The actual test for literature is outside Diggy Palace, far beyond the ramparts of Jaipur Fort and DSC largesse. How about getting off the plane at Srinagar, standing in the town square and reading passages from The Satanic Verses? In the process, some idiot might cut you down with an AK-47, but what could be braver and better than dying for the words you believe in? Or better still, why not sacrifice one’s bleeding, agonised word-hungry soul for the freedom of speech in Kashmir, where if you throw a word at the State, you gets bullets in your mouth in return?

Forget all that Rushdie went through for a moment. Despite the best efforts of a now-dead Iranian lune, he is alive, for now. Theo van Gogh is not. And so many people have faced death threats and have had their lives permanently disrupted for having the temerity to “offend” Islam that glib commentary of this nature on the issue is not just regrettable, but condemnable more so because it recommends self-censorship.

All religion is based on faith in some nebulous, fictional entity. Some people believe in God-by-any-name; others swear by Batman. And offering protection to the “sentiments” of such people is not good jurisprudence, but lunacy.

—

Greenwald writes about the perennially stamped-upon US Fifth Amendment-

The Indictment is a classic one-side-of-the-story document; even the most mediocre lawyers can paint any picture they want when unchallenged. That’s why the government is not supposed to dole out punishments based on accusatory instruments, but only after those accusations are proved in an adversarial proceeding.

Whatever else is true, those issues should be decided upon a full trial in a court of law, not by government decree. Especially when it comes to Draconian government punishments — destroying businesses, shutting down websites, imprisoning people for life, assassinating them — what distinguishes a tyrannical society from a free one is whether the government is first required to prove guilt in a fair, adversarial proceeding. This is a precept Americans were once taught about why their country was superior, was reflexively understood, and was enshrined as the core political principle: “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It’s simply not a principle that is believed in any longer, and therefore is not remotely observed.

The comment by a judge of the Delhi HC warning Google and Facebook that the judiciary would “go China” on them unless they get their act together is par for the course as far as India is concerned. Politicians and judges indulge in this behavior only because the majority of people in the country are in favor of such enforcement.

Mencken was right.

I watched Death Sentence while it was playing on TV on the channel FX. I found it almost hilariously disturbing that people were getting shot and dying bloody deaths on screen, but in the meantime mofos were being edited to mother sucker and freaking. And the f word was being changed to heck, and s*** was being changed to shoot. So show as much violence on television as you want, just God forbid you drop an F bomb or show nudity, because you know, THAT will screw kids up. Not people having their brains blown out rather graphically. Then the rest of us get to watch badly dubbed gang members running around with guns screaming “What the ‘heck’ is going on!” Thank you MPAA for keeping America’s children safe from breasts and bad words, but exposing them to more wholesome things like machetes and gang wars.

Something he says about half way though the lecture reminded me in some ways of Rand’s “intellectual pyramid.” He considers knowledge and outlook to be superior, in most cases, to pure brain power, IQ. And he shows this by comparing Leonardo da Vinci to Henry Ford. “[Leonardo's] IQ could not transcend his time,” whereas Ford had Newton, and those who built upon his ideas, to thank for his success. Kay says: “One of the wonderful things about the way knowledge works [is that] if you can get a supreme genius to invent calculus, those of us with more normal IQs can learn it. So we are not shut out from what the genius does. We just can’t invent calculus by ourself but once one of these guys turns things around, the knowledge of the era changes completely.”

A provocative quote, to end this: “If you take the word engineering seriously, and I do … we haven’t got it yet in software. We really don’t know how to do it.”

For him personally there could be no assimilation; he had known that after the first five years. By then he had learned fluent Russian, written and spoken, but he still retained a remarkable English accent. Apart from that, he had come to hate the society. It was a completely, irreversibly and unalterably alien society.

