Chicago Boyz

“Life in an advanced technological society such as ours exposes the individual to a barrage of excessive stimulation, often of stressor intensity, and to assault after assault of stressor situations. Circumstances usually preclude simple animal flight.” — Hans Selye

For Valentine’s Day, surely I can do no better than to direct our attention to Genes of history’s greatest lover found?, which, as a bonus, points the Chicago Boyz to a new weapon in our arsenal for total planetary domination:

“The really interesting find, however, would be Genghis Khan’s DNA,” [Gregory M.] Cochran[, a physicist turned evolutionary theorist,] continued. He suggested that among Inner Mongolians and the Hazaras, on whom Genghis Khan left such a genetic imprint that his Y-chromosome is found in at least a quarter of the men, there must have been a lot of inbreeding among his descendants. Yet, judging from their Darwinian success at surviving and reproducing in large numbers, that might imply that Genghis Khan had very few bad recessive genes of the kind that often damage the health of the offspring of close relations.
“Between that and the fact that he conquered most of the world, it’s fair to wonder if he was a little genetically unusual,” mused Cochran. “Of course, if you found his corpse and could extract his DNA, eventually, at some point in the future, you’d be able to clone ‘the Perfect Warrior.’ Do you think the Department of Defense would want an army of Genghis Khans?”

In fact, the U of C’s John Woods may have already found the tomb. Our genetically-engineered caste of Temujin-class warriors will CONQUER THE WORLD! BWAHAHAHAHA!

When registering to vote, do not put your email address.

I got spammed today by some podunk political campaign for their candidate. At the fine print was this:

“A message from Winvotes.com This email is being sent to you because you voluntarily listed your email address on your voter registration form, which is public information for political campaigns, journalistic or educational research.”

Bastards…

Update: Another lesson to never make your email publicly available anywhere. It’s ridiculous how spammers are able to get at us – perfect market theory must be. Makes me want to go out and vote for his opponent just to cancel out one of the votes that he gets.

You could spend hours over on Rhetorica.net reading about the canons of classical rhetoric and structural biases in the media.
Or you could just graze on over to Something Awful and see how today’s media might have covered famous events in history. I think the SA “goons” have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the “master narrative” concept, in particular …

This is worth reading.

(via BusinessPundit and Dana VanDen Heuvel )