A Rare Glimpse Into the Heart of Darkness.. AKA - Godless writes about his personal life! While in NY on one of my all-too-frequent[1] recent junkets, I hooked up with uber-realist and sometime GNXP contributor Capital Influx for a night at Indochine. On the taxi ride over, I remarked to CI that her prized "realist" theory was largely responsible for the restaurant's existence. After all, without ur-realist Henry Kissinger pulling the strings, we would not have exchanged quite so many bombs - nor quite so much culture - with the Vietnamese. Scratch Kissinger from the historical record, and there certainly wouldn't be 22 Vietnamese restaurants in NY, let alone a fairly posh one like Indochine. CI didn't take too kindly to the equation of realism with the relative triviality of Indochine, and aimed a baleful glare at me that missed and turned the driver to stone. As I grabbed the wheel from the granite hands of our petrified driver, I hastily emphasized that it is war rather than "realism" per se that spurs cross cultural pollination. Modern times differ only in that the conquered are not always next-door neighbors of similar genetic stock. To gather evidence for this hypothesis, I made a special point of checking the I section of Zagat's for the number of Iraqi restaurants. Finding none, I confidently predicted to CI that at least 5 Iraqi bistros would spring up in NYC after the decidedly non -"realist" GWB orders the occupation of Iraq. The moral? Diversity in political science causes diversity in restaurant choice, of course! I can only wonder what culinary delights an anarchist's turn at public policy formulation might occasion...though I could probably venture an educated guess. Dinner itself was an entertaining affair. Longtime GNXP readers know that a pet project (ok, obsession) of mine has been to convince people that we cannot neglect human biodiversity (h-bd) considerations when formulating policy. This is usually a two stage process: first establish that functionally nontrivial genetic differences are extant and move from there to the policy implications. Most people reject the first stage for ideological reasons, while a minority accept both premises. CI is unique in that she believes the first premise, but is adamant in her insistence that I overstate the relevance of h-bd considerations to policy - particularly foreign policy. Despite the abundance of evidence (e.g. planning -> AIDS rates, Mating strategies -> different outcomes, IQ & Microeconomics -> IQ & Macroeconomics) for the direct causal line between heritable biological differences and heritable macroscopic differences, I decided not to press the issue. Instead we returned to her favorite topic as of late: Jonathan Franzen. While I may (fairly) be accused of beating the h-bd horse into gelatin, my posting preference pales in comparison to CI's Franzen fixation. She heatedly denied entertaining romantic thoughts about the "nebbishy math prof lookalike", insisting that the whole thing was a J-O-K-E...but fair reader, methinks the lady doth protest too much. Now, lest I give the impression that CI and I were at loggerheads all evening, one must understand that bloggers in general (CI & I are an extreme example) like to argue. In fact, argument is the basis of the business model for making money off blogs that Ms. CI described during dinner and in an earlier post. So let me end this overlong ramble with an exhortation to check out Ironblogger, which promises to be amusing if nothing else... [1] For GNXP readers, that is. I don't always have time to blog when overseas...there are clone vats and homo superior design documents to inspect, after all!