evolution

I usually don’t comment on things of no worth¹, but this movie Expelled, which purports to take on evolution being taught in schools, appears to be so dumb that I can’t help myself.

In it, “Darwinism” is depicted as being the cause of and impetus for the Holocaust. It’s been said that this is a form of Holocaust denial — as in ignorance or rejection of the real cause of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ crackpot racial theories, based on such scientific pursuits as the occult and Teutonic myth. True science, such as it could be said to exist at that time and in that place, was and remains only a tool, used in that case to perverted ends.

I wouldn’t go quite that far as to call it “denial” — “Holocaust revisionism” seems appropriate — but many of the points are valid.

I have not seen this film — and I don’t plan to, unless I can steal it or someone else pays my way — so I cannot comment fully on its content. I do know that the people who made it were dumb enough to publicly kick P.Z. Myers out of a first screening but allow in his traveling partner, one Richard Dawkins. If this movie is as I understand it, what it tells me is that the Dover decision put these “intelligent design” idiots down for the ten-count — they may be walking around, but there’s nothing behind the punches they’re throwing, if this is all they have left.

1. Yeah. Yeah, I do. [↩]

I feel sort of like a hack for writing this post, because everyone on Earth has already written their own, but that hasn’t stopped me for six solid years and three thousand other posts, so here we go.

If indeed the Jeremiah Wright thing is over, I’ll be glad. It was an issue, a relatively minor one — I went to a church as a teenager where intolerant statements were sometimes made, and I turned out okay. It’s fair to ask why he joined the church in the first place, but again that’s a minor issue as well.

What about Obama’s “connection” — some might say “working relationship” — with Weatherman terrorist William Ayers.

Now that we’re all finished with Jeremiah Wright, I’d like to see some questions asked about that.

Of course, we won’t — the full court press on his behalf has already started, and will be like a tidal wave between now and June; possibly after then.

The newest agent of change is… Jim Slattery. Fortunately for us (and undeservedly so), we have people like Washburn’s Bob Beatty:

Bob Beatty, associate professor of political science at Washburn University, said Roberts must be considered the front-runner, given the GOP’s dominance in voter registration.

Beatty said critical numbers in the general election would be 41 and 26.

“Roberts has been in Washington 41 years and Slattery for 26 years,” Beatty said. “It’s a battle of which person who spent a lot of time in Washington is an agent of change.”

Slattery, who lost the 1994 gubernatorial race to Republican Bill Graves, said he was running again for public office because the U.S. Senate was “simply not getting the job done.”

Slattery, if you’re not aware, has been… a lobbyist in the time since he was… a Congressman. For six terms.

We are all idiots.

I’m finally going through my “to blog” folder, giving Guild Wars a break. I’m going to be a few days behind for a while, and maybe farther if I lose patience with the rest of the world again.

There have been a lot of related articles and blog posts published recently that seem to suggest that there is an ongoing re-examination of the default educational experience, which is to graduate high school and then go off to a four-year college or university.

Now, if I had it to do over again, I’d still go to college, because it would be one of the few places where I could study math¹ . The university I went to — which is not peculiar in this regard — required me to take in addition to my mathematics courses several other courses in the name of a “broad education”, some of which were interesting, and some of which were a complete waste of my time.

To say that college is not for everyone is not an elitist argument. Rather, it is a recognition that many people feel the same way about “academic” studies such as what I did. They have very specific interests; or, alternately, they are in tough financial straits and cannot dally with a semester studying the plays of David Mamet and emo poetry (to name two things that made me want to grab the ancient desk-chair combo and use it to force my way out the room), which they could not possibly give a crap about. There are some people who feel the same way about path integrals and the Axiom of Choice.

Ben Boychuk (our pal Joel’s partner on RedBlueAmerica, the “red” to Joel’s “blue”) writes:

Truth is, many of the reasons given for going to college are bad reasons. Henrie discusses them at length. Getting the “college experience?” As I recall, that’s a euphemism for keg parties and cheap hook-ups. Meeting new and diverse people? A year of travel is cheaper and arguably more rewarding. Learning useful skills for the job market? Nope, not a good reason, either. “If the primary end of higher education were merely the acquisition of the skills necessary for success in our particular economic system,” Henrie queries, “then would we not better occupy the years of early adulthood in some form of technical school?” Yes… but there is a long-standing stigma surrounding vocational education that will be tough to overcome. It needs to be overcome, however, if colleges and universities are going to preserve their unique mission to pursue scientific research and cultivate the liberal arts. They don’t call it “higher learning” for nothing.

I’ve got to be careful where I tread here, but I’ll just say that the attitude should be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at a university and leave it at that. That has always existed and probably always will. However, I don’t know that this analysis is quite right. Rather, it seems that the university is trying to be all things to all people. Certainly the universities are still driving forces in scientific research, and the liberal arts plod on as they ever have. Colleges and universities have also become giant bureaucracies unto themselves, as well as places where young people — some of whom haven’t the slightest interest in² science, liberal arts, or research — go to socialize and “find themselves”. I’m not so sure that is helpful to the university, and I’m certain it’s not helpful to the millions of people who subsidize them with their tax dollars.

