Har de har har. I'm a Type B Swedish American, and not only do I make eye contact with family members, I even make it with strangers if I steel myself and take a deep breath first! 
 
I bought three shirts at a department store today, and I made a point of making eye contact with the clerk as he finished the transaction. I tried to smile as well but I may have just grimaced uncomfortably. This is Seattle so he's probably used to it.

I got the first disc from Netflix and bagged it after the first episode. Starbuck is just too obnoxious. TV writers don't seem to understand military social relations. Even if it was like the Air Force (not the military) and way in the future I don't think it would be like that. If the people are not real what is the point?

Okay, okay. But what exactly are today's kids better at because of believing in evolution and not being very Christian? 
 
What this sort of result really means is that family is no longer the center of the human experience in the West. And family-orientated belief systems, religions, have consequently begun to fade. Belief in evolution is a marker of religious faith, nothing more. What is the modern center of human experience? Consumer culture. An improvement? 
 
I suppose that there is a lot more sex -- I probably wouldn't have had nearly the selection that I do 60-70 years ago. But there is less long-term commitment. For me, the trade-off is not at all worth it.  
 
It's not even worth it if the kids today really do believe in Darwin nearly as much as they believe in the magical equality fairy that stopped human evolution 100,000 years ago.

Education is more useful for some than others. Don't marry the town idiot. Let intelligent people immigrate into your country and keep out the stupid. Hire smarts over experience. 
 
And finally, transformative politics in the Middle East may have a tiny bit of trouble getting Iraq up to the civilization level of, say, South Dakota; $1 trillion dollars invested into that project may not be exactly well spent. Ditto for transformative politics in Detroit.

That quiz is a insult to the intelligence of anyone who's actually read it through. Or has even managed to absorb Western culture through the normal osmosis process. 
 
*** 
 
You know the Bible 100%! 
 
Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Clearly, the Yeti are related to Centaurs. It explains so much, and yet opens up so many new mysteries.

I would point out that many of those numbers can vary substantially depending on the area under consideration. (How many races and social classes cohabit there, their group differences, etc.)

Sometimes they're more interesting than that, Rich: "When a foetus has eight legs and two tails, the prince of the kingdom will seize power."

There have got to be some costs of growing hair in both materials and energy. (There was a family last century with a mutation for an ape-like coat of body hair. They suffered from horrible dentition.) The cost may be more important depending on when in the development cycle it comes. 
 
There is also the 'man is a retarded ape theory.' That one's just fun to say.

Me and jimbo... 
 
Social Conservative 
(21% permissive) 
 
Economic Liberal 
(38% permissive) 
 
Totalitarian

In practice you are mixing two very different things: 
 
1) Science. 
2) Popular intellectual movements. 
 
Rationalism has benefited the first immensely. The second is a mixed bag. 
 
The problem is that Science has an effective domain. There is a very good reason that "the default cognitive state of humanity is far more congenial to loose, imprecise and emotionally satisfying narratives and fabulations." It's because our loose and imprecise reasoning structure is very very good at the day-to-day problems of social reasoning, while our logical-emprical side is not. (Which is why geeks don't spend their high school careers lording it over the jocks.) 
 
The problem with the Enlightenment is that it has constantly tried to devalue our extremely effective "loose and imprecise reasoning structure" not only in the places where it is ineffective (scientific observation), but also in the places where it is extremely effective (navigating systems of social mores).

TangoMan— 
 
"You" did not mean "you personally." But it's sure fun parsing syntax instead of holding honest debate. 
 
Is it so impossible to discuss futuristic aspects of reproductive technology without getting bogged down in present day abortion politics? 
 
I don't know. You brought it up, if you recall. 
 
RichardSharpe— 
 
Do I really have to adopt children (when I already have two and they take up all my time) just to be able to suggest that a step-father who murders his partner's child should be punished? 
 
Exactly my point, of course. Hence a person can be against abortions without donating obscene amounts of money to some sort of "save the embryos" campaign.

I have trouble imagining viability as a criterion of personhood extending that far. 
 
Viability was fine as a criterion of personhood when it allowed you to perform more abortions, I see. But not anymore now that the ball is in the other court. 
 
I have trouble commending that as a principled position.

