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An idea brought to my attention by Chris Byrne at Anarchangel.

Check out a few links at this Google Search.

As Chris points out, it’s ridiculous. Capitalism can’t break, anymore than evolution can break. Capitalism is the economic incarnation of evolution; they’re exactly the same process.

Watch the video Chris links to, featuring an interview with Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man. Everything you know about the Depression and FDR is wrong: FDR made it worse, and prolonged it horribly, by trying to replace the marketplace with government intervention.

The current mortgage crisis is not a failure of capitalism; it is itself a failure of government regulation, which thieves like Barney Frank and Chris Dobbs, themselves huge beneficiaries of the crisis, want to fix with even more regulation.

Would-be tyrants like Barack Obama, of course, simply want to dismantle the marketplace altogether.

If you listen to nothing else, listen to the story of the National Recovery Act and the Schechter family of chicken butchers, starting at about 16:00.
Quoting from the book:

To justify giving to one forgotten man, the administration found it had to make a scapegoat of another. Roosevelt and his staff were becoming habitual bullies, pitting Americans against one another.

The Schechters were Roosevelt’s scapegoats.

Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiania, seemed like a righteous man who might set his state back on the path to sanity and self reliance.

Unfortunately, he turns out to be a religious whacko, prepared to impose his superstitions on the children of his state.

Jindal ignored those calling for a veto and this week signed the law that will allow local school boards to approve supplemental materials for public school science classes as they discuss evolution, cloning and global warming.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will have the power to prohibit materials, though the bill does not spell out how state officials should go about policing local instructional practices.… Critics call it a back-door attempt to replay old battles about including biblical creationism or intelligent design in science curricula, a point defenders reject based on a clause that the law “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine … or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.”

No good, Bobby. No good.

No VP slot for you, ever.

Superstition kills.

EL SOBRANTE, CA (KGO) — The Contra Costa County Health Department is closing East Bay Waldorf School in El Sobrante until Monday because of a whooping cough outbreak. More than a dozen cases have been reported.

In the East Bay, a contagious disease has shut down an entire school.

Whooping cough has made more than a dozen kids sick. It’s easy to avoid with a simple vaccine.
…
Students attending California schools are required to get immunizations for whooping cough but parents can opt out.

The state averages a 99 percent immunization rate. But at East Bay Waldorf School, health officials say less than 50 percent are protected from the disease and say that’s why it was able to spread so easily.

“We believe the immunizations are quite safe. And in particular case of an outbreak like this is the appropriate choice for their parents,” said Contra Costa County Health Services Director Dr. Wendel Brunner.

The school’s administrator Morgan Cleveland issued a statement, saying: “our community is following the direction of the county health authority. We look forward to re-opening school on Monday with the county’s cooperation.”

The Waldorf School System was founded by Rudolph Steiner in 1919. He believed children were made stronger through illness and believed in a holistic approach to medicine.

Life is risk. The trick is assessing the risks intelligently. The known risks from vaccines, while potentially severe, are extremely rare.

The risks from the diseases many of them prevent include disfigurement, disability, and death, and entire unprotected communities can be hit.

I’m uneasy, in the extreme, about requiring parents to dose their kids with anything. However, I’m also so extremely disgusted with, and more than a little frightened by, the ignorance and knee-jerk defiance that resulted in this outbreak.

One of my catch-phrases, Larry Niven’s “think of it as evolution in action”, certainly applies here, but it is tragic that it is the children who suffered from their parents’ stupid neglect.

Full disclosure: I have a niece and nephew in California who attended Waldorf grade school. I’m relieved that they survived, and I hope they are fully vaccinated now.

Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical, although I’m not sure Rodger agrees with me.

I’ve edited the title of this post about six times, but I think I’ve got it right, finally. Someday I’ll learn how to edit my stuff before posting.

The orangutans are stepping up the evolutionary ladder:

From The Daily Mail, via The Drawn Cutlass, via Ace of Spades.

This chap is not using very good form–the article describes him as “flailing” with his stick, not jabbing or throwing it lengthwise–but it’s clear he’s on right path. Another 50 thousand years or so, and we’re going to have some serious competition.

(I’ll note that the Mail has a rather sensationalistic editorial policy, but the picture seems legit.)

Ace of Spades points to Steve Paulson’s outstanding interview in Salon with Turkish American physicist Taner Edis.

Unfortunately, Ace characterizes Paulson’s article as “combative apologism on behalf of the benighted and backward state of Islamic science — or pseudoscience”.

Far from it, Ace.

Paulson is playing straight-man to Edis: he’s feeding Islamic-science talking points to Edis specifically to allow Edis to rebut them. The same questions fed to a supporter of Islamic science would be fawning. Here, however, they allow Edis to demolish the idea of “Islamic science”.

Case in point: Paulson’s question about Harun Yahya, whom Edis reveals to be a pseudonym for a whole network of creationist writers. This shows Paulson’s preparation for the interview, not Islamist proselytization.

Credit where credit is due: Paulson’s interview makes it very clear that the Islamist world grossly lags the West, and that if you want to do real, basic science (as opposed to applied science and engineering) you do it in the West, not in the Middle East. It’s a devastating exposé, and it’s placed where many liberal eyes will see it.

Paulson’s interview and Ace’s article both deserve your attention for their attacks on religion-based pseudoscience. But Ace needs to recognize an ally across the barricades.

[update below the fold]
(more…)

Yeah, us sci-fi folk, we’re weird, making and buying weird stuff like this plushie of an alien critter:

Except, of course, it’s not alien. It’s a real critter from Earth’s own distant past, Anomalocaris canadensis. The name means, roughly, “Strange Canadian Shrimp,” and I believe the plushie is about life-size.

Plushie here, if you read Japanese.

Via The Kawaii Menace.

John Scalzi, SF writer, made a bet with his readers that if they raised $250, he’d go the Creation Museum and indulge in much erudite snark.

In fact, he raised $5,118.36.

Eagerly waiting for the snark, John.

Buzz Skyline, over at Physics Buzz, writes:

1. True invisibility would give just about any living creature HUGE evolutionary advantages over it’s competitors.

2. Evolution is great at creating complex structures of the type the should theoretically yield the metamaterials necessary for invisibility cloaks.

3. And yet, there are no invisible flies, birds, jaguars, or anything else. (Despite that fact that an invisible jaguar would be really cool.)

Very interesting argument. But, then, why don’t we see any natural examples of quantum computing, which is based on a technology similar to the proposed invisibility materials?