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An anonymous emailer shares his thoughts:

Only in Hollywood could accidentally strangling yourself while choking the chicken be considered *not* a stupid and embarrassing way to die, but rather an occasion requiring heartfelt expressions of admiration for the deceased and condolence to the family.

Well, I suppose there’s some consolation to be found in the thought that he died doing what he loved. Although, as Spacebunny said, is autoerotic asphyxiation really the best one can do in BANGKOK, of all places?

It’s interesting to see the various ways that women make use of their physical assets to scam men out of their financial assets. In Western divorce culture, alimony is the vehicle of choice. In Chinese male surplus culture, it’s pre-marital bride prices that serve the purpose:

With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China. Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn’t unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

Obviously, not all women view marriage as a cash cow. But enough women do, in enough disparate cultures, that it should serve as a warning to men to choose their wives on a far more careful basis than they usually do.

Stratfor reports on Latvia’s failed bond auction:

On June 3, the Latvian government failed to auction any of its 50 million lati ($100.7 million) of bonds, managing to sell only about 2.75 million lati ($5.5 million) worth of 30-day bonds the following day, which is raising fears that European emerging markets will have to struggle to raise capital for their rising debt…. The Latvian economy is, to put it bluntly, in shambles. Gross domestic product (GDP) is forecast to decline by over 13 percent in 2009.

The conventional wisdom has it that Europe is belatedly being hit by the financial turmoil that struck the States last fall and that the USA has seen the worst. I suspect that what we’re seeing is more akin to water sloshing back and forth in an increasingly turbulent manner, in which case the relative calm in American markets is only temporary. And by “over 13 percent”, Stratfor actually means 18 percent.

Martin Blume protests too much in his review of Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific Worldby Eugenie Samuel Reich:

Reich does an excellent job of dealing with the facts of the Schön case, but less well with their interpretation. She tends to describe issues in black-and-white terms and uses strident language unnecessarily. An acerbic tone creeps into judgements of the individuals involved, such as one editor being “opinionated”, and this distracts from her central points. More important is Reich’s conclusion that the self-correction process of science failed in this case and should not be trusted: “It seems like little more than blind faith to insist that all activity carried out in the name of science will always be self-correcting.” Yet Reich doesn’t say where this assumption comes from. No scientist who has thought about how science works would “insist” on this; nor can it “always” be true.

Blume’s criticism of Reich’s failure to defend her assertion is downright humorous, considering that no scientist ever offers any actual scientific evidence for this supposedly self-correcting nature. In fact, the only evidence I’ve ever seen on the matter indicates that 14 percent of scientists admit their colleagues falsify data and 72 percent admit that their colleagues engage in other questionable practices. And it’s hilarious to see how Blume damns pretty much every science blogger and science fetishist who has ever addressed the issue of science’s self-correcting nature; most of them exhibit a belief in it far blinder than any religious faith. The pedantic quibble over an obvious rhetorical flourish is almost embarrassing as the point Reich has made, and which Blume is trying desperately to evade, is that there is little, if any, evidence that science is any more self-correcting than any other human endeavor; I daresay it’s far less self-correcting than computer programming or race car driving, just to give two examples.

Blume would have done better to put Schön’s fraud into proper statistical perspective rather than attempting to claim it as a case of the system working. No number of arrests can prove the city is crime-free. After attempting to minimize the force of Reich’s criticism through declaring that no scientist believes science is always self-correcting, he then does a 180 and attempts to defend the current self-correction process. He’s surely correct that the probability of detecting data fabrication can be increased, but I am deeply skeptical that an exhortation to remain vigilant and encourage alertness will have any effect at all. And his iconoclastic suggestion that important results should be replicated will surely confuse the innocent who genuinely believes that repetition is an integral part of the scientific process.

Blume’s defense of scientific integrity is little more than fluff, and leads me to conclude that Reich will likely be provided the opportunity to write more books of this sort.

Spacebunny sends a link to an article about a new book on women and the workplace. She notes: “And women wonder why they get paid less…..”

The authors] call for women to say no to 60-plus-hour work weeks and overly demanding jobs that yank them away from their families. Instead, they urge working women to use their clout in the workplace to demand fewer hours at the office, turn down non-family-friendly assignments, and take control of their time by working from home more, checking e-mail less and avoiding meetings whenever possible.

It may surprise you to know that I’m generally in favor of both men and women doing as the Womenomics authors recommend, so long as they do so in the full knowledge that they will receive lower pay and fewer promotions than those who are willing to put in more time and work harder. Women should by all means avoid jobs that tear them away from their families; the smart employer will actively look to find a way to accommodate such women, who tend to be smart, efficient, dependable, and very hard-working within the time limits that their family responsibilities permit. And everyone would be better off with fewer meetings; one of our business partners has a meeting-heavy culture and it’s astonishing how long it takes them to do anything.

The problem with this book, I suspect, is that the usual female fascism will likely rear its incoherent but lushly-maned head and demand that everyone do less work so as not to make working women look bad by comparison, thereby transforming what could be a reasonable call for workers to examine their individual priorities into yet another justification for government intervention into the workplace.

