Thứ Năm, 1 tháng 12, 2016

The Next Chapter of ‘How to Stop a Man From Taking Office’



By Tom CarsonNovember 29, 2016

REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo


Remember the innocent days when we were groaning how we couldn’t wait for the 2016 presidential election to end? Odds are we’ll get our wish eventually, but it hasn’t happened yet. The fantasy that Donald J. Trump can somehow be prevented from taking office is still alive and well.

Even though I’d bet my dad’s old JFK tie clip that a fantasy is all that is, I’m not going to pretend I’m immune to its “When you wish upon a stove” appeal. For sure, the past 18 months have taught us, to Trump fans’ exhilaration and everybody else’s despair, that anything can happen in this ridiculous country. Unreconciled Hillary Clinton voters just didn’t expect that the hopes and fears of all the years would be met in Jill Stein.

Stein is a notorious cluck—a few potato chips short of a bag, to put it kindly. It’s anybody’s guess what prompted the Green Party’s candidate to demand vote audits and/or recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three battleground states that would have made Clinton president if she’d won them. Even Stein acknowledges that her effort is unlikely to alter the election’s outcome, which could be the first time she’s ever said anything remotely sensible.

For starters, the math looks insurmountable. Just for fun, let’s grant that it’s possible (albeit barely) that a recount could flip Wisconsin and Michigan into Clinton’s column. Pennsylvania is still the prize, and Trump won the state by 70,000 votes. That’s enough of a margin to survive pretty much anything save for drastic evidence of vote hacking.

No such evidence has turned up, and it’s not like the experts haven’t been looking for it. Worry that Vladimir Putin’s diabolically clever cyber-elves might diddle the results—an unprecedented concern, but since he’s Putin, a plausible one—has had the people who monitor this crap on high alert. So far, as they say and as we know, Vlad didn’t impale us.




Nonetheless, Stein’s quixotic recount campaign raised $2.5 million in just 48 hours. That amount had doubled by Friday. By Saturday, Clinton herself, caught in a classic “damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t” bind, had signed on. No doubt she’d have preferred to avoid the risk of tarnishing her already complicated brand by looking like a divisive sore loser, but her loyalists would have been mighty upset if she’d left poor old Stein stuck out in the rain alone.

Predictably, our prospective Tweeter-in-Chief took umbrage. (Trump does that so compulsively you’d think Umbrage was the name of a new anti-depressant.) He called Stein’s effort a “scam” and, not unreasonably, quoted Clinton’s own words about accepting the election’s results back when he was the one threatening to do otherwise.

Then he stupefied everybody by claiming without evidence that he’d have won the popular vote if not for the “millions of people who voted illegally.” Yeah, right: millions. Did it even cross the Alpha Cheeto’s mind that this nutty charge was an argument in favor of a recount, and not just in three measly states, but nationwide?

As if things weren’t muddy enough, another story that had gained traction by the end of last week was how Putin’s propagandists had made gleeful use of fake-news websites to feed disinformation to the gullible U.S. electorate. But unlike the hazy spectre of Russian hackers manipulating the honest-to-gosh vote count, this scenario has lots of evidence backing it up.

The same goes for Russia’s collusion with Wikileaks’s election-cycle document dumps, which were lopsidedly designed to discredit Clinton. Right after election day, to startlingly little outcry here at home, Putin adviser Sergei Markov even coyly confirmed that one, saying “Maybe we helped a little bit.”

Putting aside the awkward fact that the U.S. government has interfered in countless elections abroad, it’s dismaying that Trump’s supporters are likely to react to the news with a big, fat “So what?” A foreign power whose ruler means us no good apparently did its damndest to sway one of ours, but that’s history’s headache. So long as their guy gets to make America great again, you know? Still, it’d take a much bigger bombshell than that for the Electoral College to go rogue, which was the Clintonistas’ favorite grabbing-at-straws pipe dream until Jill Stein came along.

