Robert Wright, in the New York Times, seems to think that, as Mick Jagger was fond of singing, ‘Well, after all/it was you and me.’ This has been a beloved meme of the Blame America First crowd since the sixties. (Funny, you’d think that, if this country sucked as bad as all that, they’d go somewhere else. Sweden, say.)

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.

By this logic, leaving them alone would reduce terrorism. This is an idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it, to use Orwell’s phrase. What the left can’t see, because it would undercut their entire worldview, is that Islam is founded and predicated on terrorism against non-Muslims; it’s not just Methodism with prayer-rugs. The left cannot admit that it is possible for people to exist who don’t just want to get along. This is their blind-spot with respect to communism, and this is their blind-spot with respect to Islam. ‘None so blind as they who will not see.’

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It’s getting pretty bad when even the British notice.

Paul Graham examines Political Correctness.

The most extreme of the things you can’t say would be very shocking to most readers. If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them. So we should expect that someone who similarly violated our taboos would seem depraved to us.

The most entertaining thing about technically-oriented people is that they can blow through a social paradigm without hardly noticing it.

In fact, finding the outer limits is very, very hard. Popular controversialists just go for the low hanging fruit. To really solve the problem would take years of introspection. You have to untangle your ideas from the ideas of your time, and that’s so hard that few people in history have even come close. Isaac Newton, smart as he was, wasted years on theological controversies.

This in turn reveals a ‘default educated east coast belief’: that theology is a waste of time for a smart person like Isaac Newton. (Don’t get him started on Thomas Aquinas, I guess.)  In every century other than this one, most intelligent educated people would characterize that as the best use of his time – and brain.

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No mention of whether it comes with a dynamite belt among its fashion accessories.

Read it. And watch the video.

People do strange things in service to their religion. Some of these things look very odd to outsiders. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

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Hafiz Mohammed Saeed is neither in hiding nor in jail. The founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba is instead delivering a sermon to thousands of devoteees at the Jamia al-Qadsia mosque — one of the biggest in the city.

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A Rome bank has what it thinks is the solution: to make the jobs hereditary. Under a deal signed with unions this week, 76 employees of Banca di Credito Cooperativo di Roma (BCC di Roma) must take early retirement but they will get a choice: either take a payoff or leave your job to your son or daughter (or indeed any relative “up to the third degree”, which would allow the post to be left even to great-nieces and nephews).

Everything old is new again.

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Several years ago, while researching the extensive and confusing data on radical Islam in Pakistan, I read a number of articles by B. Raman and other experts on Indian national security. The wealth of information they presented about Pakistan’s devious maneuvers made me realize that Pakistan is one of the three epicenters of the Great Jihad, with the other two being Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In the heat of events during the fall of 2001 — when President Bush lauded Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan as a “friend of the United States” — it was easy to forget that the Taliban had been the creation of Pakistan’s security services, and were their preferred means of controlling Afghanistan.

Just another wonderful day in the neighborhood….

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It is a complicated story, involving a whole chunk of the Periodic Table, high secrecy, patent battles and conspiracy theory.

But it boils down to this – 97% of the specialist metals that are crucial to green technology are currently mined in China.

China is already limiting exports and has plans to limit them some more. As a result much of the hi-tech metals industry is also moving to China.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I’m pretty sure that no one in the government does.

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I recently asked readers for their “tricks of the trade,” and was amazed by the response. It seems every profession is rich with clever little occupational secrets.

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As if there were cats that weren’t weird.

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And lately it seems to work both ways. If you think carbon is dangerous (more on this later) but there’s no cause for concern over giving Kalid Shiekh Mohammed a civilian trial, you must possess some keen insight, perhaps some X-ray vision, that gives you wisdom beyond the three dimensions and the earthly domain.

If, on the other hand, you just call things as they are — taxes hurt the economy, if you execute the bad guy he won’t kill any more little kids, cities with magnanimous social programs have teeming masses of homeless because if I was homeless I’d head down there too, maybe kids have attention deficit problems because they aren’t getting their asses whipped anymore — then you’re more mundane. You have demonstrated no irony, therefore you haven’t demonstrated this keen extra-dimensional insight. Therefore you must not have it, therefore you must be something of a dimwit. And far more horrifyingly still, you’re a little bit on the boring side.

It’s not a drive toward left-wing politics; if it was, it would be far less dangerous because it would capture the fascination only of those who are enamored of left-wing politics. This phenomenon has a deep impact on people who don’t give a rat’s ass about politics. It’s a mistaken realization of what intellectual wherewithal really is. It is an excessive fascination with where above-average intelligence might take a thought, with an inadequate understanding of how exactly that works.