That was not the worst of it: within seven years of arriving he had lost his last political illusions. It was all a lie, and he had been smart enough to see through it. He had spent his youth and manhood serving a lie, lying for the lie, betraying for the lie, abandoning that ‘green and pleasant land’, and all for a lie.

—Frederick Forsyth, The Fourth Protocol

In the 1890s, Francis Benedict and Wilbur Atwater, pioneers of the science of nutrition in the United States, spent a year in the laboratory testing the assumption that the law of energy conservation applied to humans as well as animals. They did so not because they doubted that it did, but precisely because it seemed so obvious. “No one would question” it, they wrote. “The quantitative demonstration is, however, desirable, and an attested method for such demonstration is of fundamental importance for the study of the general laws of metabolism of both matter and energy.”

This is how functioning science works. Outstanding questions are identified or hypotheses proposed; experimental tests are than established either to answer the questions or to refute the hypotheses, regardless of how obviously true they might appear to be. If assertions are made without the empirical evidence to defend them, they are vigorously rebuked. In science, as Merton noted, progress is made only by first establishing whether one’s predecessors have erred or “have stopped before tracking down the implications of their results or have passed over in their work what is there to be seen by the fresh eye of another.” Each new claim to knowledge, therefore, has to be picked apart and appraised. Its shortcomings have to be established unequivocally before we can know what questions remain to be asked, and so what answers to seek—what we know is really so and what we don’t. “This unending exchange of critical judgment,” Merton wrote, “of praise and punishment, is developed in science to a degree that makes the monitoring of children’s behavior by their parents seem little more than child’s play.”

The institutionalized vigilance, “this unending exchange of critical judgment,” is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.”

Taubes is being polite when he refrains from using the term “scientist” to describe someone working in these fields. These people discard empirical evidence if it doesn’t fit their preconceived notions, don’t understand causality (or physics, for that matter), specialize (and then work in isolated silos) to the point of lunacy, engage in research that is incapable of answering the relevant questions, and do a million other things of a similar nature. And then have to gall to provide “expert” advice to everyone else. If I look for a term to describe such a person, “quack” comes to mind. And witch doctor. And whatever you call those people who burned Bruno at the stake, given the way they treated scientists who dared to oppose the consensus, and the number of careers they managed to sabotage as a result.

I’m surprised at my own surprise, though, because this is not a unique situation. Hayek once “accused” economists of pretense and scientism. And what is the IPCC but an attempt at “manufacturing consensus”?

Rational choice philosophy … was always implausible. Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us….

[...]

The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual freedom is of value only when communally guided.

There is no doubt about the fact that the article is an attack on the very idea of individualism, but it is carried out in an indirect manner. The author attacks the synthetic individualism that is part of “rational choice theory” which he says was invented at RAND Corporation in the late ’40s and early ’50s to counter Marxist collectivism. And-

The overall operation was wildly successful. Once established in universities, rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and government (aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn). Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.

The bait-and-switch follows-

Today’s most zealous advocates of individualism, be they on Wall Street or at Tea Parties, invariably forget their origins in a long ago program of government propaganda.

So the ridiculous, zombie-like, “rational man” that many economists use to test their theories is now supposed to stand for all individuals and individualism, and what is individualism but the rotting corpse of Cold War-era government propaganda?

I neither know nor care what Hegel and Quine had to say on the subject of epistemology, but you cannot turn into a quantum mystic and argue that quantum mechanics and the related randomness makes individual choice meaningless, or impossible, and then somehow exempt the “community” from such ignorance. Adding up the IQs of the members of a lunatic mob does not a genius make.

If this democracy faces its greatest peril from someone, it is from the tyranny of the unelected and the unelectable.

I wonder what is so sacrosanct about elections and the elected. The mob votes for someone who then goes on to represent it, which in a first-past-the-post system like ours means that a fellow can become a representative of the people even if he gets a mere 20-30% of the votes. And he then follows the diktats of the “high command,” or the politburo or whatever, not the wishes of those who elected him. Even if he did look out for his voters’ interests, what about those who didn’t vote for him? Why should they be bound by his actions?