The major issue is that viability apart from the womb, one of the main tenets of Roe v. Wade, is threatened. 
 
Pointing out that the anti-abortion crowd isn't willing to pay lots and lots of money to stop abortion isn't really a convincing argument. Apply it to child murder instead: people are perfectly find with the hyprocrisy of punishing child murderers without proving one's goodwill by adopting.

Looks like the html got stripped. It's still readable anyway.

Fun. Let's see if I can make an unordered list here in the comments section. 
 
My best guesses for the future 
 
How will this affect me? Depends on who you are. If you are white, you probably won't notice much. It may be slightly harder to find a house in a good neighborhood. If you belong to a non-majority culture, there is a good chance that it is making inroads, presumably a positive thing for you. 
How will this affect my kids? It's hard to guess. I crunched some numbers and made a guess of an American average IQ in 2050 comparable with Argentina today. That's only guess, and it's hard to say what it will mean. 
How will this affect my culture and values? Depends on what they are. White American culture and values has pretty much been the walking dead since 1960 anyway. If you're the 'proposition nation' sort of person, I don't think you have much to worry about. In a hundred years, they'll probably still be holding elections for President. All the branches of government will probably look fairly similar to what they are now. The Constitution won't have too many huge changes.

Durant claims that no society ever had a word for a male virgin.

Making fun of the kids? You're kidding, right? It's the parents that give this blog its name.

I recall that Churchill started off his history of WWII by calling it the most avoidable war in history. He lists a long list of blunders that led up to war with Germany. Early on, he supported being tough on Hitler not to cause war, but to avoid it.

And certainly the Pacific half of WWII was avoidable. America (provoked is possibly too strong) egged Japan on because of our own expansionist policy in the Pacific. And now just look at how much good having the Philippines has done us since.

Stopping the Holocaust was a lucky side-effect of war. Then again, the Holocaust probably never would have occurred had it not been for the treaty of Versailles which drove the German people into Hitler’s hands.

I support our current war at the moment. But I do think it should have been avoided long before it became inevitable. It’s a long series of half-measures that have led to this. We shouldn’t have lifted a finger to help Kuwait unless we intended to go into Baghdad from the start (and no one in their right mind did a decade ago). We shouldn’t have created the current sanctions regime without an endgame; i.e. making sure Saddam was out of power one way or another within some specific time period. And we weren’t prepared to make that commitment either.

But now we’ve made our own plate, and Bush is doing the right thing to eat it. Liberating the Iraqi people is a fine side-effect of this war, but not the cause. The cause of this war is the fact that we’ve made Saddam hate us, and we can’t let a threat like that continue. He wasn’t a threat to us in the 1980’s when he had far more weapons (and was actually using what we’re calling WMDs) and was just as despotic. No one is worried about the Pakistani despot a little ways away who recently almost had a nuclear war with India. And it’s because we haven’t done anything to make him hate us.

I hope the liberation thing works. But from a humanitarian standpoint it’s still too risky of a bet to justify anything. If we really want to help people, we could accomplish a lot more cheaper with some serious nation-building in South America or Africa. We could even make ourselves loved if we were willing to be duplicitous about it.

And as a final note, Bush bungled the entire UN thing. That’s almost enough to put me off this war. The world didn’t need to hate us for doing this. Moreover, I have this little feeling that he’ll make a bigger hash out of post-War Iraq than he’s making from post-War Afghanistan. And if that happens, ten years down the road we might just be dealing with the equivalent of Saddam II. Iraq’s scientific ability and industry isn’t going to go away. The capacity to make WMD will remain. The question is whether or not it’ll want to manufacture and use them on us.

Frum's article is probably a result of getting ticked off at this: http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/review.html in the American Conservative.

Zionism isn't quite obsolete as a word, Jason. Here's dictionary.com on it: A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel.

Zionism is alive and well as a word, it's used by both supporters of Israel and its opponents.

I think that ignoring Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, is wrong, as you say. They support the war on Iraq because of a certain worldview. I imagine it goes something like: "America overall is a force for good in the world. Terrorists strike at us out of envy and insanity. Terrorist action is fundamentally random." That sort of logic leads inextorably towards fighting a war against 'Terrorism' in general. It leads to support of other nations whose people live in fear of terrorism, i.e. Israel. It leads to a worldview that cannot tolerate WMD in the hands of people who hate us.

