In brief: Chris Comer, director of science curriculum, was pushed out after she sent an e-mail promoting a local talk by the author of “Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design“. Comer merely sent a notice about the talk as an “FYI.”

The School board tried to claim that she was dismissed (after 9 years) for spamming this email. It probably had nothing to do with her testimony in the Dover trial. A quick search of the news shows that both liberals and conservatives are aghast at this development, so close on the heels of the embarrassment in PA.

This National Center for Science Education report contains the “offending” email at the bottom of a concise summary of this shameful (yet somehow predictable) event. I wish the forwards that I regularly receive were as concise and clear as this email.

MensNewsDaily.com who boast: “in the Top 75 Right-of-Center Websites for 2007″ reports:

The advocacy group Texas Citizens for Science have released a statement saying, in part, “The real reason [Comer] was forced to resign is because the top TEA administrators and some SBOE members wanted her out of the picture before the state science standards—the science TEKS—were reviewed, revised, and rewritten next year. Plans are underway by some SBOE members and TEA administrators to diminish the requirement to teach about evolutionary biology in the Biology TEKS and to require instead that biology instructors ‘Teach the Controversy’ about the ‘weaknesses’ of evolution, that is, teach the Creationist-inspired and -created bogus controversy about evolution that doesn’t exist within legitimate science.”

It seems that Texas is determined to join Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the contest for most laughable academic standing in science. But we know the caliber of Texas politicians quite well, by now.

Advertisement (almost a full page ad) for a huge new casino opening soon in St. Louis, published in the November 30, 2007 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

I didn’t know that happiness was so easily achieved.  And from this ad, it appears that everyone comes out ahead at the casino.

In October 2007, James E. Hansen testified with regard to an application to build a new coal-burning plant in Iowa.  Hanson is the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and senior scientist in the Columbia University Earth Institute.  He said some harsh things about our substantial dependence on coal:

Global warming from continued burning of more and more fossil fuels poses clear dangers for the planet and for the planet’s present and future inhabitants. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO2 in the air. Saving the planet and creation surely requires phase-out of coal use except where the CO2 is captured and sequestered (stored in one of several possible ways).

Hundreds of millions of people live less than 20 feet above sea level. Thus the number of people affected would be 1000 times greater than in the New Orleans Katrina disaster. Although Iowa would not be directly affected by sea level rise, repercussions would be worldwide. Ice sheet tipping points and disintegration necessarily unfold more slowly than tipping points for sea ice, on time scales of decades to centuries, because of the greater inertia of thick ice sheets. But that inertia is not our friend, as it also makes ice sheet disintegration more difficult to halt once it gets rolling. Moreover, unlike sea ice cover, ice sheet disintegration is practically irreversible . . .

The biologist E.O. Wilson (2006) explains that the 21st century is a “bottleneck” for species, because of extreme stresses they will experience, most of all because of climate change. He foresees a brighter future beyond the fossil fuel era, beyond the human population peak that will occur if developing countries follow the path of developed countries and China to lower fertility rates. Air and water can be clean and we can learn to live with other species of creation in a sustainable way, using renewable energy. . .

Coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact. Increased fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, compared to the pre-industrial atmosphere, is due 50% to coal, 35% to oil and 15% to gas. As oil resources peak, coal will determine future CO2 levels. Recently, after giving a high school commencement talk in my hometown, Denison, Iowa, I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried. For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

[Emphasis added]. Hansen’s comments led to these comments by David Roberts of Grist:  (more…)

I’ve just read a good book about genetics. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. There is much food for thought in this book. One reviewer called it “A Primer of Evolutionary Theory for Beginners”, and this is accurate. One doesn’t need to know chemistry or physics to follow his reasoning, because he teaches the most necessary pieces.

Basically, this book examines what has turned up in studying the genomes of various species over the last couple of decades, as well as tracing genes from generation to generation in the same family line. It starts with a simple introduction to what DNA is, how it works, and how we know this. Then it gradually leads one to understand how genes transform from one generation to the next, and how this leads to speciation.

