“More than half your body is not human”

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the clickbait headline for this BBC article.

I thought it might be something about Neanderthal genes, or perhaps mitochondria.

But no; it’s about bacteria, mainly gut bacteria:

Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

“They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”.

No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels.

We’ve been hearing an awful lot about those gut bacteria lately, haven’t we? But the question here is whether they are a part of our bodies. I say no; they’re residents with benefits, and they also can confer benefits and/or cause problems. We have what I believe is called a symbiotic relationship with them, but that doesn’t make them an integral part of our bodies.

This is perhaps more a philosophical question than a physiological one. But when we transfer bacteria from one person to another (through the rather repulsive but often-helpful mode of fecal transplants, for example), there is no host rejection problem, at least not as far as I know. Nor is there one when we take probiotics, as I do (for what it’s worth).

Paul Ryan won’t be running in 2018

The New Neo Posted on by

Does this news make you happy?

It doesn’t make me happy.

Ryan is a moderate Republican. A lot of people on the right can’t stand moderate Republicans and want them out, either believing they can be replaced by conservatives, or not caring if they’re replaced by Democrats.

That seems short-sighted to me. It’s my observation that moderate Republicans usually come from moderate districts and are often replaced by Democrats who are pretending to be moderate but who don’t stand up to their leadership and who help the passage of progressive bills by voting for them. In 2018, the GOP is facing a tremendous challenge in trying to keep the House. Ryan’s retirement is both a sign of that trouble and most likely an event that will make the loss more likely.

It’s hard to believe that Ryan is only 48 years old. He’s run for Vice President, and been Speaker of the House. He says he wants to spend time with his children and family, but that’s what they all say. Maybe it’s even true for Ryan; he lost his own father to a heart attack when Ryan was a teenager, and that may be a factor here. But it’s highly unlikely to be the only factor. I think he’s tired, and sees the writing on the wall.

Sorry to be so politically gloomy.

Obama’s illegal campaign contributions vs. Trump’s

The New Neo Posted on by

From Andrew C. McCarthy, a little recent history:

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was caught hiding the sources of 1,300 large campaign donations, aggregating to nearly $2 million. The campaign also accepted more than $1.3 million in unlawful donations from contributors who had already given the legal maximum.

Under federal law, such campaign-finance violations, if they aggregate to just $25,000 in a calendar year, may be treated as felonies punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment ”” with offenses involving smaller dollar amounts punishable by incarceration for a year or more. (See Section 30109(d) of Title 52, U.S. Code, pp. 51”“52 of the Federal Election Commission’s compilation of campaign laws.)

The Obama campaign did not have a defense; it argued in mitigation that the unlawful donations constituted a negligible fraction of the monumental amount it had raised from millions of “grass-roots” donors. Compelling? Maybe not, but enough to convince the Obama Justice Department not to prosecute the Obama campaign ”” shocking, I know. During the Christmas holiday season right after the 2012 campaign, with Obama safely reelected and nobody paying much attention, the matter was quietly settled with the payment of a $375,000 fine.

Is the $130,000 in hush money Donald Trump’s personal lawyer paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election a campaign-finance violation? Probably, although it’s a point of contention. Even if we stipulate that it is, though, we’re talking comparative chump change.

Yet, as that lawyer, Michael Cohen, has discovered, what was not a crime in the Obama days is the crime of the century now…

Prosecutors have tremendous discretion on who to charge, who to let go, who to pressure, who to squeeze. When they decide a president is okay, that president receives the kid glove treatment. When they decide he has to go, they will move heaven and earth to get him out.

The press is one of the few checks we might have on this sort of process, and we all know that they are not even remotely objective.

And then there’s the public, who get to have an opinion and then to vote. But if the public is misinformed, ignorant, and/or indoctrinated through an educational process that sees its purpose as the destruction of the ideas and power of the right and the elevation of the ideas and power of the left, the public has trouble understanding exactly what’s going on.

More on the Michael Cohen seizure

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched the Levin/McCarthy discussion videos I mentioned in my previous post today. Unfortunately, they can’t be embedded, and in their entirety they’re rather long.

