Vox Popoli

Go on, accuse him of being an evangelical Christian or whatever, make his day:

I think it a shame that discussion of evolution usually boils down to a pledge of allegiance either to Darwin or to the handling of snakes. This view admirably distracts attention from the observation that much of Darwinism doesn’t square with observation or even make sense. Religion has nothing to do with it, being an innocent bystander. I recently read Understanding Human History, by Michael Hart, which deals with the influence of intelligence on history. Hart is an astrophysicist, and his book is well worth reading—except when he deals with evolution, when he goes ditzy. They all do….

The entire Darwinian structure rests on the willingness to accept wild theories without examination.

Of course, by “theories” he is referring to the English language sense of the word:

“contemplation or speculation“, “guess or conjecture“

It’s pretty obvious that “a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena” can’t possibly apply, given the contradictory incoherencies of many evolutionary “explanations” and “stable strategies” for observed phenomena. As some noted yesterday, it is the infinitely pliable nature of evolutionary theory that indicates its fundamentally non-scientific nature. There are, of course, useful aspects of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, however, those aspects are almost entirely the part known as Mendelian genetics and have always stood quite nicely on their own.

He’d be thinking thusly:

Barack Obama can’t carry Florida. Can’t carry Ohio. Now we see he can’t carry Pennsylvania. Exit polls suggest that regular churchgoers don’t like him. Older white women don’t like him. He even lost white voters aged 18-29!

Doesn’t that make him look like a probable loser in November?

Yes, African Americans and upscale liberals will be annoyed if I prefer Hillary over him. But I don’t think we are in much danger of losing the African American and upscale liberal vote. The downscale white vote however – that’s important, that’s unpredictable, and if we nominate him, it looks like it may be gone.

He should have stopped his analysis there, because his “stronger” case for Obama leaves out the massive personal benefits that accrue to the party players when they raise one of their own to the Cherry Blossom Throne. Those trump any fears of retribution from the toothless black wing of the party.

As a general rule, the candidate who most benefits from visible youth support will lose the nomination. JFK being the obvious exception.

The New York Times mindlessly calls for tax hikes:

To restore the health of the budget, let alone keep ambitious campaign pledges for spending more money, the next president, regardless of which party wins, will have to tax the American people more than any of the candidates has been willing to admit.

Now, I’m not a Keynesian myself. But the New York Times, to the extent that they understand economics at all, have long taken a fundamentally Keynesian view. And from the Keynesian perspective, the one thing that you absolutely do not do in a recession is to tighten fiscal policy by raising taxes or cutting spending, a recession is the one time that you’re actually supposed to INCREASE the federal deficit in order to smooth out the business cycle. The editorial is clearly talking about recessionary times; it even explicitly mentions this being a time of “economic crisis”.

Newspaper editors are so economically illiterate that they can’t even manage to produce coherent idiocies.

Unsurprisingly, there is confirmation that the original “Sarah” call was a fraudulent one:

A mobile phone number used to make calls that triggered a mass raid on a Texas polygamist compound has been traced to a woman in Colorado with a history of making allegedly false claims of abuse.

If the Texas authorities were following due process, every kidnapped child would already be back with his parents. But, as we know, the judge and the CPS have no interest in following the law when there are what they laughably claim to be “the interests of the child” to justify doing whatever they decide to do. What we’re seeing in Texas is not the rule of law, it is the rule of tooth and claw.

Instapundit suggests that “This thing seems to be turning into a major disaster for the authorities”, and as the Volokh Conspiracy points out: “It’s time for a nationally prominent civil liberties attorney to get involved.”

This one is a solo job, and as I intimated before, should serve as sufficient evidence explaining why I don’t aspire to radio stardom. Henceforth, I’m going to go to an every other week schedule, which should give me enough time to offload some of the production work to the Ilk who volunteered and actually schedule interviews before the last minute. But there still might be some useful things to consider here in the fifth podcast.

Recommended Reading:

The Wealth of Nations

Food Alarmism

I’m sure all the TENS enthusiasts won’t be at all reluctant to abandon their little theory now:

Theory predicts that it should be impossible for any species to survive in such circumstances. According to Muller’s Ratchet, a law devised by Hermann Joseph Muller, an American biologist, without the genetic reshuffling of sexual reproduction, an asexual population will accumulate mutations which over many generations should spell its doom.

