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One of the top hits for my blog is people looking for information about Evolution. Evolution when examined in depth is an amazing process with many levels of complexity and nuance. I’m thinking though that people are not looking for all the details, perhaps just an overview of what it is all about. In that vein, I found a short little post from Brain Dunning, and the next excerpt is from his site.
Myth #1: Men evolved from modern apes.
This is the oldest and wrongest misconception about evolution. Nobody has ever suggested that one living species changes into a different living species. Some criticisms of evolution show illustrations that fraudulently purport to show what evolutionists claim: that a salmon changed into a turtle, which changed into an alligator, which changed into a hippo, which changed into a lion, and then into a monkey, and then into a human being. Of course such a theory would seem ludicrous. But it’s pure fantasy and has nothing in common with real evolution.
The diversification of species is like a forest of trees, sprouting from the proverbial primordial soup. Many trees die out. Some don’t grow very tall. Some have grown a lot over the eons and are still growing today. Trees branch out, and branches branch out themselves, but branches never come back together or combine from two different trees. The path of a species’ evolution is shaped like the branch of a tree, not a donut, not a figure 8, not a ladder. To embrace evolution, you need not — must not — think that a salmon turns into a zebra, or that an ape turns into a man. It’s simply not genetically possible.
We’ve all seen the other famous illustration, where a monkey morphs into an ape, that morphs into a caveman, that morphs into homo sapiens. If you climb back down the tree branch, you will indeed find earlier versions of man where he was smaller, hairier, and dumber, but it won’t be a modern ape. To find a modern ape, you’d need to go even further down the tree, millions and millions of years, find an entirely different branch, and then follow that branch through different genetic variants, past numerous other dead-end branches, past other branches leading to other modern species, and then you’ll find the modern ape. Never the twain shall meet.
Myth #2: Evolution is like a tornado in a junkyard forming a perfect 747.
Well, Bill 44 has been passed into law.
What is Bill 44? Bill 44 is the ‘parental rights’ legislation that stipulates that parents have the right to pull their children out of contentious classroom situations. Topics such as Human Sexuality, Religion and Evolution have been mentioned as possible situations.
Bill 44 or “The Right to Remain Ignorant” bill has been postponed in its implementation. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reports that the culture minister Lindsay Blackett has delayed the legislation for some more fine tuning to allow the schools to as he puts it: “Our intention is certainly not to get school boards before the Human Rights Commission.”
Intentionally or not this legislation allows teachers to be brought before a HRC tribunal when discussion such controversial topics such as evolution and sexual education are included in a lesson without parental approval.
This is a gross neglect of public education in Alberta. I’ve already written about Bill 44 here when this particular travesty of Bill came out. I am hoping that the Alberta Government have realized the magnitude of the stupid (stupid burning so bright that it made it a mark on PZ Myers’s blog Pharyngula) that is in this bill and working to neuter it as quickly as possible.
Given the lovely conservative nature of the politics in this province, I highly doubt any significant revisions will be made.
It is nice to establish base definitions everyone once and awhile. With all the rambling going on in the blogosphere it seems that certain basic terminology needs a good going over. Socialism happens to be one of those terms as suddenly in the US healthcare debate it has been repeatedly mischaracterized as misanthropically evil. Socialism, like Capitalism, has its flaws but it is certainly not intrinsically evil. A system based on exploitation of another however might qualify….
I grabbed this definition from a ytube video that attempts to define what Socialism is. The video is a little bombastic, but gets the point across. Socialism is a political economic philosophy that is based on a democratically cooperative society in which the means of production and distribution are owned by the people.
Or see what dictionary.com has to say about Socialism:
so⋅cial⋅ism
| 1. | a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole. |
| 2. | procedure or practice in accordance with this theory. |
| 3. | (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles. |
I’m reading a piece in Harper’s right now by Naomi Klein titled “Minority Death March: Jews, blacks and the “post-racial” presidency. This article is chock full of blog fodder, from US/Israeli obstructionism in the UN to the denial of racism and responsibility of the ‘first’ world. One section caught my eye as it focused on Mr.Obama and the job he is doing as president of the US. The article references what one Juan Santos wrote in an open letter to Mr.Obama. You can find the whole post here.
Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large.
