Failure and Fantasy, by Lee Harris.

. . . tragically, the Arab world seems to be united in wishing to choose the same balm that the Germans chose after the Great War, the indispensable fantasy of those who refuse to face up to reality, “It was all someone else’s fault.”

This is simply not our tradition in the United States. We blame ourselves, and at our best universities there are professors who are paid quite nicely to find as much fault with our society as it is humanly possible to do. An insane policy by any standard you might wish to chose, except that of pure pragmatic success — the most self-critical nation in human history is also the first nation to achieve absolute superiority over all the other nations of the world; and perhaps, by some dialectic irony, it is more through the efforts of men like Noam Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh that we possess supreme military might. Can you really fear a society in which men like Chomsky and Gore Vidal are lionized, as opposed to being shot in the middle of the night in a remote forest? . . .

(Link from Quare again.)

Jacob Sullum discusses the ‘gateway effect’, concluding:

A few years ago in the Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin, the social psychologist Robert MacCoun laid out seven – count ’em, seven – different versions of the gateway theory. “Given our current state of knowledge,” he concluded, “one can coherently argue that (a) the gateway is a myth – it doesn’t exist; (b) the gateway is very real and it shows why we must sustain or strengthen our ban on marijuana, or (c) the gateway is very real and it shows why we should depenalize or even legalize marijuana.”

A theory that versatile will never die.

Have I told you my favorite gateway story? Some years ago, a passing mention of marijuana in conversation prompted a friend to say that he didn’t care for the stuff at first, preferring LSD, but socializing with other acidheads who also used marijuana led him to a more sophisticated appreciation of the latter. I repeated this to another acquaintance (who had acquired a nicotine addiction while drying out from heroin); he pondered for a moment and observed that for him cocaïne had analogously been a gateway to beer.

Which in turn reminds me that, as I was signing up for pistol training a few years later, I was told to get someone of “good moral character” to vouch for my not being especially likely to misapply the knowledge that I was about to acquire. “You probably don’t know any people of bad moral character,” said the guy on the phone. I managed not to mutter, “That’s a matter of opinion.”

Assuming full eye transplant (or artificial replacement) becomes possible: What happens when a colorblind man receives a normal eye? Has science-fiction addressed this question?

It’s a good bet that the twenty or thirty of you who read this are brighter than average. (At least it’s always safe to say that, eh?) Suppose that a magic pill makes everyone 3±1 times smarter. What would it be like for one of us, after treatment, to find ourself less bright than the new average?

Buddhists say that happiness comes through detachment from desire.

Don’t believe it.

Thursday I learned that radio soap-opera exists, and sounds just like the tv kind, except that the latter has silences.

I also learned that learning an arbitrary sequence of tasks by rote, in a room where a radio is playing soap-opera as loud as any three normal people can talk, is not among my aptitudes.

Mark Steyn:

In a celebrity culture, it’s useful to be able to put a face to what would otherwise be a shadowy menace. The Chinese get away with a ton of stuff just because they eschew the Colonel Gaddafi pillbox hat and the Saddamite turtleneck and Village People moustache and run their tyranny with a bunch of boring interchangeable guys in specs and cheap lounge suits.