After all the acrimony and strife that surrounded the passage of the health care bill, it is nice to see that the insurance companies are doing their part to help galvanize the public to support further reform.

“Somewhere underneath all of this there is a root story that has to do with celibacy. The celibate status of its priests is basically the Catholic church’s last market advantage in the Christian religion racket, but human beings are not designed to be celibate and so problems naturally arise among the population of priests forced to live that terrible lifestyle. Just as it refuses to change its insane and criminal stance on birth control and condoms, the church refuses to change its horrifically cruel policy about priestly celibacy. That’s because it quite correctly perceives that should it begin to dispense with the irrational precepts of its belief system, it would lose its appeal as an ancient purveyor of magical-mystery bullshit and become just a bigger, better-financed, and infinitely more depressing version of a Tony Robbins self-help program.”
–I’ve been thinking its a good time for a well-thought-out essay on why the Catholic church should use the opportunity presented by the child molestation scandal to dissolve itself. Matt Taibbi has written one.

Hey, want to watch a bridge blow up and then have the video reverse so you can watch it un-blow up and then blow up again in slow motion? A local news crew filmed the demolition of the Union Road Bridge in St. Louis on Friday, and a film production major at nearby Webster University hooked it up so you can. It’s fun.

There was a fascinating piece in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal which centered on a recent experiment conducted by Science. A bunch of white ladies from around the world were shown a series of pictures of dude faces. The faces were of the same dude, but had been altered so that some were more masculine (wider jaw, bushier eyebrows, etc.) and some more feminine (fuller lips, rounder eyes, etc.). The women were asked to choose which face they found more attractive. The results?

After crunching the data-including the women’s facial preferences, their country of origin and that country’s national health index-the Face Lab researchers proved something remarkable. They could predict how masculine a woman likes her men based on her nation’s World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancy and the impact of communicable disease. In countries where poor health is particularly a threat to survival, women leaned toward “manlier” men. That is, they preferred their males to have shorter, broader faces and stronger eyebrows, cheekbones and jaw lines.

Masculinity, says Science, is a result of testosterone, which is a predictor of good health, but also makes a dude a real dick. In the countries where health is not as much of a concern, women have started to decide that it’s not worth putting up with some asshole who will cheat on you and drive drunk and smack you around and stick his hand in a trash compactor to pull out the bottle he will break over somebody’s head. You can take the pretty boy and have his babies and not have to worry that you’ll be doing all the housework. Science!

Anyway, how do American women like their mates? Turns out they prefer masculine men. They came in “fifth out of the 30 countries in the study, one of the highest. This is, after all, the home of James Dean and Clint Eastwood. And where does America stand in the health index ranking? Twentieth of 30 countries, one of the least healthy.”

So listen up, ladies: If you’re tired of dating assholes, you owe President Obama and the congressional Democrats a huge thank you. Ten years from now, when there is adequate health care for all, you will no longer have to saddle yourself with the real pricks out there. Unless we’re living in a world where violence and massive poverty are the order of the day. In which case all bets are off! All I know is, with my jutting chin, bird’s nest of brows, and pretty, pretty eyelashes, I’m going to do just fine either way. I hope you like guts!

[The other fascinating part of this story is how a photo of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger was subtly used to illustrate femininity. This is another shot in the war between the Times and the Journal and is perhaps an indication that the Journal is heading in the direction of many of Murdoch’s low-rent holdings (Fox News, the Post, etc.), where the deliberate tweaking of the competition is as important to the organization as the stories it delivers. But don’t focus on whether or not this is just the latest example of the Journal being taken further downmarket; focus on the healthy chicks like pretty dudes aspect! It’s the It’s Scienciest! story we’ve had in the It’s Science! category for some time.]

You didn’t realize basketball and March Madness were things that were still happening? Well, they in fact are, as is our ongoing Tournament Bracket Challenge Thing. Here’s the strange place in which we find ourselves.

