The Creation School of Economics

It's often easy to point out the vile and twisted evils of fundamentalism and theocracy in the Middle East.  After all, these are places where the law is decided in accordance with the ~1400-year old dictates of an illiterate pedophile warrior charlatan who fooled an entire culture into believing he had some sort of connection to the divine.  Yet for all that I can say to condemn every Islamic nation ever to be conceived, it's hard to ignore theocratic nutbars a little closer to home.

Prior to living in the generally liberal environment that is Silicon Valley, I'd worked and lived in Texas for a little over 2.5 years, about half of which was in Houston and about 1 year in Dallas.  While my brief experiences of San Antonio and Austin both showed some promise for the state as far as having the semblance of brain power within the populace, I did find that my longer time in Houston and Dallas both demonstrated that the state of Texas can be quite the hotbed of religious lunacy and uneducated idiocy.  This is the place where I had an employer who believed that octagons have five sides, and threatened to fire anybody who disagreed... too bad he couldn't fire every dictionary ever made.  This is the place where I came across an activist group who petitioned the schools to remove heliocentrism from school science education and replace it with the "Biblically correct" geocentric model.  Thankfully, it kind of fell apart when they started to try and blame 9/11 on Stephen Hawking (slight exaggeration, but not far off).

Well, the state's current serving governor, Rick Perry, does not disappoint.  He brings forth further examples of how reprehensible right-wing reactionaries would love to conceive a nation on the proposition that a separation of church and state is illegal and causes gay angel rape and baby-eating.

Here below, we see some examples of the sort of people Rick Perry has backing him in a possible future Presidential campaign --

Direct link -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WtJz_wj1JU

It's already troubling enough when somebody even exists who thinks that Hitler was sent by God to convert the Jews or that gay people necessarily exhibit boundless bloodlust and brutality.  But that's par for the for the course with any given religious nutbar who is so incalculably stupid, you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning.  It also isn't all that surprising that there's a pastor out there who believes that the emperor had sex with the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu (whom he characterizes as a demon).  What is truly bizarre is how they connect that to the friggin' economy.  Sex with a sun deity caused Japan's economy to dive?  When did this happen?  I see no historical record of Amaterasu coming down in physical form from the heavens and copulating with the emperor.  If he's talking about the Nikkei index being lower now than its peak, that peak was around the end of 1989, and I was very much alive then.  How come I've never heard of a friggin' sun goddess descending to Japan in order to assume the role of a royal mistress?  And how did this have any effect on the economy?  Did Tsukuyomi and/or Susanoo become overprotective of their sister and take revenge by manipulating market signals?  And why the market?  You would think an angry god would just kill people.

Ah, but it doesn't really stop at mere crazy evangelists who steal money from deluded people by amplifying their delusional state until it forms a well of stupidity so dense that it results in a black hole of ignorance from which only brain-destroying bullshit can radiate outwards and no truthful information can.  The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, says he's actually conferring with people like these stacks of human garbage over economic policy...  and he claims that it is apparently so successful that Musharraf wants to get in on the action.  Sure, Ricky...  we totally believe you.  In any case, it's not as though all that babbling with his band of blithering buffoons has produced no fruit at all.  It so happens that he has had a great epiphany, and is pushing forth a powerful measure that will get the people of Texas gathering together to finally solve the economic crisis once and for all.  How, you ask?

By praying.

There you have it, folks.  The answer to all our problems.  Prayer.  Don't bother with things like policy-making or analyzing the spending patterns or raising taxes on the rich or cutting oil subsidies...  no...  Actually doing stuff is exactly what we don't want.  Government that does things is big government, and we all know that big government is really just a commie pinko Islamofascist thing!  Socialism for the lose!  We want to stop big government and instead do absolutely nothing!  Prayer sounds about right, since that is exactly doing nothing.  It's perfect!  How did we never see it before?

Neo-Keynesians...  Austrians...  Even Marxians...  It's all over.  The Creation School of Economics has defeated us all.  And it's so simple, it requires no education at all!*  Seriously!  Any economic problem is the fault of gays, Muslims, and Oprah Winfrey.  But all you need to solve any and all economic problems is to simply beseech God and ask him to give you a job!  Just watch!  Try it, and you'll see.  If you got nothing out of it and just died empty-handed and stupid beyond all words because you wasted your time doing absolutely nothing but talking to an imaginary sky fairy, it just means you needed to pray harder.  Duh!

* Note that the wording is not that "it doesn't require any education at all", but that "it requires no education at all."  Think about that for a moment.  ;-)