The Amazon molly defies that analysis. After devising mathematical models which describe the evolutionary process, researchers at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh calculated that the fish, which has a life cycle of a year, should have died out 50,000 years ago.

One thing that is annoying about evolutionists is the way that many of them declare they would be happy to abandon it if it were falsified. But every time a genuine falsification is produced, the theory is promptly respun sans substantive modification in such a manner as to dance around the previous falsification. Does anyone truly believe that a single TENS believer would abandon the faith if Haldane’s proverbial rabbit fossils in the Precambrian were found? There are many different reasons that the Molly fish may not, in fact, falsify the theory. But is there a single evolutionary adherent who will disavow it in the absence of those reasons? I doubt it… because it is first and foremost a matter of faith, not science.

Dr Myers, meanwhile, points out that evolution only requires 30 generations. So, now we’ve got a good falsification model for testing a hypothesis based on the theory. Given the reproductive cycles of rats, we can have conclusive proof or falsification of evolutionary theory within five years by seeing if we can turn rats into cud-chewing herbivores or not.

Evolution created something new, and it did it quickly (about 30 generations), and the appearance was documented. It’s still just a lizard, but we expected nothing else — and it’s now a lizard with novel adaptations for herbivory.

I look forward to the innovative excuses offered for why we can’t actually test the model’s predictions….

MVO has a question:

My wife and I homeschool a 14-year-old. He wants to be a video game designer. The lot falls to me to teach him programming. I’m marginally proficient in html with a little java script. I program cnc machinery as part of my job. What is the natural progression of programming languages I should introduce him to?

Flash then Java then C++? I don’t know, not being a programmer myself. It’s probably worth noting that there are fewer professional game designers than NFL players, but good programmers seldom find it hard to find a job.

The Texas kidnapping outrage grows ever more surreal:

CPS spokesman Darrell Azar said it doesn’t matter if the original call turns out to be a hoax. “What matters is what we found there. We found a number of children as young as 13 who were being married and were giving birth to children and who were sexually abused and the judge agreed,” Azar said…. In a sign of continuing chaos surrounding the case, DFPS on Monday revised the number of children in protective custody from 416 to 437.

Translation: We can’t count the number of children properly, but we guarantee the rest of the evidence we obtained as the result of a fraudulent, anonymous telephone call is rock solid.

I’d be surprised if a single criminal charge was filed as a result of this outrage except possibly against the original phone caller… although the CPS agents and the judge certainly should be put on trial for kidnapping, among other things.

Brussels eliminates England on St. George’s Day:

The new European plan splits England into three zones that are joined with areas in other countries. The “Manche” region covers part of southern England and northern France while the Atlantic region includes western parts of England, Portugal, Spain and Wales.

The North Sea region includes eastern England, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and parts of Germany. A copy of the map, which makes no reference to England or Britain, has even renamed the English Channel the “Channel Sea”…. German ministers claimed that the plan was about “underlying the goal of a united Europe” to “permanently overcome old borders” at a time when the “Constitution for Europe needs to regain momentum”.

In the course of history, there are few things more common than a smaller political entity being swallowed up and its identity subsumed by a larger one. What happened to Burgundy and Castille and Athens is happening to England today, the only difference is that the English people don’t fully realize it yet. Unfortunately, it is probably too late for them already, or it will be once the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty comes into effect.

Again, I repeat the statement I first made in 2003. Hillary Clinton will be the next president. Those who point out that she can’t win because she can’t get enough delegates don’t understand that the entire purpose of the superdelegates is to shut down the democratic primary process:

With neither candidate able to get the 2,025 delegates needed to win the party’s nomination, tonight’s win in Pennsylvania will bolster Clinton’s argument to superdelegates — the 795 Democratic party officials and members of Congress who may ultimately decide the nomination.

The fact that Obama has more delegates is totally irrelevant. He can’t get enough to win, so the matter goes to the superdelegates. They are not about to put their bets and connections to central power on such an obvious loser in November. Winning 95 percent of the black vote isn’t going to make up for getting slaughtered by whites and Hispanics, who simply will not support an elitist African supremacist with a gift for both oratory and untimely gaffes. Obama was supposed to give Hillary a run for her money and make her look electable; now that he has accomplished that and even some Republicans see her as the least of three evils, her accession to the Cherry Blossom Throne is all but guaranteed.

In case you still haven’t grasped The Narrative, they’ll even spell it out for you: Hillary Clinton has her Rocky Balboa moment in Pennsylvania.