...pygmies kill elephants by sneaking up on them and jabbing them in the belly with a sharp stake. Wow. 
 
Judging by this, that's even braver than it sounds.

Here is Theodore Dalrymple's article on the intelligent patients he met, who grew up in English slums - boredom was a major problem for them. His version of sg's quote: 
 
"But why are they bored, they ask me? The answer, of course, is that they have never applied their intelligence either to their work, their personal lives, or their leisure, and intelligence is a distinct disadvantage when it is not used: it bites back."

I thought of Verne as pre-1900, but yes; going back a little further, you might know that Poe tried his hand at some predictive sci-fi. In "Hans Pfaal" he tried to imagine, in detail, what a trip to the moon would be like (the trip itself, not the arrival). The trip is made in a balloon, so he can't get much credit for accuracy. Two of his stories ("The Conversation of Eidos and Charmion," and a superseding article I forget the name of) were efforts at scientific eschatology (in the latter, he predicts the earth will eventually burn from accumulated caloric, which I believe was an out of date concept by then, so he doesn't get overmuch credit there either).  
 
Kevem - I'd never heard of him; fascinating; thanks! 
 
Chemdude - I found "Anticipations"  
(nonfiction, I see) at Gutenberg - no time to read it now, but thanks.

Edward, H.G. Wells wasn't very accurate on the social side - The Time Machine went with a crude sort of Marxism (the future races are an atrophied "functionless investor" class and a cannibalistic proletariat, with the Time Traveller explaining that you can see the beginnings of that future even now). His Martians in War of the Worlds were supposed to be a later-evolved humanoid type (their limbs were atrophied because they were more tech-dependent), so he was right on the scientific side in the sense that he didn't think evolution stops cold when you get intelligence and culture. You might give him trivially more credit on the scientific than the social side, but he was telling stories (and telling them well) more than predicting the future. He's the only 1900's (decade) sci-fi I know.

Before that, the catchphrase was "highway machismo," if I remember.

People who look back and think, I should have excercised, stopped smoking, or worked harder, are living their regret every day of their life. 
 
"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." Too painfully true.

There's another side besides the spiritual - the old-fashioned fear of competition. this article (scroll to "public versus farmers") suggests that the opposition to genetically-modified food in Europe is led by farmers' groups and is primarily protectionist in character (the article claims that Italian farmers, in particular, fear their elaborate system of controls will collapse if new varieties of crops become available).  
 
I remember long ago reading a U.S. News article on opposition to human cloning - I was genuinely puzzled as to what non-religious arguments people would raise against it. One of the strangest was fear that "an egotistical millionaire would decide that the best heir to his fortune was - himself." But perhaps the angry insistence we see that everyone is equal is birth lives side-by-side with a fear that not everyone is equal at birth - and that people who are born smarter or harder-working or more frugal or whatever will take what we want a shot at ourselves. (Some of the anti-Chinese protectionist rhetoric of the 19th century was pretty forthright - "We can't outwork them, but they can underlive us" or words to that effect.) Just a thought.

I looked in two places: the National Survey on Drug Use and Health,  
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k5NSDUH/tabs/TOC.htm , and this study on health behaviors in the military - http://www.ha.osd.mil/special_reports/2005_Health_Behaviors_Survey_1-07.pdf . Both show whites self-reporting higher rates of drug use than blacks, so there is at least some evidence for the statement in the article. (I also found this article - http://www.nida.nih.gov/pdf/monographs/monograph167/081-107_Fendrich.pdf - on "The Reliability and Consistency of Drug Reporting in Ethnographic Samples" - which calls into question the value of self-reporting for this sort of thing.)  
 
I was hoping that the military (which does plenty of mandatory drug tests) would have some physical data, but should've known better - when and whether to test is up to the individual command, and while data are apparently gathered on how many Soldiers test positive for what, https://ssob.acsap.hqda.pentagon.mil/drug_testing/3RDQTR06STATSSOLD.HTML , I couldn't find any such stats broken down in an ethnic way.

http://www.xkcd.com/c214.html

"I've wondered if cities selected for the ability to cooperate with strangers--there are lots of mechanisms that might help to do this--patience, impulse control, intelligence, to name a few--and that ability would likely be more valuable in a city than in a small town." 
 
Standard lore among lawyers - see this - runs the opposite way; lawyers in large cities are more likely to have confrontational styles in negotiation and litigation, possibly because they're less likely to keep encountering the same opponents over and over.

Alan, that's an odd one we got from the French ("martial" is like an adjective modifying "court"; if there was more than one Chapel Perilous you'd get the same thing). Though even there, FWIW, many Soldiers do refer to them as "court-martials."

I see no one has yet linked the Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Titles - http://www.dictionary-occupationaltitles.net/ - which includes narrative descriptions of the jobs and estimates of their preparation, educational, and mental requirements. Cabana Attendant, as an example, lists 
 
GED: R2 M2 L2 SVP: 3 DLU: 77 
 
That's level 2 reasoning, level 2 mathematical ability, level 2 language ability (all fairly low); level 3 specific vocational preparation (takes 1-3 months to learn the job); DLU is the year the entry was last updated. The terms are explained on this page: http://www.occupationalinfo.org/appendxc_1.html -- and the numbers assigned also tell something about job requirements for dealing with data, people, and things - http://www.occupationalinfo.org/front_223.html .  
 
There's rather a lot, for anyone who wants to spend some time exploring it.

"Whether there is a universal yearning for democratic freedom or not, its acceptance as a background assumption in the public discourse has become nearly religious." 
 
