I think I first learned the word inverse from Calvin and Hobbes, and in particular the strip in which Calvin ruefully notes, “There’s an inverse relationship between how good something is for you, and how much fun it is” (1 May 1986). The examples leading up to this punchline — he must eat the “slimy asparagus,” he cannot watch the movie Killer Prom Queen — make it clear that “inverse relationship” means that more fun means less good-for-you.

Now, consider what the journalist Johann Hari reports Dinesh D’Souza said on an ocean cruise organized by the National Review.

The nautical counter-revolution has docked in the perfectly-yellow sands of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, and the Reviewers are clambering overboard into the Latino world they want to wall off behind a thousand-mile fence. They carry notebooks from the scribblings they made during the seminar teaching them “How To Shop in Mexico”. Over breakfast, I forgot myself and said I was considering setting out to find a local street kid who would show me round the barrios — the real Mexico. They gaped. “Do you want to die?” one asked.

The Reviewers confine their Mexican jaunt to covered markets and walled-off private fortresses like the private Nikki Beach. Here, as ever, they want Mexico to be a dispenser of cheap consumer goods and lush sands — not a place populated by (uck) Mexicans. Dinesh D’Souza announced as we entered Mexican seas what he calls “D’Souza’s law of immigration”: “The quality of an immigrant is inversely proportional to the distance travelled to get to the United States.”

Taking D’Souza’s remark at face value, we can translate it into Orwellian sheep-speak as, “Mexicans good, Northern Europeans bad!” Indeed, seeing that D’Souza was born in Bombay, one must consider his “law of immigration” a statement of becoming modesty on his part.

By reasonable extrapolation, people who were born in the United States to families which have lived in the United States for generations are absolutely worthless.

(Tip o’ the G.R.O.S.S. chapeau to PZ Myers.)

Two summers ago, four men tried to “top” the terrorist attacks on the London Tube but failed, for a reason any science educator can appreciate:

The explosives would have caused carnage on the transport network, but the plot mastermind, Ibrahim, miscalculated the ratios of ingredients when making the bombs, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper has reported.

The court heard Ibrahim personally bought the bleach and chapati flour used to make the devices in his flat, which was also booby-trapped. Police said the highly volatile triacetone triperoxide, known as “mother of Satan” was used as a detonator.

But Ibrahim, who failed maths at school, got his sums wrong when mixing the recipe, making the bombs — which were packed with nails and screws — harmless.

This story doesn’t make explicit that the “bleach” was actually hair bleach, which the plotters tried to distill to get hydrogen peroxide.

The jury was told that, using two saucepans and a frying pan on the flat’s small cooker, the men set up a seven-day rota involving Ibrahim, Asiedu and Omar to oversee the process of boiling it down to the required concentration. Some was re-bottled with labels suggesting it had reached the required strength. Subsequent test firings by forensic scientists suggested that one reason why the bombs had not fully exploded could have been that the chemical had not been sufficiently reduced.

Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) was also used in the 7 July 2005 attack on the London Underground, and many people speculated that the terrorists responsible for the “War on Liquids” were also trying to make TATP in airplane lavatories.

(Via John Armstrong.)