So I’ll just suggest you watch the concluding one, which is the third in the series. I pretty much concur with what’s being said there, and I warn you: it’s very depressing.

One of the things about the lawfare against Trump is that it has four related effects that are not directly legal. The first is that anyone considering a job in the Trump administration would have to think twice about accepting it, unless that person is ready to have his or her entirely life scrutinized (and confidential communications accessed) by people determined to find a violation, however small and/or however technical.

Practically no one could endure such scrutiny. And vanishingly few would want to risk it. That handicaps Trump’s ability to govern, as one might expect. And that is one of the goals.

The second effect also would tend to handicap the president’s ability to govern, and that is just the stress and anger he is likely to feel. I certainly would feel it. Of course, presidents must function under intense stress, which is always present. But this is an added provocation. The idea is that he would crack and do something foolish, be unable to function, and/or resign.

The third effect is to gain access to all of Trump’s correspondence with his lawyer. This is the way that would work:

[Cohen’s lawyer] Ryan added that the government’s tactics were unjustified because “Mr. Cohen has cooperated completely with all government entities, including providing thousands of non-privileged documents to the Congress and sitting for depositions under oath.”

Ryan’s point that Cohen has been cooperating is a relevant one. “Searches of attorneys’ offices are ”˜last resort’ practices,” a white-collar Washington lawyer tells me, “but where there is no other way to get the suspected evidence, they are done.”

As another Washington trial attorney says, “It is unusual, absent extraordinary circumstances, to raid the office of a ”˜subject’ or ”˜target’ of an investigation especially when the government has requested and received documents from the attorney.” If such tactics were used in anything other than compelling circumstances, such as the imminent destruction of evidence, the lawyer says, “then every government investigation would start by raiding the offices” of the suspect’s attorneys.

…“When prosecutors/agents search an attorney’s office, they usually employ a clean team and dirty team,” says Wisenberg [former Deputy Independent Counsel for the Whitewater/Lewinsky investigation]. “The dirty or taint team looks at the materials first, segregates privileged material, and does not tell the clean team about them.”

If so, one wonders where the U.S. attorneys would turn to find lawyers to staff up his “taint team.” An even bigger question will be the credibility of the clean/dirty divide…

Is there anyone on earth who would believe in the integrity of such a divide in this case? Not to mention the possibility (probability?) of leaks to the eager anti-Trump press.

The fourth effect is on the public. The constant pounding on associates of the president—where no crime by Trump has ever been shown to exist in the first place—has the effect of indicating to many people that with all this smoke there must be fire. It is compounded by the fact that most people don’t understand how the legal system works in terms of process, and are only concerned about outcome: meaning, if they hate or even dislike Trump, they would be likely to think that what Mueller et.al. are doing to him and his associates must be okay.

And there are plenty of people on both sides who hate or even dislike Trump. I’ve never been a Trump fan, but I like much of what he’s done as president so far and I think that the appointment of a special counsel was an unwarranted and dangerous dangerous move, and a politically motivated one at that. I have always been more on the Dershowitz side (that link’s from about three weeks ago) of that issue, and I would say it whether the person being investigated was Trump or Obama, Republican or Democrat:

There never should have been an appointment of special counsel and there was no probable cause that crimes were committed,” said Dershowitz. “I’ve seen no credible evidence that crimes were committed by the president.”

“The investigation should never have begun. The question is how does he deal with it. He’s playing good cop, bad cop. He has some lawyers cooperating and some attacking Mueller because he wants to be ready to attack in the event there are recommendations that are negative to the president.”

The Harvard law professor emeritus went on to describe the Mueller investigation as a “legal colonoscopy” that is looking at “every conceivable aspect” of Trump’s business life.

“Who knows how many people can survive that kind of an inquiry,” Dershowitz said. “I think on the public things being the Russia thing and obstruction of justice these are safe grounds, but on the material of his business dealings there’s no way to know.”

Such prosecutors are invitations for political witch hunts and finding what’s called “process” crimes (crimes committed in the course of an investigation, such as lying to the FBI) and/or minor crimes. And if you’re looking for those, it’s easy enough to find them.

