Human Behavior

Stupidity Kills

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The headline reads….

NYC issues warning after aphrodisiac kills man

Why in the world would anyone need to be warned that taking the product was a bad idea? Or that they would think that sucking down something made from toad venom will get you in the mood for a romantic romp? The very last thing I would do to get all hot and bothered is to ingest something with the word “Venom” in the list of ingredients.

I think we’ll have to chalk this one up to evolution in action.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Enslaving the Responsible

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Over at Reason, the Libertarian Party of California is quoted as saying:

There’s no reason why consenting adults should not be allowed to marry so long as their arrangement doesn’t interfere with any other individual’s ability to live their life in any way they want to.

Aye, there’s the rub. With the contemporary culture of the invasive nanny state, we do not let people suffer the consequences of their own mistakes.

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Official Stupidity

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Indian pols revert to Third World type:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — India is reportedly considering a ban on futures trading in food commodities, as the government struggles to curb soaring inflation and the rising cost of food has become a major international concern.
 
India’s finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said Monday that he was considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, according to a report in The Financial Times.
 
Chidambaram said that governments across Asia share his worries over speculation in the commodities markets, the FT reported.
 
India is “facing a very grave crisis on the food front,” the minister said on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting in Madrid, according to the FT.
 
India has already banned futures trading in rice and wheat. The latest remarks from India’s finance minister come as his government confronts growing pressure at home to curb rising inflation.
 
On Friday, official data showed that India’s inflation hit a 42-month high of 7.57% in the week ending April 19.
 
“It’s indicative of the fact that there’s a real issue here and governments are scrambling to find some kind of solution,” said Cameron Brandt, global markets analyst at EPFR Global, about India’s idea to ban trading in food futures.
 
“I don’t think it’s a great idea especially given that their food futures market is fairly modest,” Brandt said. “If you take that away, you lose pretty important market signals. One thing the food futures market is telling us is plant more food.”
 
[…]

There’s not much to say about this except that India still has a ways to go to become a first-rate country.

Also, the ignorance about basic economics of many of the commenters on economics and finance websites never ceases to surprise me.

WWPZD?

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Again, from the usual source: with reference to this … TBN is a sewer, Crouch is a parasite, and Stein is upholding the finest tradition of Hollywood celebrities, and I mean that in the worst possible way.

Lots of other people, I hope, will be quoting Jacob Bronowski today, from the “Knowledge or Certainty” episode of The Ascent of Man:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
 
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.”
 
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

I’m not finished. I know PZ Myers. I’ve corresponded with him, spoken with him, and been a guest in his house. Nor was I there under false pretenses; he knows exactly what I am. I can think of few contrasts sharper than that between the way atheist liberal blue-state biology professor PZ Myers treated evangelical libertarian red-state corporate slug Jay Manifold and the way PZ is getting treated by these cretins.

It’s about time somebody started a “Christian Fans of PZ Myers” club, complete with WWPZD bracelets.

Did I mention that TBN is a sewer?

“Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna be different this time …”

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Via the usual source, why bright kids should, in many cases, drop out is thoroughly explained at America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree. It’s positively Freakonomics-worthy stuff. Turns out I knew what I was doing at age 19 … avoiding a s___load of debt and not compromising my future earning power much, if at all.

(Actually, in my case there is almost no doubt I would be both 1] making less money and 2] living somewhere more expensive right now if I’d somehow stayed in the academic world. Figure student debt into that and my net worth would be perhaps a quarter its present value, and that’s if I were lucky.)

Key passage: “You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound …”

The Talking Heads would agree.

(Related: lengthy six-month old post, Get Out the Hankies, with tons of comments, over on Transterrestrial Musings.)

UPDATE: More food for thought …