My wife and I plan on buying a small house soon with cash. Be a financial Luddite; financial dependence is servitude.

Agnostic, in 1990 when my brother and I were on the internet, you were 10 years old, of course you weren't downloading porn. My friends and I were though. Seriously, I have no reason to make this up. We weren't raging geeks either, just normal teenagers with raging hormones. This kind of information travels fast in high school; a lot of teen boys were doing this in my very typical suburb.

"No one had access to the internet in 1991, let alone tons of free porn to download. Internet porn did not become widespread among adolescent boys until the very late '90s for middle / upper-middle class, maybe early 2000s for others. " 
 
Wrong. Porn is what drove the adoption of the internet at least in my house. My younger brother learned from his friends how to get porn from bulletin board-like sites in 1990. We were just normal, average teenagers in the suburbs. And there was plenty of porn to get too, so we weren't the only ones.  
 
If you want a cultural time marker, go watch Wargames (1983) and you will see Matthew Broderick using a modem to log onto the internet. People were definitely logging on before browsers came around in the early 90's.

It is interesting to see that Cambodia is such an outlier. On many of the ancient temples there are large carvings showing Khmer armies marching alongside Chinese armies to fight the people that live in what is now Thailand and Vietnam. The carvings also show scenes of daily life with many Chinese in them.  
 
Or am I reading the graphic wrong?

ben g, 
I like geecee's method for arguing his points. He avoids vague statements like "..a life lived freely and with dignity.." and loaded terms like "oppression" (who isn't a victim these days?).  
Facts and stats are good; try them yourself.

Jason, could you please tell me how you found the completed fertility statistic for homosexual males. I tried using the GSS site, and I must be doing something wrong. Thanks in advance.

I never said oxford has smarter students by a long shot. I said its a superior academic institution by a long shot.

Boston is certainly no Athens. And Danny you stated that New England is a place of high culture. This is not true. New England for the most part consists of unoriginal people who follow whatever trends are started in Europe. The schools in the Boston area are over-rated too. I remember reading somewhere that Harvard was the top raked school in the world. Whatever does the ranking must be flawed in some fundamental way because Harvard is certainly not the best in terms of the skill of the educators at that institution. Oxford is superior to Harvard by a long shot.

So you're saying that our intervention and diplomacy efforts are uniformly distributed across all the countries we have embassies in? 
 
No, I am saying the coverage of the New York times is a poor indicator of where our foreign policy efforts are. The New York Times is a tiny organization compared to the military, state department, commerce department, CDC, state governments etc. These all count.

Good post in the beginning, but then you mistake the NY times coverage for the our foreign policy. The NY times has reporters in a few places, the US government has embassies/consulates/military bases/trade reps etc. in almost all of them. The State Department, for example, has all kinds of programs running in even the most obscure backwaters; they love that stuff.  
 
You have merely proven that the New York Times is a bad tool with which to see the world.

In the new issue of Science they talk about the recent drug trials for statins. It starts on page 220.

bioIgnoramus, 
I married a vegetarian, which makes me a vegetarian now. I miss eating meat a little bit but the benefit is it did knock about 50 points off my cholesterol level.

Kurt9, 
I think you may be on to something about religion fulfilling a need for group identity. I think atheists and transhumanists should easily grasp the concept, because those are groups too, just different groups.

Has political correctness worn off enough to the point where it is possible to build a site about what black people like? I don't know any black people, and I only interact with them when I go to the DMV or the post office. This sounds pompous but it is true.  
 
Maybe each tribe could have its own site for reference.

Wouldn't implanted stem cells get rejected by the immune system?

OK, I will try: 
 
Maybe people today lead a less stressful life than their counterparts in the earlier part of the last century, and they keep their looks longer. When I say less stressful I mean they have fewer children, smoke less, have better vaccines and health care etc.

Very interesting post. As a conservative I will just stick to blaming the government entitlements that started degrading the country's moral fiber starting around 1960. :) 
 
seriously though, I am curious if there are any readers who could point me to good non-fiction books by criminologists. I am interested in the subject, but I find most research to be poorly done. I am especially interested in how forensic DNA databases affect crime rates.

Yes George, but what was life expectancy 100 years ago? I think we need to keep those kind of facts in context of the era.

So Jack, our culture peaked sometime in the late 1980s in your view? 
 
Maybe it was video games that killed the American male then?

Chaka, the Poles already exist.