The BBC reports that four Nigerian states are refusing to take part in a mass immunization drive against polio because “some Muslim clerics say the vaccine is a western plot to make women infertile.” Although “Muslim clerics” are reportedly at the root of this story, I don’t think that it is at all fair to […]

This David Goodhart two part essay in The Guardian (originally in Prospect Magazine) is now on the minds of many in the thinking class. I don’t have much to add, explaining why I didn’t post a link to Goodhart’s original essay…. Life is about constraints. Duh. Posted by razib at 06:03 PM

Decline Seen in Science Applications From Overseas. This isn’t that big a deal, a nation has a right to control who comes & goes, but it seems perverse that the current regime is succeeding in discouraging graduate students at the same time it is aiming for a modus vivendi with those who circumvent the process […]

You all look alike (whites & Hispanics) asserts a candid black female congress-person. To some extent she’s correct (especially Cubans). But this is a no-no since everyone has to go around and pretend that the man in the middle is the future of political “black” America. Remember, this man is an icon of African-American political […]

About a week ago I posted The gentle jihadist & other tales. In it, the old conundrum about the reality of liberal Islam surfaced again. I repeat over and over that there is issue of quantification-there are certainly liberal Muslims, just as there are out homosexual Muslims (to push the analogy a few orders of […]

Fox’s show Family Guy had a bizarro run from 1999 to circa 2002 (it was on “hiatus” so often it was hard to predict when it would resurface between “Anchorage Cops: Eskimo Hell” and “When Housewives Attack IV”). Well, it seems huge DVD sales have resulted in its resurrection. Posted by razib at 05:49 PM

Aziz on The Passion. I don’t think I’m going to watch, sounds too bloody. Update: Compare these two pictures: James Caviezel at the opening of High Crimes and a still from him in The Passion. Looks like he’s wearing brown colored contacts to play Jesus-so Caviezel is right when he states that they weren’t trying […]

My previous post had a few comments, and one thing I want to note to make clear to everyone, memorizing the Koran in its totality is intellectually sterile, but spiritually powerful (for the believer). To the vast majority of Muslims-the Koran is the Word of God, and to the vast majority of Sunni Muslims, the […]

In follow-up on godless’ post on the religious Right, a few quick thoughts…. As some readers have implied, he might have switched “Christianity” with a more qualified statement. I think a big point to note is that congregationally oriented Christianity (ie; the more “radical” Protestant sects) have played an outsized role in American history. The […]

With the public discourse soon to be overwhelmed with the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ we should expect to be hearing and reading about the profound influence that Judaism and Christianity have had on modern society. Let us not forget that we owe a greater debt to Solon than to the […]

The Hispanic Challenge by Sam Huntington. Update: Matt Yglesias has linked to this article too, and he’s kind of harsh on it. Many of his readers are polarized, though they tend to agree with Matt from what I’ve seen. I don’t think there is a binary division here, as in: A) that was then, this […]

I just realized today that I don’t think I’ve spoken in detail of my 2-week experience when I was 11 in a madrassa. Setting: Bangladesh. Visiting my mother’s family. My mean fundamentalist uncle told her she should give my brother & me an Islamic education. So my nice fundamentalist uncle (if you care to know, […]

Comes the Thaw, the Gulag’s Bones Tell Their Dark Tale: Yelizaveta I. Obst, whose father, an ethnic German, was sent to the gulag in 1943, said history in Russia remained ambivalent because so many were implicated in it. Sound familar? Posted by razib at 09:15 PM

Dogs are very similar genetically but variant phenotypically. Dog breeds differ in behavior, though some of them have only come into existence in the past few hundred years. But turn to one species of cat, the cheetah, which shows shocking homogeneity at key functionally important locii because of several population bottlenecks (like HLA). On the […]

Abiola points me to this site featuring free mathematics texts. Another friend pointed me to Sacred Texts, all the religious esoterica (and not so esoteric) you could want. Posted by razib at 07:35 PM

In my post Changing the Subject I said I would come back to proposition D: “Some subjective sensations, such as pleasures and pains, are adaptive traits of organisms.” I don’t want to spend all day on definitions, but I must quickly say what I mean by subjective sensations. They are broadly what in recent philosophy […]

UK new services for people with family history of cancer. Note: “A small proportion of breast, ovarian and bowel cancers are associated with particular inherited genes. ” No panacea, but the battle against cancer seems a war of increments…. Posted by razib at 02:57 PM

Has the Right’s role in the world of art been reduced simply to one of criticism? I don’t recall a Leftist furor over art presented by an artist on the ideological Right. Consider the Left’s provocation with these recent incidents. Artist Chris Reddy is furious that his art was subjected to the fascist tool of […]

Are Free-Market advocates soon going to be facing a choice of the lesser of two evils by accepting socialized medicine in order to facilitate the creation of jobs? Many CEOs are reluctant to hire workers because of the associated health care costs. “If U.S. manufacturers have the health care burden, and if you don’t elsewhere, […]

Decades ago, academics in the humanities refered to Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell wrote of a “monomyth” underlying the world’s mythology. Levi-Strauss (no, not the pants maker) advanced the notion of structuralism, i.e. that certain key structures underly all cultures, into the domain of cultural anthropology. Though a lot of this came from Freud and […]