"People should recognize 1) that behaviors exist along a continuum and that discrete categories, although convenient, usually aren't valid, and 2) that the "normal person" is host to all sorts of pathological processes, and 3) that physiology is almost certainly not pathological in the vast majority of cases." 
 
People (psychologists and psychiatrists) already recognize this. 
 
Good books on the subject: 
 
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us 
 
Conservatives Without Conscience

Mosaddeq wasn't the Shah, he was the (democratically elected) Prime Minister. We (US/UK) overthrew Mosaddeq and replaced him with the Shah.

There are some obvious things that people are missing here: 
 
1. Many people are fundamentally lazy and procrastinate. A chain letter only has to reach one of these individuals to doom it to "pile of things to do" oblivion. 
 
2. Many people have no interest whatsoever in participating in such a study. Again, a chain letter only has to reach one of these individuals for it to find its way into the trash. 
 
When you take such natural human tendencies into consideration, it should be painfully obvious that the large majority of such letters will never reach their targets. 
 
3. The critics are assuming that participants will be skillful in selecting the most efficient routes. The mathematical proposition is that such routes exist, not that they should be easy for a random individual with imperfect knowledge to find.

Wow. I couldn't disagree more about emotional fragility being attractive (to me). It's a huge turnoff, and I just don't date women like that. I love tough minded, intelligent women who don't take shit.

Regarding loss of manufacturing jobs to China: 
 
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32165.pdf 
 
"The decline in manufacturing employment is not unique to the United States. 
According to a study by Alliance Capital Management, employment 
manufacturing among the world?s 20 largest economies declined by 22 million jobs 
between 1995 and 2002. At the same time, the study estimated that total 
manufacturing production among these economies increased by more than 30% (due 
largely to increases in productivity). As indicated in Table 7, while the number 
manufacturing jobs in the United States declined by 1.9 million (or 11.3%) during 
this period, they declined in many other industrial countries as well, including Japan 
(2.3 million or 16.1%), Germany (476,000 or 10.1%), the United Kingdom (446,000 
or 10.3%), and South Korea (555,000 or 11.6%). The study further estimated 
employment in manufacturing in China during this period declined by 15 million 
workers (from 96 million workers in 1995 to 83 million in 2002), a 15.3% 
reduction.61 In the United States and United Kingdom, the employment decline 
began in 1999; in the other countries in Table 6, the decline began earlier. In 2004, 
the industrialized countries experienced a loss of 865,000 more manufacturing jobs, 
and a cumulative 6.3 million manufacturing job losses over the previous five years. 
 
[see table on page 32] 
 
"The sharp increases in U.S. imports of manufactured products from China over 
the past several years do not necessarily correlate with subsequent production and job 
losses in the manufacturing sector. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve, testified in 2005 that ?I am aware of no credible evidence that ... a marked 
increase in the exchange value of the Chinese renminbi relative to the dollar would 
significantly increase manufacturing activity and jobs in the United States.?63 A 
study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimated that import penetration by 
Chinese manufactured products (i.e., the ratio of imported manufactured Chinese 
goods to total manufactured goods consumed domestically) was only 2.7% in 2001.64 
The study acknowledged that, while China on average is a small-to-moderate player 
in most manufacturing sector markets in the United States, it has shown a high 
growth in import penetration over the past few years, growing by nearly 60% 
between 1997-2001 (from 1.7% to 2.7%). However, the study concluded that ?the 
bulk of the current U.S. manufacturing weakness cannot be attributed to rising 
imports and outsourcing,? but rather is largely the result of the economic slowdown 
in the United States and among several major U.S. export m
More....

Regarding the black female/asian male thing, I think there may be several contributing factors: 
 
Lower likelihood of interaction between the two, Asian prejudice against blacks, and the simple fact that 95% of black women simply refuse to date non black men. I've read this statistic somewhere before, and I've had black women that I asked essentially confirm it. It is even common for (many) black women to make a big stink about black men who date white women. There is often significant social pressure from black women against blacks dating non blacks.