Basically, ever-present radiation, random chemistry, and aggressive biology cause frequent single-letter changes in DNA. Also RNA copy-and-paste errors regularly drop or duplicate entire gene sequences. After this see Darwin for how some mutations are explicitly preserved, some are inevitably removed, and most simply languish in or become fossil genes because there is no preference one way or the other. Carroll covers all this in many examples.

Carroll presents the simple probability and large numbers theory to illustrate the surprising speed at which populations can change, and then shows functioning (or no longer functioning) genes that have in fact visibly changed populations so rapidly.

This book gives plenty of ammo to those arguing against Creationists whose understanding of biological evolution might be along the lines of the Creationist apology: Evolution: The Fossils Say No! That book seriously misrepresents what fossils are, how many there are, where they are found, and what they’ve been discovered to mean, when, and by whom. But its main claim is that evolution is a theory based only on fossils. The Making of the Fittest barely mentions fossils (outside of those within the genome) and completely supports and explains evolutionary theory.

What about “new” traits being spontaneously created where they weren’t before? (more…)

It’s that time of year again, when we gear up for the rewards (or disappointments) promised in our celebrations of the Yule Season. Christmas Time! Days of saccharine movies, maudlin songs, a hope for fluffy white snowfall that is somehow miraculously easy to drive through and falls only on grassy areas, and the group psych-up to the kind of good cheer and fellow-feeling that it wouldn’t kill us to feel a bit of all year round. Time for the Peanuts Christmas Special, anticipation of another day of overeating, getting together with people, some of whom we never see for the rest of the year, and an almost forced sincerity.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of this is great stuff. Christmas when I was a child was magic, and if we require visual and aural mnemonic cues to trigger some of that long ago wonderfulness, what harm? Personally, I don’t like It’s A Wonderful Life, but I do like the Peanuts cartoon–even if I’m not a christian, it says something important about the lost meaning of Christmas. My favorite Christmas song is Emerson Lake & Palmer’s I Believe In Father Christmas, but I have to confess that the dynamics of some of those old carols really get to me. Music works regardless of the adapted message and the people who wrote those understood human response to awe and joy.

And the presents! My word, if ever there was a season in which material gain has achieved the level of virtue, it’s Christmas.

But.

(You knew there’d be a but. Of course. So here it is.)

A couple remarks to my last post and Dan’s piece on A Christian Nation caused me to do a little rethinking. I linked Christmas to an unhealthy preoccupation with religious issues. I should clarify, and while I’m at it make a recommendation.

I believe the insistence that our public institutions be made to reflect our world view is perfectly understandable, natural, a human thing. But how can that happen when we don’t all agree on what that view is? This seems like a no-brainer to me.

States in the south have been made to remove any emblems of the Confederacy from their public symbols and buildings. Many people in those states see this as a violation of their right to express their view. As far as it goes, they have a point.

The place where the contention begins is in what that view actually is. Most of the rest of the country see the Confederate flag as, among other things, a symbol of racism and slavery. For the people in Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, and so forth, it is a symbol of States Rights and an unwillingness to bend to federalism. (Pretty much where is broke in the Civil War, in fact—most southerners, the vast majority, did not own slaves, and probably many of them didn’t care for the institution, but they really resented the North telling them how to live.) This may be splitting hairs, but on slimmer details catastrophes have occurred.

How does this relate to Christmas? Very simply. The reality of Christmas is that it has become a secular holiday. I don’t care what the iconography implies, Christmas is a time of family reunion, generosity, good food, and a celebration of what we consider best in each other. In m opinion, that’s pretty spiritual. After all, the actual meaning of the New Testament story has been transmogrified by our community needs into an idealized representation of what it means to Do Good Unto Each Other. We don’t need to believe in a deity to Get That.

And it hasn’t been about salvation for a long time. The essential religious message, for better or worse, has been “revised” into a secular message that basically comes down to “You done all right for a year now, it’s time to set aside being Scrooge and enjoy Giving.”

