"much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."

     Richard Horton, the Editor of The Lancet, on a "symposium . . . on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research . . . held at the Wellcome Trust in London" the week previous.  "Offline:  What is medicine's 5 sigma?"  The Lancet 385, no. 9976 (April 11-17, 2015):  1380.

Halalization

     "Each of these views has problems, but it is the multiculturalist one that seems the least in touch with social and political reality today. Not because the French don’t need to learn to accommodate more differences, but because it refuses to recognize the very disturbing developments in the Islamic world today (which are anything but accommodating to differences) and how they have already affected French life. The current mantra, which President Hollande felt obliged to repeat, is that Islamic terrorism has 'nothing to do with Islam' and that the most important thing is not to 'make an amalgam' of all Muslims. (The Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, went even further, declaring the terrorists to be “without faith”—in other words, infidels.) But this attitude only reinforces an institutional and intellectual omertà that makes it difficult even to discuss what is really going on in the schools.

     "The evidence has been there for anyone who cared to look for it, in books like those of Kepel and the growing literature of memoirs written by former teachers in the quartiers who gave up because they could not control their classes or enforce the principle of laicity."

     Mark Lilla, "France on fire," The New York Review of books 62, no. 4 (March 5, 2015):  16 (14-16).

"The troubles of the Muslim world, however, are not those of pre-Reformation Europe, but rather of the Reformation in full swing."

"It has become common in Western circles, infused by the Whig interpretation of history, to speak of the need for a Muslim Luther to induce liberalism in Islam.  The troubles of the Muslim world, however, are not those of pre-Reformation Europe, but rather of the Reformation in full swing.  Hundreds of splintering congregations are seeking to suppress the accretions of popular religion, and return to the letter of the original scriptures, denouncing and warring with one another and the resurgent hierocrats of Shia Islam in Iran.  Nobody speaks for all Muslims, and political power is sought on the back of religious piety.  If one is to engage in the prescribing of solutions for Islam—a presumptuous excursion into the realm of the hypothetical, and to be done with due humility—then the fall of the Ottomans inspires a different thought:  perhaps we should encourage our Muslim friends to seek not a Luther but a pope."

     Gerard Russell, "Jihad:  the lessons of the Caliphate," The New York review of books 62, no. 8 (May 7, 2015):  47 (46-47).