Is There No End to Inanity?

By now, the more perceptive of you may have realized I haven't been writing about pollyticks lately.  That's not because I've lost interest, it's because I've been awash in a target-rich environment.  After so many hours of exposure to ever-increasing stupidity, day after day, my poor brain crawled out a convenient ear canal and ran away.  I've been luring it back by feeding it lots and lots of science, not to mention a heaping helping of Connie Willis.

We'll have a nice roundup of political dumbfuckery later this week.  For now, suffice it to say that if a politician in this country has got an R after his/her name and is currently electable, he/she is probably batshit fucking insane, so deplorably stupid that no words have been coined which properly describe the horror, and the fact he/she has any chance at all of getting elected solves the mystery of why great civilizations fail.  Forget all those theories of environmental catastrophe, barbarian invasions and so forth: it was probably the because they let their politicians become as horrifically idiotic as ours.

You'd think this current election cycle would have sated my appetite for stupidity.  Alas, no.  It's just caused me to crave a little variety.  IDiots are always good for a laugh, and watching ol' Billy Dumbski nearly get expelled for not toeing the good Baptist line gave me the giggles.  Still, I wanted more.  So I went though PZ's blogroll looking for new sources of entertainment, and came across a site called DC's Improbable Science.

Parents: if you have ever thought of sending your kiddies to a Waldorf school, unthink that thought now.

In an article entitled "The true nature of Steiner (Waldorf) education. Mystical barmpottery at taxpayers’ expense. Part 1," we learn that these schools are repositories of quackery of the first order.  We're talking people who think the moon's phase is important to crops, kiddies aren't completely incarnated yet, and pigeonhole them based on "The Four Temperaments."  Yes, just like the Four Humors, only in this case, even dumber.

Oh, and if you think your kiddies shall at least be taught to read, think again.  That, you see, would hinder their spiritual development.

As far as history class, well, you know, "'The narrative thread for Ancient civilisations often begins with the fall of Atlantis’."

You may remember the fear of being held back a grade because you were flunking reading, math, or science.  Well, kids in Waldorf schools have a whole other set of concerns:

To quote from The Age:

“One parent, who did not wish to be named, said she moved her son out of the school after a Steiner teacher recommended he repeat prep "because his soul had not been reincarnated yet".

"I just don’t believe it is educationally sound," she said.”

Ya think?

I marvel, my darlings, positively marvel, at the sheer volume of utter bullshit human beings seem capable of swallowing whole.  I guarantee you: down a cocktail of magic mushrooms and LSD, write down the insanity that ensues, blend it with the contents of the newage and religion sections of your local bookstore, pick bits of it at random, and serve it up after having translated it from English to Swahili to Japanese and back to English using Babelfish, and you'd still find people who would wholeheartedly believe every incomprehensible word of the resulting mess.

People are weird.