[NOTE: Now, we don’t actually know exactly what Cohen might be charged with, and I suppose it’s possible it’s something other than the Stormy Daniels payment money and the theory that this is some form of unreported campaign contribution. Perhaps it’s something far more serious. But I highly doubt it.]

On the universe and consciousness

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Today’s news is so depressing and appalling that I wanted a respite from it by going big. This is about as big as it gets.]

Maria Popova writes:

In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.”

When did I first come upon that thought? I don’t know, but it was probably at least 50 years ago, and it was an ancient thought back then. It struck me as profound and yet simple, as many profound ideas are. Whether you believe in a deity or not, and/or a teleological process, it seems to at least be descriptive of the basics.

Consciousness is something we all possess as human beings as long as we remain healthy, but it is a mystery. Animals have some sort of consciousness, but how much and of what nature? Are they self-conscious?

This is a matter on which science and religion and philosophy all speculate. As food for thought, here’s a piece in which an Orthodox rabbi discusses the entire question. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll excerpt this bit:

Everywhere we look, whether under the sea, under a rock, up in the sky or in a galaxy far away, the same rules and the same constants apply. And if one of those dimensionless constants would be just a little bit off – if the gravitational constant would be just a smidgen more or less, or if the combination of the electron charge, the speed of light and Planck’s constant would be just a little off – there would be no hope for any integrated information at all. No life. No observer. Zero consciousness.

So is there any reason why the universe as a whole should not be considered conscious?

Okay, I can hear you saying, “That’s not proof that the universe is conscious. It’s just evidence.” But then, as I pointed out earlier, nobody has proof that anyone is conscious other than himself. Just evidence.

I would say you’re on stronger ground assuming that the whole universe is conscious than assuming that an individual is conscious.You’re on stronger ground assuming that the whole universe is conscious than assuming that an individual is conscious. Ask yourself: Which makes more sense – that conscious human beings gradually emerge over time out of the dynamics of dumb matter; or that a great consciousness articulates itself within particular instances of much smaller consciousnesses, and eventually that of us puny human beings?

And what makes more sense, a universe where everything just happens to follow the same rules, and no two particles dare be in the same state – even though they have no knowledge of what each other is doing, since they are just dumb particles – or a universe where a single consciousness holds everything in place, as an enormously diverse, thoroughly integrated set of information?

If that sounds just way too unscientific, I’ll throw in a quotation from one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century, without whom quantum physics might never have been imagined, Max Planck:

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”

There’s much more at the link.

–

The raid on the office of Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s so disturbing is not just the raid on the office (and home, and hotel room) of Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, but the broader context in which it took place.

What I mean by “broader context,” is the vendetta nature of our entire political discourse for quite some time now; I hesitate to say when it started, but certainly by the time of the Clinton impeachment it was in place at least somewhat, and probably even before that. You may indeed disagree with me on the Clinton impeachment, but I have never seen any reason to change my judgment of that action (which I don’t want to rehash now, but please see this, this, and this, for example).

We don’t know a whole lot about the Cohen raid, except that it was so egregious in terms of violation of the attorney/client privilege (and for the president of the United States, at that) that it had better be for an excellent reason, because this action is extreme and unprecedented.

Meanwhile, the anti-Trump press is making the most of the “Trump is fuming” story. Well, I’m fuming too, and not because I’m so intent on protecting Trump or any other Republican. It’s because I want to see people protected from over-reaching fishing expeditions (see the John Doe prosecutions), and certainly don’t want to see partisan witch-hunting prosecutions of any president for minor matters. And make no mistake about it, if Trump’s lawyer really did make some sort of $130K payment to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet (ordinarily a completely legal action) and it is thought to somehow be a campaign contribution because there was an imminent election at the time, that is a matter so iffy in terms of interpretation (reasonable minds may differ on whether it was a violation at all, even if the worst comes out) and so essentially trivial that it’s not worth a raid that violates the attorney-client privilege and it’s not worth an impeachment—although of course a president can be impeached for just about any reason if the political winds happen to blow that way.

