Annoyed at NPR

This afternoon, as I was driving home I was skipping my Japanese classes and listening to the news. Two entries-- blurbs, really-- during the NPR All Things Considered newscast caught my attention and annoyed me.

The first was an article about one of the groups claiming to be the Somali Government in Exile. The group has received the backing of the Discovery Institute, a group according to NPR "better know for its opposition to Darwinism."

"Darwinism" is a bugaboo of right-wing AM radio. It doesn't exist as a meaningful term in biology. Nobody has used Darwin's theory of descent and selection in its original form... ever. The moment he proposed it other biologists piled on; many were wrong with their contributions, and many were right but we wouldn't know that until long after they died. "Darwinism" as it is used today is the bizarre parody of biology and evolution that you can hear on Sunday afternoon on the evangelical radio stations: monkeys-to-man, 747-in-a-junkyard, the whole straw man bigger than the final event any Burner ever saw. NPR should have done the responsible thing and said that the DI is opposed to the teaching of evolutionary biology, the unifying principle of science without which biology is nothing more than an interesting collection of facts with no relation one to another.

The other was an article on Reparative Therapy^[?], discussing a convention of quack practitioners. The blurb stated that "Reparative Therapy seeks to convert people away from homosexuality, but most experts believe no such cure exists."

Maybe the announcer wanted to put quotes around the word "cure," but quotes are really hard to hear across the radio. What I heard was NPR giving a nod to the right-wing's wish to emphasize the disease model of homosexuality, and that's just plain medieval, and NPR should have known better.

I get leet points!

Sweet! My patch for the Linux SDL was finally accepted. "Microsoft Sidewinder Precision Pro Gameport Version misidentified by libsdl" went upstream last week and will be in the next version of the SDL. Another minor claim to fame. I now have three patches in the Linux Standard Release package: one about porn, one about gaming, and one about work.

Never again will another geek with a copy of Freespace and a Microsoft Sidewinder Precision Pro Gameport Edition have to suffer as I have suffered!

Church libraries

One of the ways to get a feel for a church is to go see what they have in their library. Most churches have a lending library, a shelf with the books they think are most important to their members. The church where Yamaraashi-chan goes for choir practice appears to be a fairly liberal mainstream denomination, and the books on their shelves reflect that: most of them are either about affirming one's own faith, or about family matters. There were very few gotchas on the shelf; perhaps the most egregious was a book on "How to speak to a Muslim," which seemed to imply that if you read the Bible fast enough and loud enough he'd come to understand that the Koran made even less sense than you were.

There were only two IDiot books on the shelves: Phillip Johnson's hoary old "Defeating Darwinism," which attempts to lawyerize evolutionary theory; someone should explain to Johnson that science ain't a courtroom. The other was called "What's Darwin Got To Do With It," which is a comic book in the same bent as Larry Gonik's "Cartoon Guide To.." series (the one on Evolution is great, if outdated). The artwork was okay but the science terrible, ultimately resting on every outdated caricature of biology, that "AM Radio Darwinism" that has nothing to do with the biology pharmaceutical and agricultural scientists use every day.

There are few things sadder than seeing someone actively encouraging-- and profiting from encouraging-- the downfall of America. If, as many futurists predict, the next generation of major technologies will be biotechnologies then South Korea, China and India can all stop worrying. America is too caught up in stuff like this to seriously lead the way.