I don't see that at all. Bush is often whacked, from left and right, for believing this. When I googled "universal longing for democracy" I found two blog comments hostile to the idea, an article about a teaching foundation upset over the way the ULFD "is dismissed as an American plot," and a Carnegie Endowment article that was at best neutral on the subject. I tried "universal desire for democracy" and most of the comments I found were against the idea. I tried "do not want democracy" and found plenty of arguing on the topic.  
 
I tried a search at Townhall.com and pretty quickly found George Will on the subject - http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2003/08/17/democracy_everywhere ; he is not a marginal figure, but readers of The American Conservative could do better I am sure. Whether the idea is good or bad, it is being talked about, and argued against, in public, not universally accepted.  
 
(I haven't read Bush's "founding text" on the subject, which is Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy, and can't tell you a thing about it.)

"If someone went systematically through them all and put up exaggerated satires and denunciations of the Amish, the Mennonites, the Buddhists and traditional Chinese, the Mormons, the Christian Scientists, the Hasids, the Orthodox Jews, the Pentecostals, the Orthodox, the Catholics, and finally the mainline Protestants and Reform Jews, it might be funny and interesting."  
 
The Christian Scientists got their timeless send-up over a century ago - http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1003/ - and if it hadn't been written, we would be the poorer. (Even if the same writer hadn't had unkind but funny things to say about Judaism and Christianity generally, http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm )...I don't see how the author's failure to take a whack at every sect in the country detracted from the value of what he wrote, or of protecting his right to write it. But I may not be grasping this part of the argument at all.

"If I were Christian I'd likely be a Calvinist and if I were a Muslim i'd be a Salafi. Those are the only religions which make 'sense' to a genuine atheist because of their quasi-reflective biases." 
 
Interesting...when I play that game, I usually end up with, "If I were Christian, I'd probably be a Quaker" - because (given the way Christians describe God), it would probably take a divine Revelation of some kind to convince me, and Quakerism emphasizes the importance of personal revelation (and doesn't require acceptance of particular arguments, or bits of Scripture, which I might then be argued out of). I know Fox taught that anyone could receive Revelation, so that I wouldn't be stuck having to credit someone else's, let alone follow the idea that some other human had "authority" to tell me what God wanted.  
 
I don't know of any substrain of Islam (even among the Sufis) that quite meets this (though I would be grateful to learn if there is one). I understand that, to most, if I said God or His Angels were talking to me directly, I'd be calling myself a prophet after Mohammed and would be a blasphemer.

Many of my biases seem to come from "whose side of the story I read first" - now I can rationalize my bias in favor of Rome, at least in some conflicts, in terms of my views on civilization; but why on earth should I favor Alexander over his opponents? Yet, when I don't think about it, I do (And it is unconscious bias you are asking about.)  
 
When I read David Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story, I still didn't, on any level, want the Spanish to win - but I could muster far more sympathy for them than before, and found myself wanting shipwrecked Spaniards to escape back to Spain (but then, I had never read the hunt for them from the English point of view).  
 
In reading novels, at least in my younger days, I noticed I had a hard time disliking the first person whose point of view I had...so if the first chapter was dedicated to the villain, he just didn't seem that villainous to me for the rest of the book; and if the character I met on the first page was misjudging someone, I tended to pick up that misjudgment, too.

In support of Arcane's point - http://www.policyreview.org/139/rosenthal.html 
 
"The Khosrokhavar interviews [of French Jihadist prisoners] burst numerous clichés about the jihadists and the sources of their militancy. Lest anyone still cling to the illusion that the root cause of Islamic terror is poverty and economic inequality, for instance, the interviews massively reinforce the findings of the already substantial body of research on Arab Islamists showing that jihadists are largely recruited from relatively more privileged social strata in their countries of origin. As a rule, the inmates interviewed are highly educated, well-traveled, and multilingual. One 'Ousman' interrupts his interview to grill Khosrokhavar about the geographical distribution of his sample population. If the sample is not well distributed, he warns, 'it?s not valid, it?s not scientific' ? before adding encouragingly, 'you are the pioneers for this type of study.'...The inmates? more or less openly avowed enthusiasm for jihad is clearly not the product of a spontaneous reaction to desperate circumstances, but rather the outcome of an often highly intellectualized process of reflection."

P-ter, you might be interested in the article "Our Perfect Constitution" - 56 N.Y.U. Law Review 353 (1981) (I didn't find an online link to the article - the law.nyu.edu online archive doens't go back that far - but your local academic law library should have it. Justice Scalia occasionally cites it - against the proposition that "unconstitutional" is just another synonym for "a wrong or bad idea." As here: http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-7328.ZC1.html ). 
 
I am as delighted as you are that slavery has been self-evidently wrong for 230-odd years, and the persecution of minorities for some period less than that, at least in some places...but the raw material for regression to the older way is out there. We're still in the middle of a big experiment, to see what happens when minorities, even culturally isolated ones with vocally hostile members, can say what they please free of group persecution, and take part in elections. I do hope it works out.

The Fifth Amendment isn't quite as clear as you might like it to be on the subject - which is why the Supreme Court upheld curfews of Japanese (Hirabayashi v. U.S., 320 U.S. 81, 101-02 (1943)) and exclusion of Japanese from "military areas" that could include their homes (Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214, 217-20 (1944)) (Korematsu didn't reach the "internment" issue, though I believe there are some who think it did. The dissenting opinions, especially Justice Roberts's, were eloquent...so I cannot agree that objections only arose in hindsight after the war was over).  
 
Congress has since passed 18 U.S.C. 4001(a), which was specifically designed to prevent this kind of internment of citizens (without, of course, another act of Congress).

Not a textbook definition of Justification by Faith, though I found an Islamic version of that here - http://islamicweb.com/beliefs/creed/abdulwahab/KT1-chap-00.htm (scroll to "in case they rely upon it"). Classic stretchy theology; may it stretch back the other way in our lifetimes.