No one doesn’t get that. And for most of us, that’s what all the lights and the trees and the holly and the mistletoe and, yes, even the manger scenes is all about. Mary didn’t get a baby shower, so the Wise Men show up to give the kid a Good Start. The meaning is abstracted out by decades of ritual celebration so that the underlying theological message is, well, optional.

On that basis, we really shouldn’t get all bent out of shape over some Christmas decorations in or on or around public facilities. We risk becoming institutional Scrooges by standing on the letter of the law here.

The problem, though, is for those people who insist that what most of us see as the “meaning of Christmas” (whether we consciously recognize it or not) is in Error, the issue isn’t over the decorations but what they insist the decorations mean. (It’s not over slavery, it’s States Rights.) And our response…

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because when confronted by what we think Christmas means, a lot of people waffle. When pressed, they realize that what Charlie Brown rails against every year as the Commercialization of Christmas is kind of cheap and sordid. It’s not that they don’t believe that that’s what Christmas is, but that they don’t want it to mean that. They get embarrassed into admitting that, yeah, it’s the religious message that’s important, isn’t it?

And as soon as they admit that, the trouble begins and we’re in court arguing about removing another manger scene from in front of City Hall.

To paraphrase (or butcher) the Bard, Coal In The Stockings of Both Your Houses!

The commercial element will be there no matter what. That’s inevitable since it is, as they say, a time of giving.

What the manger represents in my mind is, today, a representation of the Ideal Family being visited by those who wish it well, strangers bearing gifts to the less fortunate, or to those who have special reason to celebrate. It does represent a kind of peace motif. It has become something other than its original intention. We have made it so, and that symbol is not a bad thing.

The tree was never a Christian symbol in the first place, nor most of the rest of it. Christmas is one of the most retrofitted, adaptive holidays we have, which is why it has clung to our cultural fabric so long and so strongly.

But it is, as such, secular.

This makes it like school prayer. A moment of silence to allow students to indulge their faiths is not an endorsement of a particular religion, but an acknowledgment that people have faith. But it’s their business. People privately will take what meaning they want from the symbols of Christmas—that’s the nature of symbols—while publicly we acknowledge the Community Message of the holiday. Once a year we try to recover what joy we found as children wrapped in the warmth of a group celebration that revolved around Giving. Giving of gifts, sure, but also of time, of attention, of love, or consideration, of Presence.

Christmas is not a Christian holiday except for those who choose to see it as such. It is Our Holiday, whatever world view we might hold. We’ve made it that way. The main character for Christmas to us is not Jesus, but Santa Claus. If I choose to explain this by saying that he was one of the Three Wise Men, that’s as valid a notion as any other. (I don’t, actually, but you see what I mean.)

So my solution for this silliness is to urge people to simply accept Christmas for what it has become and stop insisting that it must be Something Else for everyone. Once we publicly acknowledge that Christmas is a secular holiday—and that we’re okay with that—we can stop inflicting our petty religious-driven politics on everyone else and get to the thing that’s most important.

Being together.

He can’t be, based on his own statements. A journalist is a person who reports - who scrutinizes what the powerful say for omissions or falsehoods, who informs readers what’s really going on, who sifts through the spin and digs beneath the surface to get at the real truth.

But Joe Klein doesn’t do any of that. By his own admission, that kind of work is just too hard for him. Instead, he’s settled for a more modest goal: whenever a powerful or influential person says something which they wish the public to believe, Joe Klein will dutifully copy down that statement and communicate it to us. If two such people make conflicting statements, Joe Klein will not attempt to mediate between them or decide which one is right. He’ll present them side-by-side, neither presenting nor examining any evidence that might support one over the other. He will, however, opine that gosh, all this stuff sure is confusing, isn’t it? Who really has the time or the knowledge to decide between these contradictory statements? Certainly not Joe Klein.

This is definitely not what a journalist does. The most accurate word I can think of to describe this role is “stenographer”. So, if Joe Klein wishes to call himself a stenographer, he can be my guest.

