“Meconium” is the term used to describe the bowel movements of infants in the womb. It turns out that there’s a correlation between meconium and autism. From Spectrum:

Walker’s team examined hospital records for more than 9.9 million children born in California between 1991 and 2008 to find those who had either meconium in the amniotic fluid or meconium aspiration syndrome. They found that 47,277 of these individuals have autism, using records from the California Department of Developmental Services, which provides services for people with the condition.

The researchers adjusted for factors associated with either premature meconium release or autism, such as maternal obesity, high blood pressure during pregnancy, late delivery and insufficient oxygen in the womb.

Altogether, children who had meconium-stained amniotic fluid or meconium aspiration syndrome were 16 percent more likely to have a diagnosis of autism than those without this exposure.

I don’t know what to make of this but it’s an interesting finding.

Looking at early days in the Trump presidency John Robb observes:

Based on these differences and the evidence of the first few weeks, we can expect this administration’s style of governance to operate very differently than the legacy cold war bureaucracy that ran our country since WW2.

The changes he sees are:

• Incremental change vs. Rapid change.
• Adherence to Ideology vs. Adherence to Common Sense.
• Serial vs. Parallel focus.

I can’t tell whether he’s onto something, over-analyzing, or just plain crazy but it’s certainly interesting.

Our European friends have now developed a sort of cottage industry in producing Donald Trump parody videos. The very funny Dutch video was mentioned in comments. Over at The Moderate Voice Dorian de Wind catalogs several more:

Last week, the Netherlands responded to Donald Trump’s ascent to power with a hilarious video introducing itself to Trump as — among other — the country with “the best tax evasion system God ever created” and poking fun at the new U.S. president, using Trump’s speaking style, words and mannerisms, frequently using Trump’s own words.

Not to be left behind, other European nations — six so far — have joined the Trump troll with equally funny, yet hard-hitting parody videos.

What makes the videos even more entertaining is how each country ribs the other countries, in addition to mocking Trump

If you’re curious, cruise on over to TMV for a look. So far the Swiss, Danish, Germans, Portuguese, Belgians, and Lithuanians have gotten into the act.

I think it’s healthy. As I’ve noted before it’s a great time to be a comic.

Hmm. Yesterday it was hagfish slime. Today it’s frog spit. The LA Times reports that it’s their saliva that enables frogs to catch bugs with their tongues:

Sticky frog saliva is a non-Newtonian fluid. That means it can behave as both a liquid and a solid.

[…]

A good example of a non-Newtonian fluid is the corn starch and water mixture known as oobleck or moon mud, said study leader Alexis Noel, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. If you jiggle it around in a cup, it flows like a liquid. But if you press down on it, it turns solid.

Frog saliva behaves in the opposite way. When the slobbery tongue smacks its prey, the saliva becomes more liquid and spreads into all the cracks and crevices of its prey.

As the frog retracts its tongue, the saliva thickens, making it harder for the prey to separate from the tongue. (Imagine trying to pull apart fingers stuck together with peanut butter, Noel said.)

Combine their stretchy tongues with their sticky spit and it explains how frogs can do what they do. Isn’t nature wonderful?

You can’t say you don’t get an education here at The Glittering Eye.

The best post I’ve read in a long time is this one at The Truth About Cars (hat tip: Instapundit). It’s about Audi’s Superbowl commercial for this year.

Here’s my question. Will this ad cause Audi’s sales to go up or down?

At Forbes Nathan Lewis makes a very good point. Trade works a lot more as David Ricardo said it did with a hard currency.

How can the present situation, which is damaging not just U. S. workers but economies all over the world due to the mercantilist policies of Germany and China, be moderated if not remediated? I think that one way would be to ban the sales of Treasuries to foreign governments or entities (like banks) owned by foreign governments but I’m open to other suggestions.

I want to highlight a passage from Jeffrey Snider’s most recent and characteristically opaque post at RealClearMarkets:

The combination of the history of the eurodollar futures market plus the 2011 transcripts provides us with the whole narrative, or at least enough of it to be meaningfully comprehensive. Thus, the scale of reversal has been total – first if the Fed would act, then whether it could act, and now, a decade later, if it ever can. And to that evolution the FOMC has decided that the problem was never money but Baby Boomers and a labor market filled with drug addicts and lazy Americans (I’m not kidding). Of course they would come to that conclusion because to admit the problem was money all along would be to admit they failed in every way possible. In one 2011 breath, they would talk about all those bank reserves as if the world was filled with dollars, but then in the very next describe all the ways in which the world clearly wasn’t. Thus, they had their eyes all the time on the problem but could never see it, certainly not in the way the eurodollar futures market finally did, and as a matter of experimentally established fact.

The emphasis is mine. It appears that the members of the Federal Open Market Committee are bitter clingers, too. Except that they’re clinging bitterly to the notion that neither the near-collapse of the financial system nor the subsequent phlegmatic recovery is their fault.

I agree with this statement of Fareed Zakaria’s from his most recent Washington Post column:

Most presidents begin their tenure by trying to reach out to their political opponents, signaling that they want to represent those who didn’t vote for them as well as those who did, and generally trying to bring the country together. Trump has made almost no such effort, simply asserting that the country was divided before he was elected and thus absolving himself of any responsibility for unifying it. In office, he has mercilessly attacked anyone who dares to disagree with him, whether senators, prime ministers or student protesters. It might be a good way to play to his base, but it’s a terrible way to lead the country.

both in fact and in spirit. But it’s so 20th century. We haven’t had a president in the 21st century who’s done that. Going forward will we be at daggers drawn? I believe that in that direction is civil war not just a greatly diminished press.

As Mickey Kaus recently tweeted, warning about the dangers of military coup is one thing. Advocating military coup is something very different.

For any celebrities, politicians, or other half-wits actually encouraging military coup, you might want to consider for whom our active duty soldiers voted in 2016.