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Should this be seen as visual evidence for the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Or should it be seen instead as problem for it?

Last week’s podcast was well received, so we shall continue with the experiment. This week’s interview is with Peter Schiff. Download Voxonomics 1-2.

By the way, if anyone is feeling ambitious and wants to transcribe the podcasts, send me the transcripts and I’ll post them here. I don’t have the bandwidth at the moment, or, to be honest, the inclination.

The Corner atheists concur. When godless atheists kill, it can’t possibly be their godlessness that’s to blame in any way. No matter how often they do it. No matter how reliably predictive the “atheist in power” model is:

I hit the trifecta — Mark K., John D., and Andrew S. all taking exception to my noting the Godless Red Chinese murdering Tibetans.

And on those occasion that atheist regimes murder specifically “in the name of atheism”, they are, of course, practicing a religion of atheism and are therefore No True Atheists. I love the way the New Atheists have been routed so thoroughly that atheists such as the Rational Response Squad and John Derbyshire are now openly claiming as atheists those who believe in reincarnation, evil spirits, astrology and a whole host of supernatural concepts. It’s a beautiful Fighting Withdrawal that abandons both the militant New Atheists and secular scientists with whom they previously identified.

In any event, Derbyshire gets it wrong. The Tibetan Buddhists are no atheists by any definition. “And although the original teachings of the Buddha do not mention a creator or other deities, Tibetan Buddhism embraces a vast pantheon of divinities. These supramundane beings derive from the intersection of many sources and influences, both native and external.“

Shake it, baby.

SI’s Vault is pretty slick. I vividly remember this playoff game and Bobby Bryant taking the blocked kick back for a touchdown.

The scoring in pro football games generally features spiraling passes from quarterbacks like Tarkenton to smooth-gaited receivers like White, but Allen won the game over the Rams as surely as Bud Grant is a duck hunter. He did it just when the Vikings were reeling back on their own one-inch line in the first quarter, shoved up against their funny old end-zone bleachers by the Rams. After a 54-yard drive, the visitors were lined up and ready to get at least three points for their efforts.

Suddenly, it wasn’t a Los Angeles field goal at all, it was a 7-0 Minnesota lead. The center’s snap to the Ram holder, Steve Preece, was true enough, and Tom Dempsey’s leg did reach the ball. The thing was, Dempsey’s leg got there at the same time as a purple-shirted blaze wearing No. 25.

A Mad Biologist sticks a philosophical gun to his forehead and splatters the room with what previously passed for his brain:

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don’t do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Buckingham, who declared, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

My response was, “In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him.”

The moral case for evolution? The EMOTIONAL and MORAL case for evolution? You can go ahead and write off TENS now, because what was once merely worthy of skepticism is rapidly approaching utter farce. With defenders like this, one need not even pay any attention to those openly attacking the theory, however credible or crazy they might be. So much for the claims to be objective science, this is most remniscent of Richard Dawkins’s howlingly ludicrous conclusion of his “unrebuttable” central argument of The God Delusion:

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

In summary, because Richard Dawkins believes we should not give up hope that something we do not currently know might possibly exist because we have some partial explanations for other things that we do know exist, we must therefore conclude that God does not exist. This is total logical incompetence on a grand scale, which the Mad Biologist approaches in abandoning all claims to the scientific method in order to make a moral case for the meaningless transition of one form of organic material into another. He might as reasonably assign color ex nihilo to the fate of the bacterially infected deceased as assign any meaning to it, let alone attempt to build a moral case for a “scientific” theory from it.

Needless to say, PZ Myers actually thinks both Dawkins’s and the Mad Biologist’s lines of “reason” are brilliant. It’s simply astonishing. And by all means, I should very much like to see these clueless fetishists attempt this line of biological evangelism, it should make for extraordinarily amusing blogfodder.

Flicka reviews The Wrath of Angels:

Theodore Beale describes himself as a writer of Christian Fantasy, and certainly The Wrath of Angels can fit into that category. I think that if you do not consider the Bible to be absolute truth then you will enjoy this tale as fantasy. But any student of God’s word will immediately recognize within the characters and story a comprehensive theology through which the doctrines of angels, sin and forgiveness are illuminated, fleshed out, and animated. And as such The Wrath of Angels is more Christianity-Imaginatively-Expressed than Christian Fantasy.