A little context might be helpful here. Joe Klein is a columnist for Time magazine, and the latest outrage he’s provoked has to do with a column he wrote recently about the RESTORE Act. This is a Democratic bill currently being debated by Congress which is intended to rein in some of the more egregious lawbreaking of the Bush administration, in particular its claim that it has the unilateral power to spy on American citizens without a warrant or court review. (This is a felony under the FISA bill passed by Congress in 1978 - but Bush claims that he is the “unitary executive” who can’t be bound by petty things like laws when he’s doing what he says is necessary to protect us.)

In his November 21 column, Klein wrote this about the RESTORE Act:

Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi… supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

This sneering assertion was 100% false, and Klein would have known that if he’d read the bill before writing about it. Here’s what the proposed legislation actually says, in clear and unmistakable terms even for legal language:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.

Having made this amateurish error, Klein then compounded it by getting hostile and defensive when he was called on it. In his first alleged “correction,” he wrote, “I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it’s difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill’s language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.”

But wait - if Klein admits he doesn’t understand the bill now, then where did he get the arrogance to make such confident pronouncements about its “well beyond stupid” contents? Generally, when you unleash criticism that harsh, you want to be extra sure you know what you’re talking about. And why do “fierce disagreements” between politicians matter in any way? Why not just read the text of the bill? If it’s too hard for Klein to understand, then I suggest that he find a line of work other than writing about politics. Would you pay a car mechanic who said it was “difficult to tell for sure” why your car wasn’t working, due to the “technical nature” of engine components?

This limp correction drew yet more fire from the blogosphere. To date, Klein’s last word on the matter is a blog post with the truly astonishing title of FISA: More Than You Want to Know, in which he concludes, “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right”.

For the record, Mr. Klein, this is not “more than I want to know”. Klein is supposed to be a journalist. His job is supposed to be to inform the public. If he’s not qualified to do his job, or if he lacks interest in doing it, then he should immediately resign and hand the position over to someone who is qualified. A true journalist would not think, as Joe Klein apparently does, that the public can ever be too well informed.

Finally, in response to vociferous complaints, the editors of Time stepped in. Surely they’d want to repair this egregious error, wouldn’t they? Surely they’d want to defend their reputation and uphold some bare minimum of journalistic standards?

As it turns out… not so much.

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

This breathtaking statement was the entirety of their response to this matter. They later posted a correction to the correction (”The bill does not explicitly say that. Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t”). This is not an improvement.

This “correction” is a total abandonment of Time’s journalistic responsibilities. It’s the ultimate example of the trend I noted last summer, in “The Illusion of Balance“. That trend is the tendency of a lazy, irresponsible media to assume it’s done its job as long as it presents “both sides” in he-said-she-said fashion, with no examination of the evidence necessary.

In reality, this is not how the media is supposed to do its job; it is an abdication of the media’s job. The media’s purpose is to keep the public informed, to be the gatekeepers between truth and falsehood. Presenting conflicting assertions without making any effort to decide between them actually works against that goal. It confuses and misinforms people; worse, it leaves them more poorly equipped to decide the truth of similar debates in the future, by fostering the myth that there is no objective truth of the matter and that every political debate can be reduced to an irresolvable conflict of opinion.

Time’s behavior in this matter is a perfect illustration of everything that’s gone wrong with American media in the past several years. The media’s ignorant and irresponsible attitude that it’s not their job to decide who’s telling the truth is exactly how we became involved in the Iraq debacle in the first place, not to mention other catastrophic blunders both domestic and foreign. I think this is more than sufficient reason for people of intelligence and sense to boycott Time henceforth, and instead seek out alternative sources of news that have not forgotten the duties of a journalist.

(Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald, who’s been aggressively covering this story from the beginning.)

Any fundamentalist will tell you that our nation was founded as a Christian nation by Christians and for Christians. Their carefully crafted surveys show that a massive majority of Americans say that they are Christian, and therefore approve the fundamentalist platform.