Before this year’s tournament began, a lot of people said that this was the year of parity, when mid-majors (smaller schools with mediocre but not bad athletic programs) would have their best chance of winning — a product of the perennially really good teams being a little worse and the smaller market teams all being a little bit better. Despite that, a lot of us chose teams like Kansas, Kentucky, and Syracuse — schools with histories of being good at basketball to win it all (that’s why you chose them right?). But really, why?

Maybe we chose the favorites because it’s hard to imagine the little guy actually being THAT good. Because there’s no way that, even while we often hope for the underdog to prevail, he actually can. We have hope, but we’re not dummies, and we don’t want to be letdown, so we’re realistic in our expectations for what can actually happen in this relatively unfair world. So is that even hope, then — if what we believe is that there are chances for only small battles to be won by good, while in reality the real war rages on, barely affected by the little fires all around it.

Our selection of the favorites not only reflects our lack of true optimism, but also our nature to go against the grain of what intelligent data suggest we should do. Based on the track records of the teams, it was pretty clear that there was relative parity in the field. But even still, we used empirical evidence and the even more tried and true scientific process of listening to “our gut.” Even our most visceral reaction is to be scared and fearful of the unknown, to be so afraid that we avoid a path less taken. Even with data pointing to the contrary, we can’t be bring ourselves to believe.

What does all of this mean? Well, I think it’s pretty clear that we’re afraid. Afraid to believe that upsets can happen, that the common man can overthrow the powers that restrict and preclude him from dreaming, but more importantly we’re afraid of being disappointed and wrong. While we like to talk about being brave and believing in anything being possible, we know that that’s not actually true. That’s why we picked Kansas or Kentucky, because with the gun to our head, with our pride on the line, we knew that we couldn’t believe in hope, but in the past. Be safe! Toe the line. Otherwise we could be made to look like fools.

So congratulations to T. Keiser for being brave, for believing in hope and the human spirit and for topping the Awl Tournament Bracket Challenge. (Although he chose to Duke to win it all, so maybe we’re all screwed.)

Also, Mr. Hippity is the highest ranked Awl contributor, and actually was the previous week as well but that went unmentioned because I have reading comprehension issues.

The rudderless public outrage over executive compensation in the financial industry has clearly gone too far. It’s one thing to set limits on cash bonuses for top bankers who live and breathe the heady empyrean of financial risk-but it’s another thing altogether to challenge the one core security they know in this vale of tears. We speak, of course, of their right to dissolve their marriages and conquer fresh free markets of the heart. As Bloomberg correspondent Alexis Leondis notes, “divorce settlements for executives such as bankers who rely on bonus payouts are becoming harder to negotiate as some firms give employees less cash and more long-term incentive awards including restricted stock and deferred money.”

Leondis declined to indicate just who those clients were, no doubt solicitous for their pride when news of their plight became public and they’re promptly flooded with charitable contributions to preserve their East Hampton summer spreads and keep their wounded, uncomprehending children from joining the Exeter scholarship rolls.

Clearly one of the chief advantages of a standing pool of ready cash is its efficacy in buying off a disgruntled spouse. Eleanor Alter, a New York divorce attorney, explained that as a result of the industry-wide drift into stock and deferred compensation, many of her clients are forced to sell off second homes and-horrors!-take their kids out of private schools in order to meet the expenses involved in split-household child-rearing.

Is nothing sacred? After all, the shrinking bonus system not only reduced overall cash on hand -it distorts the basis for computing the level of future child support and alimony payouts. That’s because, as Alter says, the conventional big-ticket divorce settlement is based on a couple’s earnings over the past four years-but now the executive compensation set-up is so deeply in flux that “no one knows where it’s going to go.” Glenn Liebman, a Long Island-based CPA, almost audibly shudders at the prospect ahead: “Changes to compensation are creating a horror show when dealing with the other spouse’s budget and support package for the children.”

