Marat

Add up the total population of the world's Muslim's living in countries which are essentially 100% Muslim. Then add up the total GDP of those countries. Divide the population by the total GDP and you will have a more reliable measure of the link between being a Muslim and being poor than just looking at the rankings of countries, which greatly vary in their populations. The simplification of taking only the number of Muslims living in 100% Muslim countries is necessary because GDP is listed by country, so you want the country to measure the effect of Islam without much dilution.

You can buy 20% potency over-the-counter in a lot of European pharmacies. Not sure where you live, though.

I think you can correctly make an association between Islam and poverty if you focus not on the number of countries which are Islamic and poor but on the number of people. Many Islamic countries are contingently rich because of oil deposits, though before oil was discovered and exploited in the early 20th century, all these areas were extremely poor, which provides a better baseline for measuring the link between the Islamic beliefs of the population and wealth. But the mass of Moslems are today living in poverty, since Islamic nations with a huge population base, like Egypt and Indonesia, are poor, while the wealthy oil countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Quatar have small populations. Perhaps the link between Islam and poverty is not cause and effect but effect and cause. Thus only if a nation is poor and thus lacks education, critical thinking, modern institutions of learning, etc. can it preserve the necessary conceptual narrowness to fit comfortably within such an absolutist dogma as Islam represents. In contrast, cultures which have historically experienced the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment also experienced a major boost in productivity and wealth from those historical events, as well as an enormous improvement in their collective critical intellect, and so in these countries wealth and intelligence were linked, and intelligence ousts dogmatic belief systems under its critical power.

I suggested in post #6 above that the English lisp might arise from the historical effort to appear upper-class by speaking English with a French accent to imitate the way English was spoken by the Norman nobility rather than by the Saxon peasantry. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1971), vol. 1, p. 1636, offers two sources which lend support to this theory: John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, 'The Elder Brother' (1625) Act II, Scene iii: ... they much admire 'm that speake the lispe of court,/ Oh 'tis great learning! Sir George Etheredge, 'The Man of Mode' (1676) Act I, Scene i: Bell: What a pretty lisp he has! Dor.: Ho, that he affects in imitation of the people of quality of France. The lisp also seems to have long had an association with childishness as well, as I suggested in post #1 above: Frederick Meyers, 'Catholic Thoughts on the Bible' (1841), pt. III, v. 17: The father who should impose the obligations of manhood on a yet lisping son ... would be as unjust as he would be unwise.

Thanks, sesos. Some phenomena are so overwhelmingly obvious when you have experienced them every day for 13 years, it is astonishing the way people try to pretend they don't exist. There is even a well-known phrase, 'the English lisp,' but I guess like 'the Spanish guitar,' 'the Gallic shrug,' or 'Russian vodka,' it is just meant to confuse people, since it doesn't correspond to anything real.

One theory advanced to explain the higher than average intelligence of Jews was that throughout Jewish history, it was considered one of the social prerogatives of successful men that they could and should have large families, while it was the cultural norm that unsuccessful males should have small families. This acted as a selection pressure favoring the increase in genes associated with social success, which are pretty much the same genes that promote intellectual development. A problem now in the United States is that with the increasing stagnation of incomes among the poor and the middle class, intelligent, educated, and culturally sophisticated people have realized that the only way to improve their familial wealth is by having fewer and fewer children with each generation. But uneducated, unintelligent, and culturally underdeveloped people, who are minimally conscious of their social situation and unable to conceive of their lives as a planned project, are still thoughtlessly having huge families. The result will inevitably be a decline in the average IQ.

What about a forum, perhaps designed as a sub-forum of the Lounge, entitled 'Odd Things Members Have Seen'? I am sure we have all had the experience of witnessing something both fascinating and peculiar, and given our common interest in science, we have probably focused on that experience more carefully than most people would. It would be interesting hearing from other members whether they have ever witnessed something comparable to these unsual experiences or if they have an explanation.

Michael Hesseltine ("Hessootine") is not dead, although he has a heart attack every week or so. Perhaps one way to assess the overall size of the English lisp phenomenon is to note the unique social response to it in England. While news presenters, politicians, major public figures with a lisp would be laughed off the public stage in America, in England no one even seems to notice that they have a lisp, since it is such a common phenomenon there.