I enjoy Beale’s wonderfully descriptive style. His narrative is like the fluff of beautiful imagery sandwiched between hard slices of fast-paced action scenes. He has an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable vocabulary and brandishes words as deftly as The Lord Of Chaos does his sword. Thankfully, missing from his style are the ubiquitous fragmented sentences just to make a point, and the one sentence paragraphs as though every statement were a profundity, and the italicized sentences to reveal the mind of the charatcter that litter so many pages in contemporary fiction. Out of the midst of the many references from sources as varied as archaic literature to contemporary rock bands, along with the thoughtful, observant unfolding of his tale, emerges a unique and strong voice.

Flicka wrote this review a while ago, but I hadn’t seen it, so it was a nice surprise on the Original Cyberpunk’s shiny new site. I’m quite pleased with how Wrath has been received, although it seems I may have been a bit too clever for my own good in burying the subtext too deeply for anyone to notice. The plot point that Flicka mentions as not being explained might be a little more obvious if one understands my background in economics and my interest in currencies… there is a whole level to the novel that literally no one has noticed despite a few – quite clearly ineffectual – hints about its existence.

Remember this challenge?

According to the “scientific” forecast, housing prices were to stabilize in late 2007 and hold firm in 2008. Here’s the November 2007 forecast for 2008: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300. Wow, what precision! To a tenth of a percent! The February report comes out this week… let’s just say that instead of $218k, I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year. But what do I know, I’m not an “expert” paying close attention to the “science” of the housing market, after all.

From the February 2008 NAR report: “The national median existing-home price for all housing types was 195,900 U.S. dollars in February, down 8.2 percent from a year earlier when the median was 213,500 U.S. dollars.”

At this rate, we could get down to 175k before August.

The Lizard Queen on Alan Greenspan:

But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street — don’t ask me why because I never understand what he’s saying — but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach.

Hillary really is an idiot. Not because she doesn’t understand the first thing about economics – we already knew that – but because the correct thing to do when you don’t understand the very simple monetary policy that he is discussing is to laud his “masterful” performance in soothing the troubled waters of the markets.

Confirmation of what I wrote about in yesterday’s column, as if it was needed:

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

A cow emotes fearfully about insufficient herd immunity:

Of course, I recognize that people have a right to abide by their conscience, and I would not want public health officials to force children to be vaccinated. I just think that people who are unvaccinated, unless they have a legitimate medical reason for same, should not be allowed to use public roads, public sidewalks, or public services. They have a right not to vaccinate their children. But they do not have a right to risk my health.

But your health isn’t at risk if you’ve been vaccinated, right? What a loathsomely liberal fascist little cow! I truly don’t know understand why Instapundit likes McArdle so much, she never writes anything even remotely intelligent and regularly coughs up hairballs of asininity like this. If the vaccine industry wasn’t hiding so much information about the children being harmed by vaccines, if Congress wasn’t indemnifying both the industry and the medical personnel who inject vaccines into non-consenting children, if millions of dollars weren’t being paid out by VAERS, if there weren’t very good medical reasons to avoid going along with the insane U.S. vaccination schedule, she still wouldn’t have a point.

Her health is not my concern. Or anyone else’s. At all. End of story. If she wants to live in a cave so that no one can ever infect her with anything, she is free to do so. Life lived in contact with others implies risk. Deal with it. McArdle’s claim to be a libertarian is as ludicrous as Bill Maher’s; vaccinated or not, she has no more right to the public roads than an unvaccinated Amish child. Ironically, she is also an advocate bringing in more disease-ridden third-worlders to use those very public goods and services that she wishes to deny bad citizens she deems insufficiently injected with foreign substances.

If people really want to get serious about avoiding the spread of childhood diseases, then close the day care centers and the public schools and shop online. I’m amazed at how often kids who go to day care are sick. And there is no more evidence that vaccines are safe than there is that they cause autism, since the vaccine industry has resolutely resisted proper double-blind scientific studies into the safety of its products in favor of population surveys and metastudies of those surveys.

Don’t get me wrong, vaccines aren’t inherently bad. A limited and voluntary schedule of individual doses at a somewhat older age, spread out over time, is a perfectly reasonable program… in fact, that’s how most adults over thirty today were vaccinated. But pumping infants full of toxins that have never been tested in combination with each other, 19 shots in the first six months, isn’t just asking for trouble, it’s demanding it.

Some of you will probably be amused to note that this is one of the rare occasions when you will find me staunchly supporting Michelle Malkin’s stance on an issue.