And it’s not like the stock market-the new de facto basis for most Wall Street settlements-is exactly the most stable predictor of earning power, either. So are the new diminished payouts causing more Wall Street players to keep their big swinging dicks zipped, and endure the quiet desperation of keeping up their loveless marriage franchises? Are we witnessing the senseless sacrifice of a generation of would-be Don Drapers?

Perish the thought. After all, additional compensation schemes that get worked out post-divorce aren’t necessarily covered in existing settlements-so for the ambitious, adultery-seeking executive on the go, this is actually a propitious season to go a union-sundering, Leondis reports. “This may be an advantageous time for financial executives to get divorced because there’s less money in cash compensation to go toward alimony or spousal support, according to Robert Stephan Cohen, a New York attorney.” Just do the math on the other end of the negotiating table: “Non-working spouses will get a smaller share of money through restricted or deferred compensation than they would have if their spouses were rewarded with cash payouts.”

So if you ditch a non-working spouse in artificially straitened time, you can pile up additional compensation sweeteners as you continue storming the citadels of finance-especially since financial firms still offer sizable cash bonuses for switching employers. And what are such machinations, after all, but the laws of elective affinity applied to the seductions and wooings involved in teasing your maximum reward from the fickle mistress known as the market? Indeed, if Wall Street were really on its game, it would heed the real lesson of the failed Lehman Brothers cult of executive fidelity, and tie additional performance deals to the negotiation of a partner-pinching divorce. After all, it’s all about the art of the deal-and in today’s oversight-infested Wall Street, no less than in your basic consciousness-raising seminar, the personal has become political.

Let the poor slobs in the lower orders contend with the far less forgiving math of splitting up on five-figure incomes. Let the sentimental guardians of the national safety net manage a child poverty rate that was nearing 20% even before the onset of the recession.

After all, another Bloomberg dispatch makes it plain that, compensation woes aside, another key indicator shows that Wall Street has stirred fully back to its accustomed way of life: Esmé E. Perez notes that, after a sluggish 2009, helicopter commutes from New Jersey to Wall Street are back in full swing-at a daily rate of $200 per passenger. Liberty Helicopters, which handles the Jersey trade, will resume regular weekday services in April after maintaining a skeleton schedule for most of the past year. Liberty marketing vice president Patrick Day says that the service took calls from 150 prospective clients when it launched a new ad campaign last month. This, too, should only help to further embolden members of Wall Street’s wandering-spouse class: helicopters, after all, not only permit you to survey one’s actual living conditions from a safe aerial remove-they are also form the backbone of any battle-tested system of emergency evacuation.

Chris Lehmann commutes to work on dog-back.

Tom Scocca: Now I am going to tell you about my dream.

Choire: Oh neat!

Tom: I was working in some sort of coffeehouse at one end of a table. One one side, to the left, was Alex Balk. On the other side, to the right, was some tiny hipster girl blogging for Gawker.

Tom: In the middle of the afternoon, someone came around to the girl with a scorecard and a menu, showing her how many Blogging Points she had accumulated that day and what candy she could buy off the rewards menu. She still also had to pay some money for the candy, besides cashing in her Denton points for it.

Tom: And they made sure this transaction was really obvious and protracted, because they were trying to antagonize Balk by letting him watch it.

Tom: So I flipped out and went into a raging jeremiad.

Tom: Like, “YOU THINK IT’S OK FOR YOU TO WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; YOU THINK IT’S FUNNY, YOU WORKING FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; YOU THINK IT’S FUNNY THAT IT BUGS THAT GUY THAT YOU WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; BUT IF YOU ARE FUCKING WORKING FOR FUCKING SKITTLES, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS GOING TO HAVE TO WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES! EVERYONE! IN THE WORLD! SKITTLES!”

Tom: I swear to you that is what I did dream.

Choire: Sad to say, I can believe it.

Tom: I did not know that my subconscious even knew who Alex Balk WAS.