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A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge.

It’s not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One.

“A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,” wrote the authors. “All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.”

A hint from God not to eat foreign food. You Have Been Warned.

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The Episcopal Church has less than half the membership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But the former gets much more media coverage than the ELCA. But both are experiencing division under similar circumstances. Both churches have lost significant numbers of members in recent years, with congregations occasionally deciding to leave as a unit. And the problems in both churches deal with how the denomination interprets Scripture. The big fissures have been sparked by dramatic changes in church doctrine on sexuality.

This is why Real Christian Churches, where doctrine doesn’t change over time, have the advantage.

Steve Sailer is never afraid to dig where others fear to tread.

I’ve pointed out before that New York’s liberal media elite don’t want the public to discuss IQ, but they almost all get their four-year-olds’ IQs tested so they can win admission to fashionable private preschools. Now the New York toddler IQ testing madness has spread to New York public schools.

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Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

Well. There it is.

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A flying-car company which has struggled for 15 years to win acceptance for its radical gyrocopter/aeroplane technology may have finally broken through into the mainstream. It was announced this week that Carter Aviation technologies – aspiring designer of the CarterCopter Personal Air Vehicle – has partnered with successful military robot maker AAI.

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Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei’s corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century have been found again.

I’m sure that comes as a relief as much to you as it does to me.

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Not quite the flying car or jet pack we were promised, yet aspects of the future keep arriving.

Salon does a debunking. No, really.

Yet, like many people who acquire mega-celebrity, the vampire has developed an eating disorder. Read the books. Watch the movies. You’ll see vampires who manage nightclubs, build computer databases, work as private investigators, go to prep school, lobby Congress, chat with humans, live near humans, have sex with humans, and pine over humans, but the one thing you won’t see them do is suck the blood of humans.

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We have the technology.

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Of course she does.

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In October, we wrote about how, just as Rupert Murdoch and crew look to put up paywalls for online content, the operators of the London Evening Standard were going in the other direction and making their physical paper free. So, how’s that been working out? mowgs alerts us to the news that the paper has doubled its circulation in just a month. Not bad. But what’s more interesting is that it’s also slashed its distribution costs massively. It used to cost about 30p, and now it’s just 4p per paper.

Those media outlets who figure out the new business model will be with us yet, those that don’t are in the dumpster. It’s just that simple.

The most amusing aspect is that those media outlets that cling most tightly to espousing socialism in their editorial positions — and, increasingly, in their news sections — are the ones most desperately trying to find ways to charge their readers for stuff that their readers are just not willing to pay for. Perhaps in historical terms it will be a sad thing to see the New York Times and the Washington Post go the way of the New York Herald and the Washington Star, but I for one won’t be crying.

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To believe the truth is not the same thing as having a correct opinion – indeed the two have almost nothing to do with one another. And this is a great difficulty – for most of the things that we think of ourselves as believing – we in fact only hold as opinions. What a man believes, in the way the word is used in the New Testament, is not seen or heard in the syllogisms he is willing to confess, but rather in how he lives his life.

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It does seem to bring out the creativity in people.

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Military boffins in the US are now equipping a small fleet of armoured lorries with automatic defensive weapons which can detect incoming antitank rockets and shoot them down in mid-air before they strike, meanwhile retaliating upon the enemy gunmen with devastating firepower – all without human input.

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Stop the presses.

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Another reason why I don’t fly. Do not allow yourselves to be subject to the forces of fascism.

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You know that book “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus”? Well, here’s a prime example of that.

Now that’s comedy.

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The rot deepens…. I am prepared to defend the notion that just because one or even a hundred famous writers use a demonstrably incorrect construction doesn’t make it correct.

Check it out.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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In 1965 the two nations were equal in wealth. Four decades later, their standing was dramatically different. What accounts for the difference?

An interesting comparison.

The Other McCain is having fun.

Congratulations to this overnight Caucasian! He is now a man who can join the Klan. Send the word to Senator Bob Byrd.

Link is just for attribution; complete item is reproduced below–it’s short.

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”

“It was great, Dad.”

“Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked.

“Oh yeah,” said the son.

“So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father.

The son answered: “I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

“We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

“We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

“We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.”

Then his son added, “Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are.”

Read it.

I suspect that being tired means you have less energy to worry. But that’s just me.

Bear in mind that this is the New York Times so you really need to confirm this with another source.

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Pretty bad when so useless a legislator as Lindsey Grahamnesty can eat your lunch.

Obama ought to have known better than to depend on a Clinton administration retread like Holder.

