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<\/a>So what happens when a real scientist examines that \u201cevidence\u201d? Geneticist Bryan Sykes took a closer look at 57 specimens provided by Bigfoot believers from around the world<\/a>. No surprise: None of them came from Sasquatch. But there\u2019s also this: \u201cTwo hair samples, one from Bhutan and the other from Ladakh, India, closely matched the genetic sequence of an extinct Paleolithic polar bear.\u201d The truth is out there.<\/p>\n\u2022 \u201cSo, how many Palestinians should we kill?<\/a>\u201d Marc Goldberg asks in The Times of Israel<\/em> (via<\/em><\/a>), making like Bobby Kennedy<\/a> in Indianapolis. We can learn to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Or, I suppose, we can continue\u00a0not<\/em> doing that.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0Scot McKnight<\/a>\u00a0surveys a new book titled,\u00a0Faith and Reason: Three Views.<\/em>\u00a0My first thought was that something must be missing there. If you have two variables, shouldn\u2019t that produce\u00a0four<\/em>\u00a0possibilities? A but not B; B but not A; both A and B; neither A nor B.<\/p>\n But then I thought about it some more and realized that, in this case, there couldn\u2019t be much point including an essay arguing that fourth view. Come to think of it, I\u2019m not sure how one could argue for the first option either. Making a reasonable argument\u00a0against reason<\/em>\u00a0seems either pointless or self-refuting. \u2026<\/p>\n \u2022 \u201cPoor people have it easy<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Wow<\/em>. (I guess \u201cneither faith nor reason\u201d is a more popular category than I realized.)<\/p>\n \u2022 Please ignore that this is from Edward Mendelson\u2019s discussion<\/a> of W.H. Auden\u2019s response to Isaiah Berlin\u2019s essay on Ivan Turgenev, because that sounds terribly pretentious and I wouldn\u2019t want the high-brow airs of all of that to distract us from the perceptive wisdom here:<\/p>\n Berlin wrote: \u201cThe dilemma of morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute polarization of opinion has, since [Turgenev\u2019s] time, grown acute and world-wide.\u201d Whatever Berlin intended, a sentence like this encourages readers to count themselves among the sensitive, honest, and responsible, with the inevitable effect of blinding themselves to their own insensitivities, dishonesties, and irresponsibilities, and to the evils committed by a group, party, or nation that they support. Their \u201cdilemma\u201d is softened by the comforting thought of their merits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2022 What Mendelson diagnoses there is part of the process by which we can lull and flatter ourselves into becoming Very Serious People. Once we count ourselves among \u201cthe sensitive, honest, and responsible\u201d \u2014 and among the civil, non-partisan, objective, orthodox, fiscally concerned, moderate, high-minded, centrist, mainstream, etc. \u2014 we\u2019re in grave danger of becoming the moral equivalent of poor \u201cLady Florence\u201d:<\/p>\n