He is our Silence running for president –
With respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor. A Black man at the head of the White Amerikkkan State – one who’s unwilling to speak truth to power, but more than willing, like a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, to become that power and to launch wars of aggression against other people of color.
In Obama’s case the targets will be Iran (which he has threatened with “surgical” missile strikes) and Pakistan, rather than Iraq. That’s the only difference between Obama and Rice and Powell, or Bush, for that matter.
Between the Harper’s article and Mr.Santos’s own denunciation of Obama and what he stands for, it seems like the current president of the US is in a fair bit of trouble. Where is the reform promised by his campaign? It was my first impression that Obama was taking his time being conservative in his governance as to size up his opposition and his own capacities. The more I read the more it seems that Obama is not about hope and change, but rather maintain and remain the same (maintaining the status quo of the last 8 years is reprehensible) .
I hope that Obama begins to move in a genuine progressive way soon. He is at risk of losing his base of people who genuinely thought he would fight for change.
The Chicago School of thought is opportunity capitalism at its finest. Naomi Klein wrote about how that if no crisis exists then state actors will often create a crisis to get the public to accept changes that during a non-crisis period they would not accept. The Shock Doctrine is an important book that is definitely worth reading to gain a better understanding of how the world works.
Furthermore, it goes a long a way to answering the question: “Why do they hate us so much?”. Our policies toward other nations can be quite horrific at times as we encourage profit over people almost in every case. Klein’s detailed analysis should make you feel a little ill by the time you are done with the book.
See the film short about the Shock Doctrine on ytube.
This post is dedicated to debunking the whole “harsh punishment on criminals is good” mentality. This post will have nothing to do about ‘prisoner rights’ or ‘criminal coddling’, but rather it will look at the efficacy of ‘harsh punishment’ on crime in general and how efficient longer jail sentences would be. Does it actually work? To what degree? Is that degree of success worth what it costs to citizens? Lets take a look.
For as long as there have been communities, murderers and thieves have been seen as criminals. Indeed, non-human primates share this with us as they will also punish, banish or kill deviants of this kind. And since the birth of the community, punishment for these crimes has been vast, varied, ingenuitive, brutally painful, and many have been fatal. So what we have is a near perfect case study. Thousands of years worth of experiments where two specific crimes have met with the pinnacle exemplars of the object of our study, harsh punishment. If harsh punishment really had any effect whatsoever on deterring or reducing crime, after those many thousands of years of diligent application we should find that the social problems of murder and theft are all but solved, strange memories of an era long past away. As we don’t seem to be any closer to a crime free utopia than early communities (indeed, most would argue we are further away) the only conclusion is that harsh punishment is contending for the rank of ‘most ineffective idea ever actualized by any government’, which is a highly competitive race. But for those that find this thought experiment a bit too neat, lets break it down a bit and look at our system of imprisonment.
I’m not sure if this is a nation wide project, or even if its province wide, but the MP’s from Edmonton and the surrounding area have been periodically sending out mail to all of their constituents. This piece of mail consists of a single sheet of paper with some Conservative Party message on it as well as a piece you can rip off and mail back to the MP with your response to the aforementioned message. I despise them.
I am actually in favor of governments letting the people know what its doing and why, but this is not what we’re talking about here. These “political messages” are merely propaganda tools. Further (and I find this insulting) they aren’t very good ones. The message I get from the Conservatives is “We don’t have to try that hard to brainwash such a simple minded public, this should suffice.”
Attacks on other parties either focus on especially weak straw men versions of the target party’s policy or they resort to slander and ad hominem attacks, which never present a political reason why they might be a poor choice for voters. Most of these messages could be replaced by the words “People who are not us are bad,” without losing an ounce of actual content.
The letters used to promote themselves are no better. Most are void of any actual policy and only vaguely refer to some ideal that Conservatives like to attach their policies to. No understanding of Conservative policy would be lost if, instead, they just sent out letters that said, “We are good, believe it!” repeatedly.
These propaganda leaflets have bothered me for some time (especially the “free” return postage, as if it is to be paid out of Conservative pockets instead of by our tax dollars, yeah right) but something odd happened that finally convinced me to write on one of these letters. I received one that actually had a piece of specific information regarding the Conservative plan for Canada: they want to repeal the faint hope clause so those who have received a life sentence will not be eligible for parole for at least 25 years. This, they say, will make Canada safer.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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