have lived during that era could have been pairing up with apes.



"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who wasn't involved in the study. "My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates â€" not to put it too crudely."

Yuck.



**********



Transparency Makes Fraud Harder: Fraud Data to Be Shared by Regulator



HT Mortgage Fraud Blog



**********



Q and O analyses the security angle to the immigration debate, and finds it worthy of concern.



**********



Dean's World has a very good bit on the lack of symmetry in the way the sexes are treated in this country, and why young men are tired of it and therefore leery of marriage.



I am happily married to the world's only perfect woman. Yet I have seen friends and coworkers go through worse than hell. One man divorcing after eight years who was told by the court that he'd be expected to support his ex-wife for the rest of his life. Another earning roughly $30,000 per year "allowed" to keep $400 per month to live off of because the judge "knew" how much he made and wasn't interested in documentation to the contrary. A third whose wife pushed him into the high paying career as a condition of staying married, then divorced him because she couldn't stand the weird hours that he had to work and the location he was assigned to, but wanted not only 75% plus of his gross pay but the right to take the two kids 600 miles away to live and to force him to pay for all visitation. Another whose wife wanted to divorce him because she wanted to be with her new paramour and initially told her future ex-husband in the presence of witnesses "and keep your filthy kid, too!" but who later demanded and got custody because her lawyer told her how much child support would be involved. Not to mention one guy I know whose girlfriend assaulted him with a kitchen pan but in defending himself, she got a bruise on her arm and so he got beaten up by the police and arrested for domestic violence and a couple other charges, never mind that he looked like the victim of a cattle stampede before the cops started in. Not to mention the ex-wife of one of my friends, who joined the Hare Krishnas after their marriage, wouldn't let him eat meat after that, and performed all sorts of other emotional tortures and mindgames, not to mention selling his car one day so he was forced to get rides from her and couldn't go anywhere without her taking him. He called up a mutual friend singing "Happy Days Are Here Again!" when the Krishnas sent her to out of town for a few weeks. We tried to get him to divorce her for several years before he gave up, and the court treated him like the bad guy.



If you want to encourage marriage, you're going to have to somehow change the perception that if it ends, the man is automatically going to get the high speed rotating stainless steel shaft no matter what happens. Many younger men today are willing to sire children and even to pay child support, but not to marry. Ladies, we have heard how much this hurts you so many times we can quote chapter and verse. Backwards. In our sleep. It's not even close to how much it harms the children or the man involved. If you want a better chance at the man picking up more of the load of the children, you're going to have to level the playing field.



Because no matter what you've heard from Catherine MacKinnon, the man is not always the problem, and definitely not always the only problem.



(Every single one of the men in the previous examples has since found other, apparently rational, women who want them in their lives, despite the fact that most of them are dead broke from having to pay their previous wives the majority of the paychecks)



**********



Respectful Insolence has some details on the Ward Churchill report.



Volokh Conspiracy has a chain of articles as well.



**********



Armies of Liberation has a good bit on prospects, or lack thereof, of the commanding officer of the USS Cole, left high and dry by the Navy in the name of protecting higher ups.



**********



Michelle Malkin has the actual records of the briefings the Donkeys were swearing they never got, including USA Today's whining about how awful it was that they couldn't blab about this classified information they had received.