"If I have seen farther than others, it's because I'm knee-deep in dwarves."
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution
The interview generated responses from Randall Parker, Chicago Boyz, Steve Sailer, another from Steve Sailer, The Neutralist, Susan, The Daily Burkeman1, and GNXP.
What Education Crisis? Not Online
I Still Like Ike Not Online
Dynamics of Adaptive Introgression from Archaic to Modern Humans (pdf)
An Evolutionary Look at Human Homosexuality
In our genes (pdf)
Genetic Diversity and Genetic Burden in Humans (pdf)
Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (pdf)
Infectious causation of disease: an evolutionary perspective. (Pubmed)
Genes, germs, and schizophrenia: an evolutionary perspective.(Pubmed)
What Are You Optimistic About?
The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA
Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes
There are 47 ways in which culture accelerates rather than retards evolution. I keep thinking that this is all obvious, but clearly the word 'obvious' has no meaning.
"This is All Horseshit." (Pre-Iraq War. October 14th, 2002)
Come on, you take that seriously? By that argument China is harboring anti-American terrorists right now. This is all horsehit. As far as I can tell, exactly nothing new has happened in Iraq concerning nukes. Most likely they are getting steadily farther away from having a nuclear weapon.. Look, back in 1990, they surprised people with their calutrons. No normal country would have made such an effort, because calutrons - mass spectrometers - are an incredibly inefficient way of making a nuclear weapon. We know just how inefficient they are, because E. O Lawrence conned the government into blowing about a quarter of the Manhattan Project budget on a similar effort. Concentrating enough U-235 for one small fission bomb cost hundreds of millions of 1944 dollars. Probably the Japanese could have constructed new cities for less money than this approach took to blow them up. By far the cheaper way is to enrich the uranium just enough to run a reactor and then breed plutonium. The Iraqis wanted U-235, probably because it is much easier to make a device with U-235 than with plutonium. You don't have to use implosion and you don't even have to test a gun-type bomb - we didn't test the Hiroshima bomb. . I would guess that they realized their limitations - they're not exactly overflowing with good physicists and engineers - and chose an approach that they could actually have made work. Implosion is not so easy to make work. India only got their implosion bomb to work on the seventh try, back in 1974, and they have a _hell_ of a lot more technical talent than Iraq.
....Almost all the oil sales ( other than truck smuggling) go through the UN. ^8% of that revenue is available for buying _approved_ imports. Mainly food and other hings that we approve of. The Us has a veto on such purchases. The total amount available for those approved purchases was something like 7 billion last year. Saddam is getting under-the-table payments of something like 20 cents a barrel from some or for all I know all of the buyers: but how much cash is that? we're talking something like 1 or 2 %" no more than 100 million a year. Sheesh. Probably the truck smuggling accounts for more. Hmm.. That might be as much as a billion. Not much cash to run a government. . It's a little hard to for me to see how he manages to keep the show on the road at all.
There are now a number of talkative idiots saying that Bush has made a mess of Iraq - Volokh, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, George Will, etc I wonder if that's really true - it assumes that it could have gone some other way and I doubt that . There are certainly some mistakes that we can't help making. We had to use the Army we had, not some imaginary Army full of people who dream in Arabic and know Iraq like the back of their hand.
I compare this to someone who has had a bad sexual experience with a porcupine and is now trying to decide just where he went wrong. Should he have used Brylcreem on the quills? Should he have sent flowers? Did he ' come on too strong'?
"I don't think that Bush has been noble at all."
I don't think that Bush has been noble at all. If I decide to build a dam to control flooding and further irrigation, that's good intent. But If I then don't bother to do the standard preparations, if I don't bother to check for old mines and faults, if I don't bother to grout the ones I'm told about, If I don't bother to use standard-grand concrete, if I don't bother to do a serious engineering analysis, if I don't bother to check to see if it will hold up to a hundred-year flood or earthquake - that's negligence. If I have plenty of people working for me who are experts in all those things, and I ignore what they have to say, that's negligence.
Saying you mean well is cheap. If you don't do the spadework, if you don't bother to exercise current best practice in determining the practicality and feasilbility of of your project, you are morally responsible for every bit of resulting trouble.
There is overwhelming evidence that Bush and his team never practiced anything approaching due diligence concerning Iraq . Neither did Congress. As far as I can tell, _I_ put more effort into understanding the situation and the likely course of events than Bush and his entire Cabinet. I would guess that sensible Americans put more effort - and more serious effort - into buying a new car.
"Someone who hasn't even moved up to phlogiston yet."
There were no chemical weapons in Jordan. I checked. Now that we've got that out of the way, it gets a little more difficult.
You see, it's hard to talk thermodynamics to someone who believes that all matter is made up of earth, air, fire and water - someone who hasn't even moved up to phlogiston yet. This is just as much fun as talking to your old-style ideological communist or Freudian, whose heads are crammed with ideological constructs that have no connection to reality at all. (No, Virginia, there is no such thing as the Oedipus complex, penis envy, or the final withering away of the state).
There is no such thing as islamofascism. Almost every Arab government is a boring bureaucratic despotism. They hardly have any ideology at all nowadays, other than the people on top staying on top. Most are looser than, say, Burma or Vietnam. Some are reasonably comfortable if you stay out of politics and don't expect an efficient sewer system ( true of Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco). Bin Laden is something different - but only a tiny fraction of the Arab world has anything to do with him.
"I shouldn't have to explain how stupid this is."
I want my government not to care - because caring enough to get involved, paying pinheads like Kilcullen to come up with fresh nonsense, subsidizing one warlord or another, using Special Forces, for all I know regular Army and Marines - is pointless, expensive, and counterproductive. For one thing. there's not much of a threat. Sometimes getting involved in local struggles made sense in the Cold War (and often it didn't - you want a few tens of embarrassing, expensive, and bloody examples?) - but at least then there was a real enemy, one with strategic power and ambition. Islamic terrorism isn't exactly in the same ballpark - at least thousands of times weaker. More than that, it is impossible for the United States Government to cleverly navigate the political currents of any third-world rathole, because the decisionmakers don't know anything about such questions and can't be made to know.
I figured that when Rich Lowry wrote a "We're Winning" column, defeat was certain. He's never right about anything: today's National Review is his monument. There was a lull after the Iraqi elections, now apparently ended: a number of stupid people proclaimed this lull as the ' tipping point', but it's more likely the ' tupping point'. That lull is over: the military sources who were sounding optimistic three weeks ago no longer are.
Copyright 2007. Email the webmaster at world.of.greg.cochran@gmail.com