There’s so much more in this story—and so much that’s not yet known—that I have turned to my usual legal go-to people, lawyers I have seen over time, in many situations, as the most non-partisan and fair of all. One is libertarian Jonathan Turley, whose take on this mostly involves Cohen, and sees him as bait to lure Trump into some sort of misstep in reaction:

…[W]e still are unclear as to whether Cohen was acting for himself or his client or his shell company in paying off adult film star Stormy Daniels just days before the election.

Cohen signed the now-infamous nondisclosure agreement with Daniels on behalf of “EC LLC,” which is basically himself. He allegedly never conferred with Trump or got his consent for paying $130,000 in hush money. Moreover, Cohen has talked about securing $20 million in penalties from Daniels for himself, not for Trump.

Even when a valid, clear attorney-client relationship exists, that privilege can be set aside in cases of crime or fraud…

The president could ultimately pardon Cohen, while the special counsel could give him a deal. Some at the Justice Department may be counting on Trump’s aggressive tendencies to do the rest. In running to Cohen’s rescue, the president could easily find himself the prize rather than the predator in this conflict.

That seems to take as a given that Trump is the quarry, but doesn’t really address the question of whether this is a proper behavior for a special prosecutor appointed to investigate another matter entirely: to use other courts (in this case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York) to launch an iffy prosecution in order to pressure a president into a reactive misstep, and to violate the confidentiality of his communications with his own attorney along the way.

Let’s look at liberal-but-usually-fair lawyer Allan Dershowitz; who said that the silence of the ACLU on this—which “would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down” if it happened to Hillary Clinton, but is instead issuing forth a “deafening silence”—is “appalling.”

Note also that the article I just linked puts forth an idea common to most writers on the subject of the Cohen raid, which is the assumption that it was Trump appointee Geoffrey Berman, Acting Southern District U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, who approved the warrant being sent to the judge for the ruling. The idea that a Trump appointee approved this was used as justification for the idea that it must have involved something very serious and egregious, with lots of probable cause.

But it turns out that Berman had already recused himself, and we don’t know why. What we do know is that he had nothing to do with this.

There is also a discussion between Mark Levin and Andrew C. McCarthy on the Cohen raid (McCarthy is usually especially good on the law), which you can listen to here. The reason I’m not commenting on that is that it’s long and I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet myself, so I don’t know what McCarthy and Levin say. I may weigh in on that later, but I wanted to get this post up ASAP. So this is my quick take on the whole thing so far.

[ADDENDUM: This is also part of what I mean by “broader context”—the incredible double standard of the law. One of the strongest foundations of our legal system is that justice should be blind, which means (among other things) that it should not be differentially applied to members and/or leaders of different parties.

And yet:

Trump voters and even fair-minded middle-of-the-roaders consider the crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and wonder at the double standard. She and her team smashed phones and computers to bits after the evidence therein was subpoenaed. Oops. Hillary Clinton and her chief minion Cheryl Mills claimed attorney-client privilege when Mills, herself, was under investigation for obstruction. Did Hillary answer any of the FBI’s questions? We don’t know as they didn’t record the session. Oops. And then, classified emails showed up on Hillary’s assistant’s husband’s computer who is in prison for pornographic interaction with a minor online. Has the Clinton Foundation or Huma Abedin’s home or Hillary’s bathroom been no-knock raided yet?

No.

And then there’s the business of how this Russia investigation started: opposition research that turned out to be specious was used as evidence to wire-tap a Trump associate who had ticked off the number two at the FBI, Andrew McCabe. So the FISA system was used to harm political opposition ”” the leadership of the FBI, DOJ, and the FISA court were used as a way of “insurance” against Trump. And, boy, has it worked! The investigation prompted by a butt-hurt James Comey based on made-up evidence based on illegal leaks by Comey to the press now leads to scooping up all communications between Donald Trump and his attorney to be revealed to FBI investigators. Sounds fair!

Stipulate to the fact that Michael Cohen made some illegal payment to Stormy Daniels and it somehow entangles the President and the President is pressured to resign or face impeachment, what is this doing to the body politic?

