Headline of a story in the UK Telegraph [h/t TomO via Bishop Hill]:
Heart disease drug ‘combats racism’
A common heart disease drug may have the unusual side-effect of combating racism, a new study suggests.
Now if only they could find a drug that had the side-effect of combating mindless repetition of the CAGW mantra! That would be impressive.
I was at an event this evening that I’ve attended for the past few years. It’s an adaptation of “Dragons’ Den” – a very popular TV program here, in which entrepreneurs pitch their product or service to a panel of “dragons” (all quite financially very well-endowed) in the hope of getting/persuading or more of them to invest in their business.
The event I attended is called “Social Enterprise Dragons” – whereby each year, three worthwhile non-profit organizations make a pitch for modest funds and/or services in kind to help them grow a business concept that is (or could be) a money-maker for their organization.
This year, the contestants included Vancouver Native Housing Society, who were pitching their “Urban Aboriginal Fair Trade Gallery“, which I think is a fabulous idea!
Is the Social Enterprise Dragons a good idea? Yes, I happen to think so … well, I did.
In previous years, after the pitch presentations, the Dragons retired to a “den” to make their decision(s) as to which agency should get the goodies, while the rest of us enjoyed mingling, munching and mixture of beverages!
But this year, in lieu of offering an intermission of mingling and munching, the organizers decided to bring in a speaker from the US, who nattered on about his background: misspent youth–>recovered alcoholic (via 12-step program)–>very successful advertising man–>discovered social conscience–>eventually landing in the non-profit sector, where he started an organization to help addicts on the road to recovery acquire the training, skills and support to get jobs. Fair enough.
Then he took a giant left turn and started ranting about the evils of “the economy of greed” which is causing dreadful problems in less prosperous nations – convinced that those affected are getting even less prosperous by the day, and are increasing in numbers. I just wanted to scream, “Where on earth are you getting your facts from? Ever heard of Hans Rosling, you should look him up and watch his video“.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he then proceeded to rant about … you guessed it … global warming … 97% of scientists etc. – and the “economy of greed”. It struck me that he may have been paying far to much attention to the “non-policy prescriptive” Green Crusader, IPCC Chair, Rajendra Pachauri.
I really wish I could have handed the speaker a pill to combat the brainwashing he must have undergone. Will I attend this event next year? I’ll have to give it some thought when the time comes.
But in the meantime, I suppose it’s good to know that for those who might be “racist at heart”, there may well be an app for that!
The View From Here 
You’re right. Any number of people could have clued (and the Dragons) him in to the state of the world: Hans Rosling (though, curiously Dr Rosling is worried about AGW), Matt Ridley, Charles Kenney, Bjorn Lomborg, or Peter Diamandis (X-Prize founder), to name a few.
In fact, they should have shown the TED video of Peter Diamandis explaining how technology is helping everyone get richer. He also explains in his talk why we focus on the negative, we are hard-wired for it.
The Litany is so hard to expunge, but TED talks offer some good starting places to do so.
The TED video of the Peter Diamandis talk can be seen here: http://normbenson.com/timberati/2012/03/08/the-world-is-getting-richer-and-thats-a-good-thing/