Liberty Swept Up In Playoff Excitement

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Lynchburg, VA -

The Liberty University Football Team is still alive in the FCS Playoffs.

Students are getting swept up in the excitement, after the Flames came from behind to beat JMU on Saturday, 26-21.

With many of the students just now returning to school from Thanksgiving break, the surrounding community is now catching playoff fever, as Liberty continues towards the championship, experiencing something they've never experienced before; Playoff football in December!

Saturday's win was Liberty's first ever playoff win for the football team. Head coach Turner Gill and the players thanked the student body during morning convocation for their faithful support.

LU Sophomore David Harper says the buzz on campus for Saturday's game is already ramped up to a new level, saying "Everybody's so pumped up for the game, just because it's really awesome for everybody to be there and supporting the team. Everybody, like, yelling out for LU, it's pretty awesome!"

Liberty got great fan support in Harrisonburg, and they're looking to take away that home field advantage again this weekend, as the Flames travel to Philadelphia to face Villanova.

Student tickets are now on sale.

In addition, Liberty says they are working on plans for buses to take the 6 hour drive for Saturday's big game.

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Liberty Swept Up In Playoff Excitement

Andrew Dittmer: Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt on How Private Equity Really Works

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Yves here. Naked Capitalism contributor Andrew Dittmer, perhaps best known for his series on libertarianism (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and his responses to reader comments) has returned from his overlong hiatus to interview the authors of the highly respected new book, Private Equity at Work.

Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt have produced a comprehensive, meticulously researched, scrupulously fairminded, and therefore even more devastating assessment of how the private equity industry operates, including its deal and tax structuring methods, its impact on employment, and whether its returns are all they are purported to be. Their work was reviewed in the New York Review of Books; we also discussed it in this post.

Earlier this year, Andrew spoke with Appelbaum and Batt, and the first part of their discussion covers the problematic relationship between private equity funds (general partners) and their investors (limited partners) and how private equity affects other businesses.

In some cases, Appelbaum and Batt bending over backwards to be evenhanded. For instance, they attribute the explosion in CEO pay not to the leveraged buyouts industry (private equity before it was rebranded in the 1990s) but to an article by Michael Jensen in the Harvard Business Review that argued for paying CEOs like entrepreneurs. While narrowly true that the Jensen article was the proximate cause of the shift in big corporate pay models, having lived through the 1980s and the way that LBOs captured the attention of the business press, it is hard to imagine Jensens thesis being taken seriously in the absence of the LBO boom. The maximize shareholder value theory of corporate governance was first presented in a Milton Friedman New York Times op-ed in 1970 and had not gotten traction with the mainstream. It was the wave of takeovers of overly-diversified conglomerates in the 1980s and the easy profits garnered by breaking them up and selling off the pieces that seemed to prove the idea that too many CEOs didnt have the right incentives to run their businesses well (and in fact, its also true that the business press of the 1970s decried American management as hidebound and much less good at working with labor than the Japanese or Germans). But as weve seen since then, equity-linked pay has produced rampant short-termism and facilitated looting by executives. Even if the old pay model was problematic, its replacement has performed even worse, save for the CEOs themselves.

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic as well as teaching undergraduates. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience

Interactions of General Partners (GPs) with Limited Partners (LPs)

Eileen Appelbaum: Rose and I did a briefing at the AFL for the investment group. We had investment people from both union confederations who are concerned about the fact pension funds are putting so much money into private equity. They told us that they had never been able to see a limited partner agreement until Yves Smith published them. The pension fund people are so afraid of losing the opportunity to invest in PE. Some general partner could cut them off for having shared the limited partner agreement. Unbelievable.

Andrew Dittmer: In general, LPs seem to have a pretty submissive attitude toward GPs. Where do you think this attitude comes from?

Rosemary Batt: One cause is the difference in information and power. Many pension funds dont have the resources to hire managers who are sophisticated in their knowledge of private equity firms. They dont have the resources to do due diligence to the extent they would like to, so they need to rely on the PE fund, essentially deferring to them in what they say.

Eileen Appelbaum: I think that there is a reluctance to question this information or to share it with other knowledgeable people they are afraid that if they do, they will not be allowed to invest in the fund because the general partners will turn them away.

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Andrew Dittmer: Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt on How Private Equity Really Works

Rand Paul just wrecked his 16 campaign: Watch his awful Eric Garner answer

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Journalists and comedians want an entertaining 2016 presidential race, and Im sympathetic. I know people are going to prop up some folks I cant get behind, but its all fair. Libertarian minded liberals will say nice things about Sen. Rand Paul, and so might independent minded folks like MSNBCs Chris Matthews.

And most days, I think thats great. Rand Paul would be an interesting major candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries. I like some of what he says about criminal justice reform. Im glad he wants to reach out to, rather than disenfranchise, African Americans. Hes not the worst potential GOP candidate.

But Pauls response to Chris Matthews Wednesday about the Eric Garner tragedy shows that, for all his lovely words about African Americans and criminal justice excess, hes a standard-issue libertarian whose top issue will always be taxes. Hell always be an anti-tax libertarian first and foremost, before hes a civil rights libertarian.

