It's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre Darwinian era.

The United Arab Emirates has been revamping its laws to improve migrants living conditions and strengthen protection of their rights. Its activism is noteworthy, given the benighted approach to migrants typical in other Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia.

It is not, as one benighted analyst suggested, A 20 improvement (reduction) in heart attacks plus a 30 improvement (reduction) in diabetes incidence equals a 50 improvement. You need to average the improvements to get a figure somewhere between 20 and 30 .

Third, public health officials should embark on a campaign to educate local authorities and citizens about the DDT. People now hear only the reflexively anti pesticide drumbeat of the environmental movement, the lamentable legacy of the benighted Rachel Carson and her acolytes.

In 1992, the sirens of Somalia s political collapse lured the US into another civil war to save a country from itself. The US humanitarian mission to that benighted country sought to salvage a failed United Nations enterprise to secure and feed Somalia s ravaged population.

The great loudmouth Rush Limbaugh, a kind of John the Baptist for the coming of Trump, argued in 2010 that Liberty is not inviting anyone in, but is rather an early neocon, taking the American flame out to the benighted world Lady Liberty is stepping forward.

Now, too, the Enlightenment is often invoked as shorthand for the Western values that are supposedly in danger of Islamization. Now, too, people warn of Muslim tricksters, states within states, the impossibility of assimilation, and the necessity for staunch secularists to free the benighted Muslims from their faith.