And, catch me on this week’s RedState Radio with Susie Moore!
Bonus:
Also, catch me on this week’s RedState Radio with host Susie Moore!
There’s a distinct tendency for some clueless folks to go all misty-eyed and start drooling over the notion of “indigenous wisdom,” namely that a bunch of pre-literate savages with a life expectancy in the twenties with double-digit infant mortality somehow possessed some great store of wisdom and knowledge. They didn’t. Life sucked for those people, and most of the “wisdom” they had in matters like medicine were crap.
But that doesn’t stop the fuzzy-headed brigades. Oh, the primitives did know some remarkable things; they weren’t stupid, just ignorant.
Over the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in indigenous knowledge. The United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa have been at the forefront of the movement to integrate ‘ancient wisdom’ with modern science and decision-making by applying it to everything from public health to climate change. The appeal is both understandable and alluring. For 
millennia, indigenous cultures have accumulated a vast repository of information that has helped them to adapt and survive. Prior to European contact, the Quechua of the Andes used quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree to treat fevers. It later proved to be the first effective treatment for malaria. Salicin from the willow tree was used by tribes in the Americas to treat pain, fever, and inflammation and led to the development of aspirin. The active ingredient in snakeroot, reserpine, was used for centuries by native peoples in India to treat high blood pressure and was adopted by Western physicians as an early treatment for hypertension. From stellar navigation to sophisticated construction techniques, agricultural innovations, and hunting strategies, indigenous knowledge has made significant contributions to human progress.
Here’s the onion:
While these achievements deserve respect, many practices promoted under the banner of indigenous knowledge lack scientific merit and should be approached with caution. In Australia, attempts to incorporate the Aboriginal practice of ‘spiritual healing’ into the health system have been met with alarm as it involves a belief in sorcery and supernatural intrusions rather than biological agents. In the United States, alternative treatments include Native American herbal remedies, spiritual ceremonies, and sweat lodges. The use of these untested therapies divert valuable resources away from evidence-based medicine and can legitimize ineffective alternatives. In some cases cancer patients have refused proven treatments for traditional remedies.
I’ll be a little more direct: Rubes are being taken in by charlatans peddling non-scientific woo in the name of indigenous wisdom, or something.
Leave it to South Park to ridicule this nitwittery (yes, that is Tommy Chong’s voice at the end):
This isn’t unique to the West. In places like China, ignorant rubes still believe stupid crap like the magic healing properties of rhinoceros horns, which is creating a huge black market for smuggled rhino horn; this leads to poaching, which leads to rhinos being an endangered species. That sucks.
It would be great if these nitwits would stop believing in fairy tales. Modern medicine isn’t perfect, but it sure beats going to a tribal with doctor when you have a brain tumor.
Sometimes you just have to wonder what the hell people on the left are thinking. Now it’s your dog’s impact on the climate. Yes, really. My good friend and RedState colleague Bob Hoge reported the other day on just that. Read:
Sometimes you can’t help but wonder: how do the progressive scolds who constantly shame everyone else for routine actions ever get out of bed in the morning with the burdens they carry? They worry they’re using too much water to brush their teeth, they can’t take a vacation because the emissions from the car or plane will cause the demise of us all, and the CO2 they emit with each breath spells disaster.
They constantly fret over the consumption of meat, the use of everyday household appliances that make our lives better, and any other progress that has brought our civilization into the 21st Century.
Now the Associated Press is highlighting the latest idiocy out of the National Academy of Sciences, which has determined that your pooch is contributing to the possible death of human society:
The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most. Meanwhile, the lowest-impact actions were changing to more efficient appliances and swapping out light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes. Those were three of the top four overestimated actions in the report.
No one cares, AP.
This has to be the dumbest damn thing I’ve read in weeks – the AP’s hand-wringing, not Bob’s excellent takedown of it. Now Bob is a dog person himself, and so has some rather pointed opinions on these assertions:
If I were less polite, I’d tell them exactly where they can stick this study:
Why dogs have a big climate impact
Dogs are big meat eaters, and meat is a significant contributor to climate change. That is because many of the farm animals, which will become food, release methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Beef is especially impactful, in part because around the world cattle are often raised on land that was illegally deforested. Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas, cutting them to then raise cattle is a double whammy.
Tough shit, AP.
Look, you’re going to go precisely nowhere with trying to convince people to either give up Man’s Best Friend, or at least to try to get Fido to eat his veggies. Dogs are obligate carnivores; like cats, they 
need meat.
Besides, the relationship between humans and dogs is unique. Of all our domestic animals, dogs joined humans voluntarily, out of mutual benefit. One could argue that cats did as well, but as Rudyard Kipling so aptly noted, cats did so mostly for their own benefit. Dogs and humans both gain from being around each other; they help us hunt, they guard our homes, they love us unconditionally. I’ve always said, if anyone claims you can’t buy love, tell them to buy a puppy.
We’re keeping our mutts, AP. The climate will look after itself.
Two of our closest relatives, the Neandertals and the Denisovans, have been extinct for some time. But a mildly interesting UK Daily Mail piece asks (with some imagery) what things would be like if they were still around. It’s a good question.
Dr April Noel, a palaeolithic archaeologist from the University of Victoria, told MailOnline: ‘The idea that Neanderthals were hunched over, dim-witted individuals with no thought beyond their next meal is no longer tenable.