Appearing on MSNBCs Hardball shortly after a Staten Island grand jury declined to prosecute the cop who choked Eric Garner to death, on suspicion that Garner was selling loose cigarettes, Paul shamed himself, badly:

Well you know I think its hard not to watch that video of him saying I cant breathe, I cant breathe and not be horrified by it. But I think theres something bigger than the individual circumstances. Obviously, the individual circumstances are important. But I think it is also important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes so that driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive. But then some politician also had to direct the police to say, hey we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette. And for someone to die over breaking that law, there really is no excuse for it. But I do blame the politicians. We put our police in a difficult situation with bad laws.

Watch it here:

There is so so much wrong with Pauls answer on Garner. Its a huge part of why he will never be president. What kind of callousness is required to say the bigger issue in Garners death isnt excessive police use of force, or police practice toward African Americans generally, buttaxes? What kind of heart do you have to have to use the Eric Garner tragedy to rail against cigarette taxes?

Beyond that, we dont even know for sure that Garner was selling loose cigarettes at the time he was taken into custody and killed. Also: a lot of folks who sell loose cigarettes buy them cheap, and sell them for more than they paid but also pay taxes on them. Its not always a tax dodge. So its not even clear if Paul is right about the tax issue.

But also, even when its a tax dodge: Its really ludicrous to blame cigarette taxes for Eric Garners killing. Try harder, righties. Pauls lame dodge was everywhere within minutes of the grand jurys sad decision.

Im not sure I can think of a case of a cop shooting anyone over selling something without charging/paying taxes, ever, in my lifetime. On the other hand, there is a very real issue of police using excessive force against African Americans cops are 21 times more likely to shoot a black suspect than a white one, and we have the real-life examples of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford and Michael Brown, just counting back to August.

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Rand Paul just wrecked his 16 campaign: Watch his awful Eric Garner answer

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The African Genome Variation Project shapes medical genetics in Africa

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We examined highly differentiated SNPs between European and African populations, as well as among African populations to gain insights into loci that may have undergone selection in response to local adaptive forces (Supplementary Methods). To account for confounding due to Eurasian admixture, we also conducted analyses after masking Eurasian ancestry (Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Note 6).

On examining locus-specific EuropeAfrica differentiation, enrichment of loci known to be under positive selection was observed among the most differentiated sites (P = 1.41031). Furthermore, there was statistically significant enrichment for gene variants among these, indicating that this differentiation is unlikely to have arisen purely from random drift (P = 0.0002). Additionally, we found no evidence for background selection as the primary driver of differentiation among these loci (Supplementary Note 7).

In addition to genes known to be under positive selection (for example, SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and OCA219, 20, LARGE21 and CYP3A4/5) (Supplementary Fig. 3), we found evidence of differentiation in novel gene regions, including one implicated in malaria (for chemokine receptor 1, CR1) (Extended Data Fig. 8). CR1 carries the Knops blood group antigens and has previously been implicated in malaria susceptibility22 and severity23, with evidence suggesting positive selection in malaria-endemic regions24 (Extended Data Fig. 8). We also identified highly differentiated variants within genes involved in osmoregulation (ATP1A1 and AQP2) (Extended Data Fig. 8). Deregulation of AQP2 expression and loss-of-function mutations in ATP1A1 have been associated with essential and secondary hypertension, respectively25, 26. Climatic adaptive changes in these gene regions could potentially provide a biological basis for the high burden of hypertension and differences in salt sensitivity observed in SSA27.

In contrast, overall differentiation among African populations was modest (maximum masked FST = 0.19) (Supplementary Fig. 4) and only 56/1,237 sites remained in the tail distribution after masking (Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Table 6). This suggests that a large proportion of differentiation observed among African populations could be due to Eurasian admixture, rather than adaptation to selective forces (Supplementary Note 6). Genes known to be under selection were notably enriched among the most differentiated loci after masking of Eurasian ancestry (P = 2.31016). Among the 56 loci robust to Eurasian ancestry masking (Supplementary Table 6), we identified several loci known to be under selection (Extended Data Fig. 8), including a highly differentiated variant (rs1378940) in the CSK gene region implicated in hypertension in genome-wide association studies (GWAS)28. The major allele of rs1378940 among Africans was in complete linkage disequilibrium with the risk allele of the GWAS SNP rs1378942 (ref. 29), with the frequency of this allele highly correlated with latitude (r = 0.67), providing support for local adaptation in response to temperature as a possible mechanism for hypertension (Supplementary Fig. 5)30, 31.

Comparing populations residing in endemic and non-endemic infectious disease regions (Supplementary Methods), we identified several loci associated with infectious disease susceptibility and severity. As well as the known sickle-cell locus related to malaria, this approach identified additional signals for genes potentially under selection, including the PKLR region32, RUNX333, the haptoglobin locus, CD16334, IL1035, 36, CFH, and the CD28-ICOS-CLTA4 locus (Supplementary Table 7 and Extended Data Fig. 8)37. Similar comparisons for Lassa fever identified the known LARGE gene, as well as candidates associated with viral entry and immune response, including in the Histocompatibility Leukocyte Antigen region, DC-SIGN/DC-SIGNR38 (also known as CD209/CLEC4M), RNASEL, CXCR6, IFIH139 and OAS2/3 regions (Supplementary Table 7). For trypanosomiasis, we identified APOL140, as well as several loci implicated in immune response and binding to trypanosoma, including FAS, FASLG41, 42, IL23R43, SIGLEC6 and SIGLEC12 (Supplementary Table 7)44. For trachoma, we identified signals in ABCA1 and CXCR6, which may be important for the growth of the parasite and host immune response, respectively (Supplementary Table 7)45, 46.

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The African Genome Variation Project shapes medical genetics in Africa