Very Righteous Republicans claim that the moral high road demands justice or else justice is mocked. Really? This whole dog and pony show doesn’t seem like it’s mocking justice? When all of America knows, even the most delusional Democrat, that no Democrat would be subjected to this circus, justice is a joke. (The inevitable mocking response by Republicans keen on calling out hypocrisy doesn’t change the warped justice: “But Hillary!” Two sets of rules is not justice.)

There is no winning here. The cheerleaders for the investigation pull, pull, pull at the ever finer thread holding the states united. They seem to have no idea what fearsome forces they play with. Americans rightly see this fiasco as the intent to undo an election that nearly everyone “important” finds revolting.]

When do you know you’re old enough to die?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the headline for this eyecatching article in the Guardian.

At any rate, it certainly caught my eye.

I initially assumed it might be about assisted or permitted suicide, and whether and when a minor could be allowed to make that decision.

But it’s not about that at all; it’s about older people (such as journlaist Barbara Ehrenreich, who seems to have written a book on the subject) who have decided to forego a lot of preventive medical testing and to eat the occasional pat of butter:

Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.

While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.

This is news? This is something to write an entire book about??

Ehrenreich seems to have concluded that preventive medical testing isn’t all that cost-effective, particularly as one gets older. This is hardly a revolutionary thought. As for butter—well, there are plenty of people touting a judicious amount of butter, and I remember reading at least three decades ago that it was probably better for you than margarine.

Nor is this advice just for those in their seventies (as Ehrenreich is) and beyond. The youngish and middle-aged could certainly stand to lighten up a bit, too. I recall reading a book about this subject many decades ago, as well, and remembered its title as being Worried Sick. But when I looked it up just now, I found to my surprise that it was one of many with that title that have been published since, all on the same subject. The one I originally read was published in 1988 and called Worried Sick: Our Troubled Quest For Wellness.

No one is getting out of here alive. But we all want to stay alive and healthy and functioning well as long as possible. I’ve known a number of very elderly people who have said that if they get diagnosed with a fatal illness they will reject treatment, but when diagnosed with such (at the ripe old age of 90, for example), and even with other health problems dogging them, still opted for treatment and a longer life.

I contend that no one knows how he/she is going to react till faced with the situation, and we all have to decide how to approach the entire subject of testing and worrying and diet and exercise and all the rest. There are no guarantees; we try to do the best we can, balancing prudence with pleasure.

Facebook’s war on the “unsafe” Diamond and Silk

The New Neo Posted on by

You may remember Diamond and Silk. They started out on YouTube when Trump was just a candidate, and became a sensation for their humor, their attitude, and the fact that they were two black women who supported Trump.

Then they got a gig on Fox, and continued doing what they do. Here’s a very short example:

Being savvy marketers (unlike neo-neocon), they have a Facebook page. But guess what? Facebook has decided they are “unsafe to the community” (I assume that’s the Facebook community, but maybe they mean the community at large).

Yes, unsafe.

Here’s Diamond and Silk’s description of Facebook’s move:

“Finally after several emails, chats, phone calls, appeals, beating around the bush, lies, and giving us the run around, Facebook gave us another bogus reason why Millions of people who have liked and/or followed our page no longer receives notification and why our page, post and video reach was reduced by a very large percentage.

Here is the reply from Facebook. Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 3:40 PM: “The Policy team has came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.”

And here’s a video of Diamond and Silk from Fox, talking about what happened to them:

Facebook is a business, but it seems to be extending the philosophy of the anti-free-speech movement on so many campuses—that we are so fragile we must be protected against speech we don’t like (i.e. speech the left doesn’t like)—to the business world. They are so big I guess they think they won’t suffer from these kinds of moves, or that any possible hit they might take will be small and practically meaningless to them.

Don’t carry a knife in Great Britain

The New Neo Posted on by

When you do away with guns, you apparently get more knives. It stands to reason.

