Testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human fathers

On the one hand, this sounds like it supports the notion that stay-at-home dads are less “manly.”

On the other hand, in a earlier age, men had to do the hunting and heavy lifting, as well as producing the maximum number of babies (given the incredibly high infant mortality rate).

But time moves on, and the Big Balls types no longer have such an evolutionary advantage. Nowadays, families with fewer children — at least in the First World — have a survival advantage. And co-parenting also helps prepare the offspring for a world where success at social interaction is more important than throwing hands.

Source: Testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human fathers | PNAS

Everybody wants to be in a gang!

  • Jewish immigrants
  • Irish immigrants
  • Italian immigrants
  • Puerto Rican immigrants
  • Black migrants
  • Mexican immigrants
  • Dominican immigrants
  • White supremacists
  • ISIS recruits
  • Trump supporters

The poor, the outsiders, and the disappointed are all prospects for gang membership.

Are there gangs for happy WASPS, too? Well, there’s always the Episcopal Church, the Club for Growth and the Social Register.

Chuck Schumer totally pwned by Trump

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s candid thoughts on President Donald Trump got caught on a hot mic last month.

In the audio from the Senate chamber, the Democratic senator from New York spoke with an unidentified person about his dinner with Trump the previous night.

“He likes us. He likes me, anyway,” Schumer said.

By “us,” Schumer presumably meant House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who was with Schumer at the dinner.

After that dinner, the Democratic leaders said they agreed to pursue a deal to protect about 800,000 young immigrants from deportation. They said the deal would include border security measures but not the president’s proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Later, of course, Trump added a pile of conditions to the supposed agreement he had made with Schumer and Pelosi.

Not only had he humiliated the country’s top two Democrats, he had done it using the very techniques outlined in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. The idea is that you start out by insulting your counterparts then, later, you make a tiny concession. At that point, the other side falls all over themselves in gratitude.

Worked perfectly on Chuck and Nancy.

Source: Chuck Schumer on hot mic: Trump ‘likes us’

See also Stockholm Syndrome.

Here’s why Trump will win

Scott Dikkers, the founding editor of The Onion, says “I think [Trump is] going to win. I don’t think there’s any doubt. I know the electoral map looks challenging to him, but you’ve seen the polls. Trump keeps going up, Hillary keeps going down and we saw how Trump laid waste to all these other professional politicians. Trump transcends the typical politician strategies and rhetoric because he’s appealing to people’s lizard brains and the lizard brain doesn’t care about facts. It doesn’t care what’s true. It doesn’t care what’s reasonable. It’s just going to vote, ‘Trump — he’s strong,’ and that’s what we’ve got and that’s what’s going to happen. I hope I’m wrong.”

Source: Donald Trump faked being a lawyer to us, too: Onion founder

Uber Knows When Your iPhone Battery Is Dying And You’re Getting Desperate

But they promise not to use the power for evil.

… [Keith Chen, Uber’s head of economic research] revealed that Uber knows when the battery on your phone is low — it keeps tabs on your battery so the app knows when to switch into low-power mode — and that it knows you’re willing to pay more for a ride when your battery is running out. . . . “[W]e absolutely don’t use that to kind of, like, push you a higher surge price, but it’s an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior,” said Chen.

Source: Uber Knows When Your iPhone Battery Is Dying And You’re Getting Desperate

If I’m not happy, why should you be?

To our nation’s founders, happiness was a right of man. So would they be pleased to learn that modern day Americans are indeed happy? In fact, the majority of U.S. adults today describe themselves as “very happy.” Happiness appears to be an equal opportunity emotion, striking men, women, whites, nonwhites, young, and old in similar degrees. Marriage is associated with higher rates of happiness, but more money doesn’t necessarily buy greater happiness. The rate of happiness is depressed [ha!] among low-income Americans, but it levels off at a higher rate in households earning $30,000 or more.

In response to the Bitemaster’s rants about happiness (e.g., are women any happier now that they have the vote?), Correspondent Jeffrey Wilheim has provided a link to an actual study of people’s happiness: A Nation of Happy People