Tiwari’s “democracy” is a kleptocratic oligarchy at best, and an ochlocracy at worst. Defending such a system is an act of lunacy. Not that Hazare’s or Ramdev’s ideas and actions are any better. The political theater in Delhi now borders on the absurd.

It is perplexing to see people who call themselves scientists ignoring, for some reason, all evidence that causes their hypothesis to fail, and Taubes writes the following in the tenth chapter-

Even the diabetes community found it easier to accept Reaven’s science than its dietary implications. Reaven’s observations and data “speak for themselves,” as Robert Silverman of the NIH suggested at a 1986 consensus conference on diabetes prevention and treatment. But they placed nutritionists in an awkward position. “High protein levels can be bad for the kidneys,” said Silverman. “High fat is bad for your heart. Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.” “Sometimes we wish it would go away,” Silverman added, “because nobody knows how to deal with it.”

This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, or the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. When the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discussed cognitive dissonance in scientific research—”the awareness of an anomaly in the fit between theory and nature”—he suggested that scientists will typically do what they have invariably done in the past in such cases: “They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.” And that’s exactly what happened with metabolic syndrome and its dietary implications. The syndrome itself was accepted as real and important; the idea that it was caused or exacerbated by the excessive consumption of carbohydrates simply vanished.

And this is from the fourteenth chapter on “The Mythology of Obesity,” where he discusses the “thrifty gene” hypothesis and its history-

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, just a few years before Neel himself publicly rejected his hypothesis, that obesity researchers began invoking thrifty genes as the reason why putting on weight seems so much easier than losing it. Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University was among the first to do so, and his logic is noteworthy, because his primary goal was to establish that humans, like every other species of animal, had apparently evolved a homeostatic system to regulate weight, and one that would do so successfully against fluctuations in food availability. We eat during the day, and yet have to supply nutrients to our cells all night long, while we sleep, for example, so we must have evolved a fuel storage system that takes this into account. “To me, it would be most unthinkable if we did not have a complex, integrated system to assure that a fraction of what we eat is put aside and stored,” Hirsch wrote in 1977. To explain why these components might cause obesity so often in modern societies, he assumed as fact something that Neel had never considered more than speculation. “The biggest segment of man’s history is covered by times when food was scarce and was acquired in unpredictable amounts and by dint of tremendous caloric expenditure,” Hirsch suggested. “The long history of food scarcity and its persistence in much of the world could not have gone unnoticed by such an adaptive organism as man. Hoarding and caloric miserliness are built into our fabric.”

But that “scarcity” is a myth more than anything else-

The prevailing opinion among anthropologists, not to be confused with that of nutritionists and public-health authorities, is that hunting and gathering allow for such a varied and extensive diet, including not just roots and berries but large and small game, insects, scavenged meat (often eaten at “levels of decay that would horrify a European”), and even occasionally other humans, that the likelihood of the simultaneous failure of all nutritional resources is vanishingly small. When hunting failed, these populations could still rely on foraging of plant food and insects, and when gathering failed “during long-continued drought,” as the missionary explorer David Livingstone noted of a South African tribe in the mid-nineteenth century, they could relocate to the local water holes, where “very great numbers of the large game” also congregated by necessity. This resiliency of hunting and gathering is now thought to explain why it survived for two million years before giving way to agriculture. In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture. (It was this observation that led Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”)

Although famines were both common and severe in Europe until the nineteenth century, this would suggest that those with European ancestry should be the most likely to have thrifty genes, and the most susceptible to obesity and diabetes in our modern toxic environments. Rather, among Europeans there is “a uniquely low occurrence of Type 2 diabetes,” as Diamond puts it, more evidence that the thrifty-gene hypothesis is incorrect.

It’s the people’s will! I’m their leader! I must follow them!

—The Rt. Hon. James Hacker, MP, Yes Minister