And you know what? You apparently get guns, too:

The increase in London homicides has been so profound that for the first time in recorded history the UK capitol’s murder rate has surpassed New York City’s…

In January, the UK’s Office for National Statistics published the statistical bulletin, “Crime in England and Wales: year ending September 2017.”…

The report stated that there had been a 20 percent increase in offenses involving firearms from October 2016 through September 2017 over the same period a year earlier. This included a 36 percent increase in offenses involving shotguns and a 20 percent increase in offenses involving handguns. Handguns are prohibited in the UK outside of Northern Ireland.

Most of this has occurred in London. And knife attacks have increased, with the following reaction from authorities and activists:

Having stripped the law-abiding of the most useful means of self-defense, activists and government officials now busy themselves with knife control. Anti-knife activists from the Save a Life ”“ Surrender Your Knife campaign provide “knife banks” where owners can relinquish their blades anonymously. Having collected a reported 100,000 knives so far, which they used to create an anti-knife sculpture, knife control activists recently met with Home Office officials to coordinate a nationwide campaign to collect 1 million blades.

The UK already prohibits most knife sales to those under 18, bans a wide array of knives and swords outright, and prohibits subjects from carrying any knife other than a 3-inch or shorter non-locking folding knife “without good reason.”

And this is not from the Onion:

…a March 16 sweep [of refuse and shrubbery] by officers near London’s Regents Park uncovered a pair of plyers, two screwdrivers, scissors, and a file, which the department assured the public were “safely disposed [of] and taken off the streets.” With the help of local students, last October police in London’s Telegraph Hill were able to protect residents from a pair of scissors, something the department referred to as a “potential weapon.” A month earlier, a “weapon sweep” in Barnsbury prevented a gardening tool from “end[ing] up in the wrong hands.”

This is more than disarming the public; it’s detooling the public. And it’s doomed to failure. You might say “knives and screwdrivers don’t kill people; people do.” And if people are determined to kill and threaten and harm, they will find a way. People are quite ingenious, especially when angry.

And if people are not allowed to defend themselves, only the “bad guys” will have weapons—or will make weapons out of common objects found every day in your home. At least, they used to be found in your home.

Most articles about this development have focused on the London Mayor’s tweet:

But this is part of a much bigger picture, which has been ongoing (as the link he provides in the above tweet shows). As Guy Benson writes at Townhall:

There is never a reason to carry a knife? What about to defend yourself against the criminals murdering people in London? Or is self-defense now officially becoming a criminal offense in Great Britain?

Well, yes.

[NOTE: You may be surprised to learn that in the US, where knife laws are passed on a state-by-state basis, there are some states that have fairly Draconian laws against carrying certain kinds of knives. I haven’t done a country-wide search on this, but my impression is that none come close to the extent of the ban in the UK, and I’ve never heard of drives to surrender knives or to find them in park shrubbery. Most of the US laws concentrate on switchblades and ban any carrying of knives by minors on school property.

For example, here are the laws in New York, and here’s Ohio and Mississippi. As you might expect, Texas laws are far less restrictive.]

What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity

The New Neo Posted on by

No, not what it taught me.

What it taught Karin Jones.

The essay is just another sad commentary on modern life by a woman who seems to have little sense of morality. Or maybe what she lacks is spirituality. Or maybe responsibility, insight, conscience—a host of things that all boil down to she just did what she wanted without remorse, and one of the things she wanted was emotionally uninvolved sex with a lot of married men.

So married men who didn’t want divorces were her partners of choice, when she might have tried unmarried men instead (she said there were plenty of unmarried candidates offering themselves, but there was the risk of emotional involvement with them, so the married seemed safer).

So, what did sleeping with married men teach Jones about infidelity? Not much, apparently, although her essay appeared in the NY Times with that promising title. She did learn something about a subset of men: those who had wives who didn’t want sex and yet the husbands didn’t want to leave them. What percentage of men having affairs fall into that group, and purposely choose (as her sexual partners did) to have sex with a woman who attached no strings except the requirement to not have an emotional connection?

Even with this subset of men (however large or small it may be), I still don’t know what Karin Jones learned that wasn’t already obvious. That there are some men who aren’t having sex with their wives and yet won’t leave them? And that most of these men didn’t want to ask their wives’ permission to have an affair? Because that’s the gist of what Jones seems to be saying she learned. As I said, not much.