Let’s look at some of their potent evidence. I pulled this fact from a Christian political activist site, ObjectiveMinistries.org

“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord [i.e. Jesus Christ] one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names…”

- Article VII, US Constitution

Yeah. I’m sure that our Deist founders inserted the phrase “Year of our lord” to enforce Christian doctrine. This was simply a declaration of what calendar they were using (as opposed to the Chinese or Hebrew calendars). But then, this site also is currently pushing “Roy Moore for Alabama Governor — Taking America Back For The Lord One State At A Time!”

Apparently the word “Objective” in their URL refers to its meaning as “Target” rather than “unbiased”. I got to this site while looking for the obvious parody site, LandoverBaptist.org. Anyone with the sense of a 10 year old would recognize that it is a pointed parody, yet the ObjectiveMinitries site has labeled it as hate-speech and misleading, and is running a campaign to get it shut down.

I suggest viewing both sites regularly, one to see what the radical churchies are up to, and the other for comic relief. Mind the ads in the latter.

But, back to my point: (more…)

How can we save up to 6% of our total electricity usage? Dry our clothes outside–hang them on clothes lines.  Unless the neighbors try to interfere, as described by this article from Time Magazine. 

Yes, there are people who want to do their part to lower their carbon footprint.

But on the other side are people who oppose air-drying laundry outside on aesthetic grounds. Increasingly, they have persuaded community and homeowners associations (HOAs) across the U.S. to ban outdoor clotheslines, which they say not only look unsightly but also lower surrounding property values. Those actions, in turn, have sparked a right-to-dry movement that is pressing for legislation to protect the choice to use clotheslines.

The article notes that 3 states limit the ability of Homeowner Associations to ban clothelines (Florida, Hawaii and Utah).  North Carolina is working to be a fourth state, but the effort is drawing opposition from HOA’s and the real estate industry.

Imagine the excitement if scientists suddenly announced that there was a new as-yet-undiscovered energy source that would provide six percent of all the electricity in the United State without any environmental drawback.   It would be the front page of every newspaper.  Here’s an equivalent idea that, unfortunately, meeting with derision by short-sighted people who obsess about a stilted idea of appearances.   So , is a clothes line ugly?

Project Laundry List’s [Alexander Lee] dismisses the notion that clotheslines depreciate property values, calling that idea a “prissy sentiment” that needs to change in light of global warming. “I understand the need for communities to legislate taste, but people always find a way around it,” he says. “The clothesline is beautiful–gorgeous, sentimental and nostalgic for many.

The quote featured on the homepage of Project Laundry List?  It’s by Benjamin Franklin:

We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.

Adam Smith argued that everyone will ultimately benefit when each person acts out of self interest.  For a long time now, economists have now shown that Smith’s view was naïve, and that even rational people will act in ways that leave everyone worse off.  This dysfunctional process leads to an over-exploitation and destruction of common resources known as the Tragedy of the Commons:

Free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource through over-exploitation. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are distributed among all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than that which is exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball to the point in which the resource is exhausted.

The October 19, 2007 issue of Science (available only to subscribers online) contains a short article about three economists (Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson) who have recently been awarded a joint Nobel Prize in economics for their work regarding “mechanism design theory.”  This theory

aims to find schemes, or mechanisms that in sure that acting in self-interest will indeed lead to benefits for all.  Today, its applications range from how best to auction broadcast rights and other public resources to contract negotiations and elections.

How does mechanism design theory work?  It starts with the recognition

that unbridled self-interest doesn’t always lead to the greater good.  For example, if the people of the town were asked to chip in to build a bridge, each person would benefit by underestimating his or her share and letting others bear the cost.  So for lack of funds, the bridge would never get built.  That’s sort of a logically unavoidable lose-lose situation is known as a Nash equilibrium.

Hurwicz explored ways of tweaking the rules “so that the most beneficial state and the inevitable equilibrium state are one and the same.”  It seems undeniable that the free market, if allowed to run amok, is destructive to our long-term societal needs.  I was concerned about this issue in an earlier post, although I was perhaps melodramatic with my title.  What kind of tweaks does mechanism design theory offer to the markets?