This weekend Sarah Palin dismissed suggestions that her cries of “RELOAD” and a graphic “targeting” representatives who voted in favor of health care reform were in any ways an incitement to violence. “When we talk about fighting for our country, let’s clear the air right now about what it is that we’re talking about,” she said at a Tea Party rally in Nevada. “Don’t get sucked into the lame-stream media lies.” Then she took to her Facebook page to discuss March Madness.

To the teams that desire making it this far next year: Gear up! In the battle, set your sights on next season’s targets! From the shot across the bow — the first second’s tip-off — your leaders will be in the enemy’s crosshairs, so you must execute strong defensive tactics. You won’t win only playing defense, so get on offense! The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons — your Big Guns — to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win.

Focus on the goal and fight for it. If the gate is closed, go over the fence. If the fence is too high, pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, parachute in. If the other side tries to push back, your attitude should be “go for it.” Get in their faces and argue with them. (Sound familiar?!) Every possession is a battle; you’ll only win the war if you’ve picked your battles wisely. No matter how tough it gets, never retreat, instead RELOAD!

She’s clearly having fun here, and even if you make the case that using charged language like “reload” and imagery including gun sights is a deliberate attempt to at least imply, if not suggest, violence, you have to admit it: This is a brilliant new method of post-modern reverse-dog whistle parody that once again proves Sarah Palin knows exactly what she’s doing. Or not. The genius of the Sarah Palin method is that it works either way!

Earlier this month, I wrote about Erykah Badu’s performance of her new song “Window Seat” on the Jimmy Fallon show. In it, I noted that she was wearing an unorthodox outfit that revealed more of the shape of a woman’s body than we usually see on network television. (For the record, I’m very much pro the shape of Badu’s body; honestly, I like to see as much of it as I can.) As we learned over the weekend, we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.

In the video for “Window Seat,” which was released on Saturday, the wonderful singer walks through Dealey Plaza in her hometown of Dallas, right where president Kennedy was shot in 1963, and takes off all her clothes. It was filmed real fast, apparently, with no warning given to onlookers who might be forgiven for being a bit distracted themselves at the sight of a famous hometown girl, publicly starkers, as they say in England, on a Wednesday afternoon. It was St. Patrick’s day, actually, so most of them were probably good and drunk. Badu’s been writing about the experience on her twitter feed:

“I heard people yelling diff things @ me but i held my head up and kept moving. there were children there. i prayed they wouldnt b traumatized…” and “..didnt remember what kind of undies i wore that day so i chked 1st b4 removing pants. lol. i knew my intent was good. that thought made it ok.”

There’s lots of interesting things about the video: the radio broadcast of the moments before the Kennedy assassination, the stress evident on Badu’s face as she walks, the fact that she fed a parking meter when she set out. But my favorite is the guy in the red jacket and blue-striped that she passes early on. He seems to have recognized her-he stares, and then picks up her jacket and sandals and chases after her for a bit. Is he a colleague? A production assistant? Or just someone collecting souvenirs? Oh. And hip-hop gossip blogger Sandra Rose is already saying the whole thing was shot on green screen. Hmm. Doesn’t seem like that to me. But I guess we’ll have to wait for the Zapruder film to surface for frame-by-frame analysis. Whatever the case, it’s all pretty terrific.

The video was inspired by a similar one that Brooklyn indie-rock duo Matt and Kim made last year for their song “Lessons Learned.”

And here’s from the “secret shows” (not at all secret!) that Badu played this weekend.

The head of the Islamic Chechen secessionists, Dokka Umarov, hasn’t yet claimed responsibility for the two Moscow bombings today but that’s not stopping everyone from fingering his organization. Some recent history: “The last time the black widows struck outside their volatile North Caucasus homeland was in 2004. That was a bloody year for Russia. Black widows blew up two passenger planes that took off from Moscow airport, bombed the Moscow metro twice, and took part in the infamous siege of Beslan’s School Number One. Hundreds of innocent civilians, including children, lost their lives in the carnage. Last year, after a long pause, they began to strike again in the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region far from Moscow that includes Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. Their cause is the creation of an Islamist caliphate along Russia’s southern spur.”