I can’t say with complete certainty that Gordon Brown is the worst Prime Minister ever to be inflicted upon the English people, but he’s without question one of the worst. Of course, if the British Labour Party wasn’t such a bunch of feckless, economically-incompetent, euro-subservient ninnies, they wouldn’t be the British Labour Party:

Honestly, my granny could run a better coup than this lot. How hard can it be? What does it take to get rid of Gordon Brown? You’d think a well-judged shove would do it. Or a lone tank outside the radio station. Or a ranging shot from the destroyer offshore. Or just one gentle puff from someone close – and he’s gone. Yet after another day of political comedy, the Prime Minister is still locked away in Downing Street, refusing to budge. Westminster thinks he’s finished, but he’s still there, like a gangster shouting: “Come and get me, coppers!” He has no intention of making things easy by walking away.

Send Labour – and perhaps more importantly, the Conservative Party – a message by voting UKIP today. And for the love of Her Majesty the Queen, find her a less obnoxious Prime Minister to serve time until the next parliamentary elections, the calling of which should be the new Prime Minister’s first action. It is rather amusing, though, to see the speed with which Tony Blair’s Nu Labour managed to transform itself back into a media-friendly version of Old Labour, complete with its patented capacity for economic self-demolition. Unfortunately, David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher and the Tories are too europhilic to be a genuine alternative. Regardless, as even the Labour-loving Guardian has concluded, Gordon Brown must go.

They’re kind of like fairy tales for scientists, except they are usually less coherent than the Brothers Grimm variety:

Although many scholars have tried to identify a useful function for human hairlessness, they have failed. Indeed Alfred Wallace, the biologist who jointly described evolution with Darwin, concluded that our hairlessness proved the existence of God. Only a supernatural being, unconcerned with natural selection, could have designed it.

But Darwin showed that hairlessness was proof of a different type of evolution, not by natural selection but by sexual selection. Under natural selection, individuals survive if they are adapted to their environments: a brown bear, being conspicuous, would not last long in the Arctic, so it evolves into a polar bear. Sexual selection is not concerned with the environment but with sex: individuals breed only if they find a mate, so animals have to attract one. Consider the peacock.

OK so already we’re in trouble. The guy is going to use the example of a peacock’s plumage to prove why we lost our hair. (!!) If that were the end of the story, I might say some wise aleck remark like, “If the guy were trying to explain why women had such lush manes, compared to the meager covering of the males, then it might make sense to bring up the peacock.” But I can’t go that route, because the “scientific Darwinian” story gets even more convoluted.

Of course, this is an amateur Darwinian Tale. We Scientific Selectionists prefer to explain Evolutionary Stable Strategies, such as why passive men pursue ill-tempered women, also known as the STD-PW Dilemma:

Heritable psychological variation is the “raw material” of human evolution by natural selection, and understanding the mechanisms that generate such variation has become a fundamental challenge for contemporary evolutionary biology. A male human faces an inescapable reproductive dilemma, in that he seeks to spread his genes as widely as possible, an evolutionary pressure which is countered by the fact that an overly aggressive man risks a higher probability of being injured or diseased, thus resulting in a hindered ability to mate. However, a wholly passive man faces the high probability of falling under the influence of his mate and being prevented from going out to find other potential mates, thereby limiting his gene-spreading.

The STD-PW dilemma has, through Natural Selection, resulted in the evolutionary stable strategy of passive men selecting for bitchy women, with whom they mate and spread their genes before prolonged exposure to the bitch results in the application of one of two variant strategies. Either the male cannot stand the female’s bitching anymore and flees of his own volition, (the proto-passive strategy) or the female becomes so disgusted with the excess passivity of the male that she either kicks him out of the house or initiates a relationship-ending affair (the passive strategy).

Either strategy results in freeing the passive man to pursue subsequent mates and further spread his genes without any need for the aggression that would force him to risk reproductive-hindering injury and/or disease.

It is science!

Leveraged lawsuits. I like the sound of that one. Vampire money squared!

Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits. Not in trip-and-fall cases, mind you, but in disputes that are far larger, more costly and potentially more lucrative, often pitting major corporations against each other. Mr. Fields is chief executive of Juridica Capital Management. which runs a fund that invests in one side of a lawsuit in exchange for a share of any winnings…. Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company’s backers, but said that “on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.” He added, “We’re certainly beating the market.”

You know there are already guys at Citi and Goldman Sachs who are busy figuring out how to assess the risk factors and price the securitization of lawsuit investment products.

“Polls ahead of tomorrow’s elections suggest that Labour could be facing the worst drubbing in its history. By some counts the party is even trailing the UK Independence Party in voting intentions for the European Parliament.”
– The Daily Telegraph

That’s my recommendation for any British readers voting in tomorrow’s European parliamentary elections. The two most important issues for Britain right now are a) leaving the European Union, and b) ending immigration. Everything else is irrelevant in comparison with those two issues, which threaten the sovereignty and survival of the nation. With the exception of Daniel Hannan, the Tories are pretty much useless, while Labour is unspeakable and the Liberal Democrats are little more than Labour lite.

If there is no UKIP candidate standing, vote BNP. Despite their left-wing economic policies, they’re on the right side of the two most important issues at the moment. Don’t be put off by the hysterical media rhetoric or fooled into supporting Cameron’s Conservatives, they’re nearly as Europhilic as Nu Labour and they’re not going to allow a referendum on the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty either. The Tories don’t want to change the direction set by Blair and Brown; they offer nothing more than the illusion of change. Fortunately for British voters, the parliamentary system precludes the ridiculous “a vote for a third-party is a vote for the Democrats” argument that so many mathematically challenged Republicans find convincing.