If you take Alexander Hamilton’s word for it—the real one’s, not Lin-Manuel Miranda’s—the Electoral College was devised partly to prevent men with “talents for low intrigue, and the petty arts of popularity” from becoming president in a fit of popular mania. But it’s never done so yet and there’s almost zero chance it will now. Besides, Clinton’s diehards tend to forget that she’d be out of the running no matter what. Any GOP electors who flip—and there may be a few, depending on how outrageously Trump behaves between now and December 19—will almost certainly cast protest votes for another Republican, not her.
Unless pigs have started taking flying lessons nationwide, Stein’s recount push is sure to fail. She’ll thereby validate Trump’s win, not undermine it. But all of this isn’t really about practicalities. The point is that we’ve never had an incoming POTUS who panics people so much they resort to magical thinking to keep their hopes up. At the very least, we’re probably in for a few more weeks of chaos. When the dust settles, we’ll be stuck with one more damned election we can’t really trust. And a president we probably shouldn’t.

Why Women Go For Funny Guys, According to Science



By Justin LehmillerNovember 29, 2016

Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo


Seth Rogen. Kevin Hart. Jonah Hill. Jason Sudeikis. What do these guys have in common? Yes, they’re all damn fine comedians, but there’s another reason they’re alike: at one time or another, they’ve all been romantically linked to some of the sexiest women in the world.

These guys don’t have the chiseled faces and bodies of Hollywood action stars, but that hasn’t hurt them when it comes to their love lives. It turns out that a good sense of humor can level the playing field, and some scientists think they know why. Evolutionary psychologists believe that the appeal of funny men may have something to do with—wait for it—the female orgasm.

Scientists have long debated the purpose of the female orgasm. Early theorists argued that it assists in reproduction because contractions of the uterus help to retain more sperm. By contrast, others have claimed that the female orgasm is nothing but a “fantastic bonus”—in other words, that it serves no real purpose at all and, like the male nipple, is just an evolutionary byproduct.

Yet another theory—and one that has been growing in popularity in recent years—is that the female orgasm is designed by evolution to help women identify high-quality mates. This idea, known as the mate-choice hypothesis, suggests that women aren’t going to orgasm with just any guy, but rather the guys who bring the most to the table. Put another way, women are more likely to orgasm with men who are “good catches,” or guys who are worth having relationships with and/or who have good genes to pass along. Orgasms can therefore be thought of as a reward for choosing a high-quality mate, or a signal that he might be worth sticking with.
So what makes a guy a “good catch” and, by extension, someone with whom women are more likely to have orgasms? Research suggests that having a good sense of humor is pretty high on the list. In a new study published in the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, women were asked to think about the traits of partners with whom they had an easy time reaching orgasm, as well as the traits of partners with whom orgasms were more difficult. One of the biggest differences that emerged was humor. The “high-orgasm” male partners were simply a lot funnier than the “low-orgasm” partners.






In further support of this idea that humor is a major turn-on, a 2014 study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology found that women with humorous partners had sex more often. Not only that, but women were more likely to initiate sex if they had a funny partner.

What makes funny guys so attractive? It might be because having a good sense of humor signals a whole host of desirable traits. For example, in that 2014 study, women who thought their partners were funny also rated them as being more intelligent, popular and creative.

Intelligence has been argued to be the most important among these traits, for at least two reasons. First, intelligent men are likely to be more successful and, as a result, perhaps that makes them good providers. Evolutionary psychologists believe that it was adaptive for our female ancestors to look for mates who can provide well due to the fact that reproduction is a much more costly activity for women than it is for men. Second, intelligence is at least partially inherited. Thus, by choosing an intelligent partner, women may be giving their offspring an IQ boost.

This isn’t to say that being funny is the only male trait that turns on women, or even that it turns all women on. In the previously mentioned Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology study, researchers found that women’s odds of orgasm were linked to several qualities of their partners, including his psychological traits (like faithfulness), physical characteristics (like smelling good) and what he did in bed (such as performing oral sex and giving clitoral stimulation during intercourse). Clearly, whether a woman is likely to orgasm is a function of far more than just her partner’s sense of humor.

That said, there’s mounting evidence that being funny is one of the more sexually desirable traits a man can have. Although we can’t say why for sure, the data are at least consistent with the mate-choice hypothesis.

A word of caution: the take-home message here is not that you need to try harder to be funnier. We all know guys who have tried a little too hard to make a woman laugh at the bar on Friday night only to have it backfire spectacularly. Play to your own strengths and remember that, while being funny may be important, it’s not everything.