PhysicistDave, 
 
>Of course, any human behavior ? whether going to Starbucks, believing in religion, enjoying Kurt Cobain?s music, or believing in phlogiston ? must somehow be consistent with human nature. 
 
>But the idea that religion is a special case that requires unique forms of explanation is simply anti-scientific. The kind of ?just so? stories that this enterprise evokes are a classic example of the ?cargo-cult? science that gives evolutionary psychology a bad name. 
 
There is a big difference between religion and these other things: Religion, as far as we can tell, has been around for as long as we have been human. Kurt Cobain, thankfully, has not. 
 
You might like to read the entire article. The author, Frank Zindler, is a smart, impressive guy and shouldn't be dismissed so blithely.

Here are a couple quotes from the second article: 
 
"While the particular details of religion are transmitted verbally by culture - our substitute for instinct - I submit that the religiosity of Homo sapiens can be considered to some extent instinctual. That there could be such a thing as a religious instinct becomes plausible, I think, when we consider the implications of the fact that we evolved as a social species, not a solitary species. We evolved as social animals - herd animals. We evolved as wolves, not foxes. 
 
In the evolution of big-brained social species there must arise a conflict between the desire for autonomy - self gratification - and the group need for integration and subservience. In many social species, autonomy and separation from the group produces anxiety. A lost sheep is not a happy animal, and many Christians separated from their congregations, priests, and pastors experience profound Angst. (This is why excommunication and shunning can be so devastating to certain people.) It appears to be one of the functions of religion that it allows people to ?escape from freedom,? as the psychiatrist Erich Fromm once put it. When we do what our priests tell us to do, we avoid the anxiety that comes from having to make our own decisions - anxiety that arises from painful knowledge of our own inadequacies and proneness to make mistakes. Religion serves as a vehicle for discharging anxiety by connecting isolated individuals to the group and making them feel as though somehow the power of the entire group flows through them. In doing so, I shall argue, religion employs the neuronal circuitry evolved in prehuman social animals for non-verbal communication within the group." 
 
And 
 
"Analogous to hypnosis, religion distorts perceptions, rendering them resistant to correction. Often, strong emotions must be evoked before the spell can be broken: it is like using ice-water to awaken a hypnotized person. The neural circuitry of religion is intimately intertwined with that which distinguishes us as herd animals, as a social species. Surgical attempts to remove the harmful, religious components of this circuitry are quite naturally resisted - as though they were attempts to deprive people of their group identity. Loss of religion produces more autonomy, but this again can increase anxiety levels. Illusions that reduce anxiety will not be given up easily. Not withstanding all I have said here today, fear remains the soil in which the roots of religion feed. Unless better means are made available for reducing fear, religion will continue to feed upon our neuroplasm."

These two articles may be of interest: 
 
Religion, Hypnosis, and Music: An Evolutionary Perspective 
 
And especially this one: 
 
Why Is Religiosity So Hard To Cure?

Some criticisms of related Brian Caplan writings can be found here.

The paper by Jones and Schneider (2006) mentions Hendricks (2002) atleast 15 times but they did not list the paper in their bibliography, which makes it hard to find it. 
 
I'm a little skeptical of their finding though (I'll probably find their results more believable if I read Hendricks'). The number of developing countries that they have IQ data for is lot smaller than the number of source countries for immigrant workers. This is important because the ranking of countries in terms of national IQ is quite different from the ranking of the US wage of the immigrants from those countries. Borjas' JEL paper in 1994 gives some info on immigrants' wages.

but my major point is that it is less important that a large number of scientists or scholars in the field agree upon x than a large proportion. this goes for evolution, global warming, medicine and economics. 
 
But is the case that a large proportion of economists are against increasing the minimum wage? I don't think so.  
 
See page 6 of this report: 
 
http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1156&context=ev 
 
Also, Klein at George Mason surveyed some of economists who signed that petition and it's clear that their position was informed by more than the narrow position of higher minimum wage having an adverse effect on the employment rate. 
http://www.econjournalwatch.org/pdf/EJWCompleteIssueJanuary2007.pdf