There are other worldviews. One is that terrorism is not a fundamentally random act. Many strong supporters of Israel understand that terrorism has causes--yes, what Buchanan called the "amen corner" exists in America and has powerful influence within the administration. The majority are Jews. I know that it's not PC to point out the wealth and power of Jews, but it's fine to point out the political clout of blacks or talk about southern whites and racism or Cuban Americans and their support of embargo. Jews are an ethnic community like any other. Many (Jewish) neo-cons do support American military campaigns in the Middle-East to "make the world safe for Israel." This viewpoint exists and has consequences. I've read the Weekly Standard and National Review and New Republic since 9/11, and I remember who was saying what over the following months. They were beating the Iraqi war drums before anybody. Ideas have consequences.

On the other hand, if you are neutral on the Israel issue, the idea that terrorism has root causes leads you somewhere fundamentally different. The idea is "if we weren't over there, they probably wouldn't be angry enough to blow us up. They might still be blowing something up, but probably not us." That we have no interest in the Middle East so pressing as to send troops over there seems to follow. The oil is still going to get pumped. Having troops there and fighting wars there only leads to extremists blowing our cities up.

Yeah, that's isolationism. But if you always reject isolationism out of principle, you wind up always having to fight everywhere all the time.

We could invest the wealth and power of our nation in a project of war and nation-building that wouldn't be complete until the planet is one of democracies
More....

Rob, I think you are correct that America acts as a restraining force on Israel. I read someplace a while back that America does have a world hegemony, but ours is the 'hegemony of the status quo.'

Moreover, the economic disaster that would occur if the US cut off aid to Israel would probably drive Israel towards a 'final solution' to the Palestinian problem.

If we take a cold-eyed look at the world, though, I don't see how that concerns us. Whether it is Palestinians getting driven out from their land, or Israelis getting blown up in shopping malls, I think that it is not a vital security interest to us. Getting involved will only lead to problems.

Nuclear war could interupt our oil supply, but I don't foresee nuclear war. Pakistan has nukes and Iran is getting them. No one is likely to do a first strike. And if they are then the best we could do is delay it. Israel does have a demographic problem, as you say, and we can only prevent them from acting on it for so long.

I suppose another way to avoid the energy crunch brought about by oil price spikes would be to build breeder reactors and spend more on fusion (the hot kind) research. Expensive, but not when you compare it to the cost of going to war in the Middle East every decade.

If we really want to do something to make the world a better place, we can spend a few billion helping destitute people in Africa or some such. Do-good military involvement leads to too many complications.

As a side note, I also noticed someone say that they agreed with me that Jews have 'disproportianate power.' I don't think I'd go that far. The way America's democracy works is that people who really care about their pet issues can have an effect on policy disproportianate to their numbers. The NRA, teacher's unions, pro-Life and pro-Choice groups at various times, affirmitive action debators, and what not. The same happens on various issues that are central to Jews. Jews certainly don't all have the same opinion on things. They are very liberal overall, and donate a great deal of money to the Democratic party. But there are also a high number of influential Jewish intellectuals who have influence with both the liberal and conservative movements. Every ethnic group intertwines itself within the society of our country in a different way. Certain ethnic groups are more influential on their issues because of this, but I certainly wouldn't call Jews the most influential. The white ethnic-European status quo still has considerable power. Blacks are probably much more influential on their own issues than Jews because of simple solidarity. Hispanics have population on their side in many areas. Like the rest, Jews have a certain degree of power because of the way they integrate with our society, but that is often diminished because of so many divergent viewpoints amoung Jews.

Yeah, America sometimes follows the minority
More....

My grammar sort of fell apart in that last paragraph, didn't it? Here it is again just to avoid any misunderstandings:

That doesn't mean that I can't say that the minority is wrong and doing something harmful to the majority. They often are. And in this case I think the minority might be the "Likudniks". I know this sort of viewpoint is often attacked as anti-Semitical, even when anti-Jewish bias is clearly absent. Just look at Moran. If he had said the same about blacks or women, he would have been applauded for recognizing their social power. Accusing everyone of crypto anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism is harmful to the debate, and I suppose that's what I didn't like about Frum's article.