“It’s a little Machiavellian,” says Gabriele Demange of the Paris school of economics.  “You design a game so that in the end the Nash equilibrium comes out to be what you want.”  For example, each person could be required to pay what others think the bridge is worth, thus eliminating the incentive to lie.

The article in Science suggests that mechanism design theory has promising applications in areas such as climate change.

Unrestricted free-markets are a proven method of depleting valuable resources.  It has happened over and over.  One of the most dramatic examples is the lack of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic Ocean, formerly teeming with fish.  Nonetheless, it is commonly argued among conservatives that government is incompetent and destructive whenever it intervenes in the economy, and that the freewheeling and unrestricted efforts of individual independent entrepreneurs are our only hope.  This blind faith in the “free market” often takes on a religious fervor.

I don’t dispute that entrepreneurs are great at some things, such as stocking the shelves with goods and services demanded by consumers. It is equally clear, however, that a society with long-term ambitions needs to somehow hook its energies to those long-term aims. 

The unregulated free market reminds me of the way natural selection works.  Neither unregulated markets nor natural selection “see” into the future or “try” to achieve any particular at long range end. That which ultimately evolves from either process is not necessarily “sought” by the real-time actors.  The result, again, is often the destruction of valuable resources upon which those short-term actors (and others) critically depend.

With notable and relatively few exceptions, corporations are short-term, shortsighted self-interested amoral entities seeking immediate high profit at the expense of preserving public resources.  When they are not regulated, corporations have repeatedly functioned to destroy valuable public resources.  They are especially pressured to run toward short term profit by the unregulated hedge funds that essentially run them.

I am not familiar with the nuts and bolts of “mechanism design theory” beyond the sketch presented in Science, but it sounds intuitively correct that free markets need to be tamed and tweaked in order to maintain some focus on critically important long-term needs.

You’ll find the trailer to this new Morgan Spurlock documentary here.  Here’s the promo:

From producer Morgan Spurlock (SUPER SIZE ME) and director Rob VanAlkemade comes a serious docu-comedy about the commercialization of Christmas.  Bill Talen (aka Reverend Billy) was a lost idealist who hitchhiked to New York City only to find that Times Square was becoming a mall. Spurred on by the loss of his neighborhood and inspired by the sidewalk preachers around him, Bill bought a collar to match his white caterer’s jacket, bleached his hair and became the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Since 1999, Reverend Billy has gone from being a lone preacher with a portable pulpit preaching on subways, to the leader of a congregation and a movement whose numbers are well into the thousands.

Huffpo published this piece on a businessman who takes anti-consumerism seriously:

Travel company operator Hal Taussig buys his clothes from thrift shops, resoles his shoes and reads magazines for free at the public library. The 83-year-old founder of Untours also gives away all of his company’s profits to help the poor _ more than $5 million since 1999. He is content to live on Social Security.

Taussig takes a salary of $6,000 a year from his firm, but doesn’t keep it. It goes to a foundation that channels his company’s profits to worthy causes in the form of low-interest loans. If he has money left at the end of the month in his personal bank account, he donates it. . . .

“I could live a very rich life on very little money. My life is richer than most rich people’s lives,” said Taussig. “I can really do something for humanity.”  . . .

He calls consumerism a “social evil” and “corrupting to our humanity” because of what he said is the false notion that having more things leads to a richer life.

“Quality of life is not the same as standard of living,” he said. “I couldn’t afford (to buy) a car but I learned it’s more fun and better for your health to ride a bike. I felt I was raising my quality of life while lowering my standard of living.”

Compliments of Dana Milbank.  For those who’d like to reminisce. 

The Templeton Foundation is promulgating a set of short essays by twelve prominent thinkers and writers.  I’ve recently noticed these essays in several magazines.  Templeton asked the following question to its panel: “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?”   The answers ranged from “yes” to “not sure” to “unlikely” to “no.”  

Here’s what interested me about the project. Most of the respondents jumped in without pointing out any problems with the highly ambiguous word “purpose.”  There were several notable exceptions (Paul Davies, Peter William Atkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson). Most of the panelists, however, blithely ignored this conspicuous problem. 