Speaking of which, does it bother you that a cottage industry has been set up to warehouse your “excess” student loan money — the part of your loan/grant that doesn’t get eaten up by tuition and books?

This is going to become a theme in the coming days (and already is over at Bill’s – we’ll get to that later), but education, like other goods and services, obey the laws of supply and demand. Let’s assume that the supply of higher education has held steady over the last several years, and then let’s (artificially) increase the demand for that education. What happens to its price? Of course, it goes up, making it a prime target for demagoguery, meaning more money is poured into it, and so on.

More importantly, what happens to its value to the holder? What does it really mean? And are other things, like technical school education, or community college, necessarily less valuable - or are they just different?

UPDATE [04/30]: Stumbled across this — America’s most overrated product: the bachelor’s degree?

1. but I would take a more applied focus, so I would have been in the actuarial field by 26 instead of — if I’m lucky — 32. That’s a difference of about $200,000 in income. [↩]
2. or aptitude for. [↩]

I don’t know if Mindy McCready is from Louisville or not (and frankly, I can’t be bothered to check), but it made the headline work.

Let me ask you this: Roger Clemens ended up playing for the Yankees to make tons of money and win championships. Do you think that these details would be coming out now if he hadn’t ever played for the Yankees?

If your answer to that question is “no”, then do you think was it worth it?

Bill, on speculation of impending food shortages:

One difference [in the relative price of food-ed.] of course is processing - we are paying the vast majority of our food money for someone else to put it in a form that is convenient for us. The cheese is shredded, the bacon is sliced, shrinkwrapped and refrigerated, the breakfast cereal comes in a multicolored cardboard box with an internal liner and a little plastic toy. So long as that is the case, America does not have a food cost problem as much as we have a packaging cost problem, and that kind of a problem is much easier to overcome…

A second difference is transport - it simply costs more to ship bananas from Guatemala than tomatoes from Hays. Some things may be going away or will become prohibitively expensive. So be ready to make substitutions.

Our system has allowed us the luxury of spending far more on packing and moving our food than on the actual food. And that has been a cushion that will buffer the costs of food so long as we are willing to make substitutions and a few sacrifices of convenience on our own part.

It’s entirely worth your time, especially now, to invest in a few good kitchen tools and learn to use them properly. It might also be worth it, if your living space permits, to cultivate a “green thumb”. Depending on others for food — which billions of us do, even in America (even cooks, thought of in a certain sense) — is seemingly becoming less wise by the day.

It is also amazing to me that ethanol is still being pushed¹ as an alternative fuel source. Its production is not efficient, and it is literally taking food out of the mouths of others, particularly those with little else but the land they walk on. This happens in more ways than one: besides growing things that could be eaten that are instead shipped to ethanol processing plants, government resources that could be spent on something that is efficient (or, horror of horrors, returned to the citizenry for same). Any farmer will also tell you about the deleterious effects of growing a single crop on a given patch of land for long periods. Furthermore, as Bill also notes, the rush to take advantages of artificially-increased corn prices decreases the supply of whatever else might have been planted, thereby raising those prices as well. Finally, when ethanol is finally found not to be the answer to the fuel question, where does that leave the ersatz food-producers?

Ethanol — “liquid pork” — is not and will never be² the answer to anything except the question of what makes a good funnel of tax money to fuel processors.

It might make me a bad Kansan to say it, but all subsidies geared toward the use of ethanol as a fuel should be stopped.

1. an “E85″ gas station just opened up in Lawrence. [↩]
2. It may be that it’s better to instead use switchgrass-based ethanol, because switchgrass can be grown on land that is not as good for producing food. But you still can’t eat switchgrass when times are tough. Is it the best use of the farmer’s limited resources? [↩]

I don’t have it in me to write about politics right now in the current climate, because I have nothing but dark thoughts to share. If I were to say¹ what they are, there is even a remote possibility that I might feel bad about doing so.

Instead, I ask you: Who’s the bigger douchebag — someone who listens to Simply Red’s Holding Back The Years with the windows rolled down, or someone who turns it down when he (or she) realizes that the car they’ve pulled up next to at the stop light has their window rolled down too?

1. like “The fact that Bill Ayers has lived long enough to spout weaselly and self-important things rather than dying in an alley penniless and alone is proof that there is no God”. What? Too much? [↩]

Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not the editorial board.

I just got the most awesome phone call from my buddy. He’s starting a week’s vacation tomorrow, and is staying up late tonight. He’s playing the 8-bit classic The Legend of Zelda on his old NES, and he called me to inquire about the location of the sword upgrade early on, because he couldn’t remember.

I, of course, did.

He ended our conversation by saying that he was “going to take a dump”, and then was “going to slay the fuck out of some fools with my new sword.” My heart is warm with nostalgia.

And the time we’re all supposed to pretend never occurred, and the people we’re supposed to pretend never existed.