The Other McCain doesn’t much like Rod Dreher.

I have to confess that I don’t have a lot of use for him, either. I put him in the same class as David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, and Malcolm Gladwell.

“To you, you’re a conservative; and to the media, you’re a conservative; but to a conservative are you a conservative?”

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“People would tell me, ‘How could a writer like you – that we like – like a fascist, an imperialist dog?’ ”

Gaiman, who started his career as a graphic novelist steeped in fantasy and science-fiction, commented: “They usually had not read any Kipling, and had been told not to like him by legions of right-minded people.”

If you stray an inch from the Party Line, they will throw you off the cliff, no matter who you are.

Megan McArdle takes a look at the personal finance evangelist.

On a fine summer day at the end of August, I paid $220 for front-row seats on the floor of a minor-league hockey rink in Detroit, just to hear Ramsey talk for five hours. The ostensible topic: getting your financial life in order. Afterward, my fiancé, who grew up in the Bible Belt, called me to ask what I’d thought.

“I think I just attended my first prayer meeting,” I told him.

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No, this isn’t about Senator Byrd. Fooled me too, at first.

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General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism.

You can have a genius IQ and still be an idiot, in the original Greek sense of the term.

Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively.

Michael Savage may be right that liberalism is a mental disorder.

The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong.

That certainly matches what you see in the newspapers.

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Just consider that detected early, the five year survival rate for breast cancer victims is in the neighborhood of 98%. Detected late, that rate falls to about 26% a decrease in survival of 72%. And that doesn’t begin to cover the additional suffering from the treatments and dislocation of families when diagnosis is delayed.

My first wife died of breast cancer, which she discovered through self-examination. She was 43 at the time. Under these guidelines, it would have been discovered too late for her to have even the slight chance that she did have. I am not a supporter of these guidelines.

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… I noted some of the uncanny parallels between George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover: Both were president during a time of economic crisis; both presided over vast expansions of government that helped cause the crisis or at least make it worse than it might have been otherwise; finally both were (inaccurately) portrayed by their political opponents as dogmatic free market advocates, when in fact both were highly statist. After leaving the presidency, Bush is unconsciously imitating Hoover in yet another way — by rhetorically supporting free markets and criticizing the even more interventionist policies of his Democratic successor (which in both cases built on the expansions of government initiated by the Republicans who preceded them).

The only good things I can say about George W Bush is that he wasn’t as bad as his dad and he was better than the alternative. Damning with faint praise? I’m good with that.

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There are advantage to universal standards. The most important is economies of scale–once you learn the standard, it applies everywhere. But the disadvantages are subtle and usually much greater than the advantages.

I don’t want standard of health care, one standard of what’s “best.” Everyone is different and what is best for me may not be best for you. More importantly, what is best is unknowable to a committee of experts. Not hard to know. Not difficult to discover. Unknowable. What age should a women have a mammogram is not a question that has an answer. There are many answers. One reason is that women are different. A more important reason is that our knowledge evolves. What is thought to be “best” (wait until 40) may turn out to be different (wait till 50). But even more importantly, when power is centralized, the very idea of “best” no longer applies. The incentives aren’t there. When there is one standard set by the political process, the experts’ incentives on whatever committee determines the universal standard are inevitably going to be politicized. So give me “inefficient” competition among standards. Let different standards vie for attention.

This is just a spontaneous observation in response to the apparent rampant historical ignorance about the holiday of Thanksgiving. There seems to be a general belief that Thanksgiving was a once-in-a-century lucky thought on the part of the Pilgrims that arose from their unique conditions.

NOPE.

Thanksgiving was a celebration of the traditional harvest festival, Martinmas, that had been going on in England since it became Christian. Being Dissenters, the Pilgrims wouldn’t have use such a ‘Popish’ term as the traditional one, but they would celebrate the feast nevertheless, just as modern atheists will wish you ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than the more offensive ‘Merry Christmas’ but they’ll still say something. Remember that this took place in 1621, prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by the English over a century later, and what they would consider November 11 (Martinmas) we would consider November 21, which is right around the current politically-determined date for Thanksgiving.

Just in case you were wondering.

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There’s a government program for that….

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Al Gore has made an enormous amount of money by pretending to know something about science. He is by no means the first such charlatan, but he must be one of the most successful.

It is a remarkable fact that Al Gore has had a significant influence on public policy relating to science when he is, in fact, utterly uneducated in scientific matters and is of very limited intelligence.

On the other hand, he’s gotten rich, so I guess the joke is on us.

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You’d almost think that the U.S. were an Arab country. (Hm. Well, sometimes it acts like one….)