Big-headed babies are brightest

Phrenology is real. Big heads correlate with big brains which correlate with high IQ.

People with big heads typically don’t run fast because their body shape must change to support their big heads, so their hips get wider and then their legs angle in and it is not as efficient for running.

That’s why cornerbacks and other players at speed positions don’t tend to be as bright as quarterbacks and offensive linemen.

REPORT: The size of babies’ heads at birth is strongly linked to their future success, with larger head circumferences and brain volume associated with higher intelligence, scientists have found.

The finding is among the first to emerge from data gathered by UK Biobank, in which 500,000 Britons are being studied over the long term to discover the links between their genes, their physical and mental health and their path through life.

A key target for the research is unravelling the complex links between brain function and DNA — one of neuroscience’s great challenges because so many genes are involved.

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Why Carl Schmitt Became A Nazi

From Reinhard Mehring’s Carl Schmitt: A Biography:

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Wikipedia.

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I Wonder Where The Washington Post Stands On Donald Trump?

From this afternoon:

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Constitutional Theory

From page 191 of Reinhard Mehring’s Carl Schmitt: A Biography:

Schmitt defines the state as the ‘political unity’ of a people and interprets the ‘positive’ constitution as the ‘complete decision over the form and type of the political unity.’ Every people with a political will decides for itself about its ‘form of existence’ and gives itself a legal constitution. A people with a political will (to the self assertion of its political unity) Schmitt calls a ‘nation.’ A nation makes a ‘state.’ This concept of the constitution aims at the ‘homogeneous’ national state.

Pg. 218: “I also believe that the Jews ‘of the tribe’ are not liberal; but their concrete situation among the other peoples forces them nevertheless to declares the ideas of 1789 as sacrosanct. Any minority must insist on the sanctity of liberal principles.”

Pg. 224 reveals Carl Schmitt had an affection for the Luke Fords of the world: “Maybe some quick and flexible individuals will succeed in performing the trick of preserving their freedom between the many powerful groups, the way one jumps from one ice floe to the next.”

Pg. 396: “There is no doubt that Schmitt considered genocide and the Holocaust as crimes. But he would remain silent about it through his life.”

411: “Thus, it was personal outrage over Schmitt’s turn to National Socialism which led to his detainment. It was his Jewish acquaintances from the Weimar period who made sure that Schmitt was considered and treated as a perpetrator after 1945.”

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NYT: Hillary Clinton’s Supporters, Once Certain of Victory, Now Racked by Doubt

New York Times: Beside the olive display at Zabar’s, that iconic hub of lox and neurosis on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Linda Donohue was trying to talk herself down.

Surely the polls she tracked anxiously were not to be trusted, she said. Surely Donald J. Trump, the man with the garish golden tower across town, would not be allowed to reach the White House.

“We have to have more faith in the American public,” said Ms. Donohue, 61, a longtime New Yorker now living in Seattle.

A man behind her could not suppress a loud snort.

Then Cathi Anderson, who was shopping with Ms. Donahue, mentioned yet another distressing poll, this one from Ohio, which showed Mr. Trump ahead. Ms. Donohue nodded grimly.

Just in case her faith in the American electorate was misplaced, Ms. Donahue said, she had retained her Irish citizenship.

For both parties, every election can feel like the most vital of a lifetime, the one day standing between a still-proud nation and its imminent demise. Among liberals, there is an especially rich tradition of “bed-wetting,” as even some practitioners call it, at the faintest sign of shakiness from their candidate.

But as Hillary Clinton lurches toward Election Day, her supporters at times seem overwhelmed by a tsunami of unease, exacerbated by Mrs. Clinton’s bout of pneumonia and a slow-footed acknowledgment of the illness. They are confronting a question they had assumed, just a few weeks ago, they would not need to consider in a race against the most unpopular presidential nominee in modern times: Could Mrs. Clinton actually blow this?

“It’s like someone dropped ice water on the head of America,” Julie Gaines, the owner of Fishs Eddy, a home goods store in Manhattan, said of Mr. Trump’s increased odds. “Everyone sobered up. This could happen.”

The creeping dread has accelerated in recent days, reaching critical levels even by Democratic standards.

Mrs. Clinton became sick. Several polls tightened to the margin of panic, with Mr. Trump overtaking her in surveys in Ohio and Florida. And even as Democrats hoped on Friday that Mr. Trump’s latest gambit — seeking to distance himself from his long history of “birtherism” — would backfire, there is a fear that no scandal can sink him.

A cartoon in The New Yorker captured it best: A woman sits in her psychiatrist’s office, perspiring in distress. The doctor scribbles on a pad. “I’m giving you something for Hillary’s pneumonia,” the caption reads.

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