Try listening to Zeinab Bedawi for a while on BBC World News. It affects me like chalk screeching on a chalk board. But I think we do have a much longer list already, just on a cursory consideration, of Brits with lisps than of prominent people in other countries with the same speech impediment: Churchill, Karloff, Hesseltine, George VI, Field Marshall Montgomery, etc. I can still remember my bewilderment on first arriving at High Table in a British college and the server asking me if I wanted any "appoo cwumboo." I thought I heard 'apple' somewhere in there so I was tempted to say 'yes,' but then again, since I had just consumed a fairly stale, gray pigeon as the main course, I was hesitant.

Another possible source for the English lisp is the desire to seem upper class by altering pronunciation to make your English seem more French, since there was a long tradition in England of the Normans being culturally superior to the poor Saxons, whose consonants sounded so harsh and Germanic. This has even crept into the way some English names are pronounced, such as Magdalene College at Oxford and at Cambridge being pronounced as 'Maudlin College.' I may have experienced more of the English lisp since I lived only in English academic communities, where a snobbish accent was more cherished than in the normal world, and the lisp may have a snobbish implication. It is difficult to prove my assertion that it is much more common in England than in America, but there is a phrase, "the English lisp," though I know of no comparable phrase such as "the Australian lisp" or "the American lisp." If you watch BBC World News you will hear more than a few news presenters with very strong lisps, but you never see one on American news programs, but in America it would be seen as a bizarre oddity, while in England it is sufficiently common to seem acceptable. How many American politicians have you ever seen with a strong lisp? None, because they would be laughed out of their business. But in England, politicians often have a strong lisp and it doesn't seem to cause anyone to find them psychotically transfixed by their childhood and its baby talk, such as Michael Hesseltine, for example. Finally, I have nothing against the British! They are peculiar, and much more different from Americans than even Germans or Austrians are, but I can get along with most of them better than I can get along with people from most foreign countries.

Although I would guess that fewer than 1% of North Americans speak with a lisp, after living for 13 years in England I would have to say that about 10% of the people there speak with a lisp, often in such an extreme form that they are nearly incompwehensiboo. I wonder why a lisp is so common there but so rare elsewhere? One possible answer is that the English are psychologically fixated on the security and comfort they experienced as young children, and for this reason they subconsciously seek to reassure themselves by speaking baby talk all the time, the chief characteristic of which is a lisp. This is consistent with a documentary I once saw in England on different advertising techniques in England and the rest of the world. A certain cold medicine had been marketed quite successfully everywhere in the world with commercials presenting a "Get tough with your cold" message, but when this same message was run in England, the product failed to sell. After a while the company changed its ad campaign in England to "Baby your cold," and then the product sold as well as it had elsewhere in the world. The lesson from this seems to be that something about the English psyche clings to the infantile stage of development, and that this accounts for the predominance of lisping in English speaking.

Sir Isaac Newton not only grew up in a world filled with nonsensical ideology, but he even subscribed to it, devoting much of his life to kabbalistic interpretations of the hidden meaning of the Bible. His counter-example and that of many people like him indicate that the amount of nonsense you absorb doesn't act as a block to the development of the intellect.

A Canadian psychologist, Philip Rushton, published a study some years ago showing that Orientals have the most intelligent brains, Caucasions the second most intelligent, and Blacks the least intelligent. This of course created a national outrage, with the Premier of the Province saying he wished tenure regulations would permit him to fire the scientist from his post for publishing that data. There is of course a fundamental mistake here, which is to think that we support the right of all people to be treated equally because they just contingently turn out all to be equal, rather than that we endorse universal human equality because it is a basic moral value.

If your brain develops through learning a Western language, your linguistic and mathematical skills are stored on opposite hemispheres of the brain, so you get the typical phenomenon of Western culture of a cultural divide between humanists and scientists since these skill sets are separate rather than integrated and mutually reinforcing. However, if your brain develops through learning an Asian language based on ideograms, your mathematical and linguistic skills are stored in the same hemisphere of the brain, where they mutually support each other. Ergo, you are smarter. Cultural differences with respect to the importance of success, the work ethic, and respect for learning also make an important contribution.