Scalia’s health problems were manifold—his family members didn’t want an autopsy or feel that one was necessary. (“I knew, and he knew, that he was at a place in life where he could be taken from this world at any time, and that’s what happened last week,” Scalia’s son Eugene told Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. “Our family just has no doubt he died of natural causes.”) But precision, at this political and cultural moment, would have been helpful. Texas, after all, is a state where a good number of people believe that a military-training exercise named Jade Helm is a cover for a plot by the Obama Administration to declare martial law, and where senior elected officials—senators, governors—are willing to humor them.
This is also why Trump is unlikely to pay a political price for his failure to quickly dismiss the conspiracy theories. He is in tune with the feeling among many in the electorate that the official story is almost never the whole story.
.. The Scalia conspiracy theories are crude and fantastic, but one reason they may persist is that the respectable Republicans—Presidential candidates and Senate leaders—echo their bottom line, which is that it would be illegitimate, a seizure of power, almost, for President Obama to name a successor to Scalia. He doesn’t have the right, even though the inauguration of the next President is almost a year away; he would be cheating, ignoring the people. The quiet implication is that Obama, himself, is not legitimate.
Pakastani Universities Deride Science: Jinns Invade Campus
One might have thought that Pakistan’s super-elite universities would be different. Lums, the country’s most expensive private university, has a school of science and engineering built with American dollars. It appeared to have a serious mission but several Lums professors now openly deride scientific reasoning.
.. The distortions were clear to me, but when the professor poured a ton of scorn on Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc squared, my eyes nearly popped out and my heart stopped beating. What else could make an atom bomb explode, or a nuclear reactor produce electricity? Jinns, surely! But he is not alone in making such claims. The head of the biology department, in an email to the entire Lums faculty, excitedly claimed that reciting or listening to certain holy verses “can control genes and metabolites” and suggested that specially equipped audio-visual rooms be made in hospitals to treat terminally ill patients.
.. Perhaps to underscore its determination to shift away from Western science, last month Lums ousted Pakistan’s most highly regarded and respected mathematical physicist from his tenured position.
.. Paranormal and conspiratorial ways of thinking dovetail well with each other.
.. Rejecting science means you are spared the required toil, effort, and exacting mental discipline needed for learning hard stuff like math and physics. Besides, you might not even have the talent for it. It’s far easier to curse science than to woo it.
.. Pakistan’s universities should have been beacons of enlightenment, open inquiry, and bold new thinking. Instead they are sheep farms. A legion of intellectually lazy and ignorant professors wants a breed of students who will submit to authority, not question or challenge. Knowing that an invented bogeyman subdues five-year-olds effectively, they hope the spectre of unworldly creatures and fear of death will suitably frighten 20-25-year-olds. The newly launched jinn invasion of campuses means that Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual decline will accelerate.
Why Ben Carson’s Nazi Analogies Matter
In one respect, Mr. Carson is the antithesis of the crude and boisterous Mr. Trump. In tone and style, Mr. Carson comes across as calm, reasonable and agreeable. But in fact he is more rhetorically intemperate than even Mr. Trump.
.. Mr. Carson had expressed concern that if Republicans didn’t win control of the Senate in 2014, “there may be so much anarchy going on” that the 2016 elections couldn’t be held.
.. As a result, the usual ways voters judge a candidate — experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues — have been devalued. People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it. Reason has given way to demagogy. In a political context, Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson represent the id rather than the superego, not just in what they say but in how they perceive the world around them.
How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election
There is precedent in the United States for this kind of backroom king-making. Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, was put into office in part because of strong support by Western Union. In the late 1800s, Western Union had a monopoly on communications in America, and just before the election of 1876, the company did its best to assure that only positive news stories about Hayes appeared in newspapers nationwide. It also shared all the telegrams sent by his opponent’s campaign staff with Hayes’s staff.
.. According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, since Obama took office, Google representatives have visited the White House ten times as frequently as representatives from comparable companies—once a week, on average.
.. Republicans, take note: A manipulation on Hillary Clinton’s behalf would be particularly easy for Google to carry out, because of all the demographic groups we have looked at so far, no group has been more vulnerable to SEME—in other words, so blindly trusting of search rankings—than moderate Republicans. In a national experiment we conducted in the United States, we were able to shift a whopping 80 percent of moderate Republicans in any direction we chose just by varying search rankings.
.. The best way to wield this type of influence is to do what Google is becoming better at doing every day: send out customized search results. If search results favoring one candidate were sent only to vulnerable individuals, regulators and watchdogs would be especially hard pressed to find them.