Barrel Strength

The debt instruments of the US government are considered risk-free return because of the credit rating of the US government.  The risk-free return changed today to return-free risk given that the returns for four-week US Treasury bills are now zero and that the risk is never zero.

The Treasury sold $27 billion of three-month bills yesterday at a discount rate of 0.005 percent, the lowest since it starting auctioning the securities in 1929. The U.S. also sold $30 billion of four-week bills today at zero percent for the first time since it began selling the debt in 2001.

These are historic times indeed.  In UK the rates have hit the lowest since the Bank of England was established in 1694.

The arrest of Illinois Gov. Blagojevich (D) along with his chief of staff, and new developments in Rezko land deal have raised several questions about Obama himself.  Given the allegations, it is imperative that Obama make a sincere effort to clear his name, especially given the arduous task ahead.  The critical nature of world events ranging from terrorism and Iran to finance require no less.  This would also be a good time to head off potential problems in the future such as, does BHO have any outstanding debts to his cocaine dealer that would make him susceptible to blackmail?

To address all this and more, Obama’s first order of business should be an appointment of a Special Counsel to thoroughly and completely investigate any allegations that threaten to tar and blacken the Obama presidency. This president who has previously emulated JFK now must follow the words first uttered during his Inaugural Address: “…that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship…”  No matter the price of this investigation, it should be followed through to conclusion.  No matter what the burden or the length of the investigation, that hardship must be endured to avoid besmirchment of this Presidency.

By appointing a Special Counsel at the start of his Presidency, Obama will exemplify real change, instead of just words, as well a providing real hope for those looking for honest governance and transparency.  The President himself is responsibile for ensuring the success of the Presidency, rather than relying on TV pundits like Chris Matthews, who has vowed to make it his job.  Yes, this is all very serious.

A recent story links brain power to quality of sperm.

The story is reported in the Economist of December 4, 2008.

The interesting connection is the Geoffrey Miller, the co-author of the scientific article at the base of the story, and husband of the principal researcher, is author of the ground breaking book on sexual selection, The Mating Mind, with which all intelligent well-read people should be familiar.

The Economist story goes as follows:
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THERE are few better ways of upsetting a certain sort of politically correct person than to suggest that intelligence (or, rather, the variation in intelligence between individuals) is under genetic control. That, however, is one implication of a paper about to be published in Intelligence by Rosalind Arden of King’s College, London, and her colleagues. Another is that brainy people are intrinsically healthier than those less intellectually endowed. And the third, a consequence of the second, is that intelligence is sexy. The most surprising thing of all, though, is that these results have emerged from an unrelated study of the quality of men’s sperm.

Ms Arden is one of a group of researchers looking into the connections between intelligence, genetics and health. General intelligence (the extent to which specific, measurable aspects of intelligence, such as linguistic facility, mathematical aptitude and spatial awareness, are correlated in a given individual) is measured by psychologists using a value called Spearman’s g. Recently, it has been discovered that an individual’s g value is correlated with many aspects of his health, up to and including his lifespan. One possible explanation for this is that intelligent people make better choices about how to conduct their lives. They may, for example, be less likely to smoke, more likely to eat healthy foods or to exercise, and so on.

Alternatively (or in addition) it may be that intelligence is one manifestation of an underlying, genetically based healthiness. That is a view held by many evolutionary biologists, and was propounded in its modern form by Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who is one of Ms Arden’s co-authors (and, as it happens, her husband). These biologists believe intelligence, as manifested in things like artistic and musical ability, is such a reliable indicator of underlying genetic fitness that it has been chosen by members of the opposite sex over the millennia. In the ensuing arms race to show off and get a mate it has been exaggerated in the way that a peacock’s tail is. This process of sexual selection, Dr Miller and his followers believe, is the reason people have become so brainy.

Hitting the g spot

Ms Arden sought to test this idea in a way that excluded intelligent choice and got directly at any correlations between intelligence and health that operate at the physiological level. She chose sperm quality because it is both easily measured and about as far from intelligent choice as it is possible to imagine—and because the relevant data had already been collected.

Her retrospective “volunteers” were former American soldiers enrolled in what was known as the Vietnam Experience Study. In 1985 almost 4,500 veterans of that war volunteered for extensive medical and mental examinations. Some of them gave semen samples that were analysed for sperm concentration (ie, number of sperm per cubic centimetre), sperm count (ie, total number of sperm in the ejaculate) and sperm motility.
Ms Arden found 425 cases where samples had been collected and analysed from unvasectomised men who had managed to avoid spilling their seed during the collection process and had answered all the necessary questions for her to test her hypothesis, namely that their g values would correlate with all three measures of their sperm quality.

They did. Moreover, neither age nor any obvious confounding variable that might have been a consequence of intelligent decisions about health (obesity, smoking, drinking and drug use) had any effect on the result. Brainy men, it seems, do have better sperm.

By implication, therefore, they have fitter bodies over all, at least in the Darwinian sense of fitness, namely the ability to survive, to attract mates and to produce offspring. That is an important finding. Hitherto, biologists have tended to disaggregate the idea of fitness into a series of adaptations that are more or less independent of each other. This work adds to the idea of a general fitness factor, f, that is similar in concept to g—and of which g is one manifestation. To him that hath, in other words, shall be given. Unfortunately for the politically correct, Dr Miller’s hypothesis looks stronger by the day.

Dear readers, Our friend the Dark Lord is too lazy to get a password for this site so I have to post some of his stuff here so that his readership expands beyond the exclusive confines of Berrelstrengthians. Encourage him to blog more!
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Ms O’Grady’s article (Monday’s Wall Street Journal)-Canada’s Conservatives
Overreach– shows what a difference two days can make in politics. Now it
looks like the Liberals and the NDP overreached!

The Liberals and the NDP formed the coalition with a view to defeating the
Conservative government and slipping into power without an election. This
Liberal/NDP/Bloc Quebecois troika absolutely depended on that assumption.
It should be noted that the Bloc Quebecois has no legitimacy in nine of the
ten Provinces of Canada; it does not seek votes outside the Province of
Quebec; and its primary objective is to break up the Federation. Should
this coalition come to power, the party seeking to break up the Federation
would have veto power all the Federal Government’s decisions. With that in
mind, it is clear why the attempt to unseat the Conservative government
created such a furious outcry.

Further, the claimed pretext for forming the coalition, namely the
Conservatives’ plan to cease the subsidizing of political parties with
taxpayers’ money, is, according to the latest poll, supported by fully 61%
of the electorate. Yet another poll reveals that more that two thirds of
the electorate (68% nationally and higher in some of the nine
English-speaking Provinces) want a new election should the government fall.

After years of posing as the main federalist party in Canada, and especially
in Quebec, these shabby dealings may well have done lasting harm to the
Liberal Party. With the polls showing what the voters think of this deal,
it’s no wonder the troika wanted to avoid an election: they would be
hammered at the polls, and Mr. Harper may well turn out to be the unintended
victor in this conspiracy.

Regards,

The Dark Lord