I reacted to the Templeton question by thinking:  “Does the universe have a what?”  Obviously, stars and space dust don’t think.  If the “universe” (everything that exists, taken as a whole) doesn’t think, or if something big out there doesn’t think, how can the “universe” have a purpose? 

Most of the panelists must have assumed that a universe could think (or that something big out there thinks). Those panelists seems to be alluding to God.  Indeed, the Father of the Universe often slips in the back door when people discuss the “Purpose of Life.”  This tactic is always a cop-out, though.  In sum, here’s the problem with the question: The vague Templeton question seems to be either nonsensical or it is an invitation to sneak an unexplained (and equally vague) God into the explanation. 

For them, the question became: “Is there a God?”Those who invoke God as an explanation almost never consider how God Himself might have come into existence.  They take only the first small step of an eternal regress (God is responsible for X) and then they call it quits.  Nor do they produce any evidence showing how God was really responsible for the phenomenon they are attempting to explain. The people who rely on God as an explanation typically fatigue easily.  They are marathon runners who drop out at the third mile.  Those of us who consider “God” to be a human projection (rather than an independent reality) are inclined to press this issue further, until God falls back out of the equation.  Of course, not everyone sees God to be a human projection.  If we’re not careful, discussions about “purpose” end up being hidden arguments about the existence of God.  And as we’ve seen over the past several thousand years, these arguments almost never resolve on the basis of real evidence.

In my opinion, “God” often serves as a token for other deep concerns for most Believers.  I suspect that many of the panelists who concluded that the universe has some sort of “purpose” are nonetheless trying to answer some question–a real question.  What question are they really answering when they suggest that the universe has a “purpose?”   I suspect that they are translating the hopelessly vague “purpose” question into something they do understand, something amounting to one of these questions:

• Do you find your world interesting? (See the essay of Bruno Guiderdoni).
• Do you find the world to be beautiful or having grandeur?
• Is there a big invisible Sentient Being out there?
• Are you fascinated by the elegance and widespread applicability of natural laws that can be rigorously studied and tested?
• Are you happy?
• Are you terrified?
• Are you capable of an overall love of life that seems genuine?
• Would you fight to protect what you have?
• Do you want, in some vague way to the question to be “yes” because it feels right in some ineffable way? (see the answers of John Haught, Jane Goodall & Eli Wiesel).
• There’s yet another potential translation of the Templeton question—this one’s only for deeply honest people who don’t frighten easily.  It is a view put forth by Albert Camus, who stated “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”   Put into the form of a question, “Do you find enough purpose in the universe, with enough confidence, that you will refrain from committing suicide?  Perhaps the less threatening way to ask this is to ask “Do you love life?”

These are questions I actually (more or less) understand.   Based on a careful reading, it seems like many answers to the “purpose” question are really addressing a wide variety of important concerns.  That the answers are so different could suggest that the panelists are actually answering different questions.

Cognitive science has shown that any real answer any deep question must ultimately be anchored in metaphor (see here, here, and here, and here) and emotion (see here and here).  The Templeton panelists barely mentioned these deep anchors, however, and this failure constitutes a lost opportunity to make something interesting out of a flowery yet incoherent question.

“Philosophical” questions are almost always questions about the nature or limitations of language. Questions about the ostensible purpose (or “meaning”) of life are thus, at bottom, questions about the meaning of “purpose” (or the meaning of “meaning”).  To really answer such a question requires a discussion of the nature and limits of language, as well as a discussion of the limits of the brains that use language.  Most writers lack the courage, the patience, the neuroscience or the humility to chase down these deeper issues, however.  Purpose? “Yes, of course” (or “No, of course not”).  Now what’s for dinner? 

It’s just too tempting to splash at the surface when a nonsensical question is constructed with proper syntax.  The proper syntax fools us into thinking that it’s a meaningful question.  Combine this with the constant temptation to anthropomorphize the universe and then endow it with a human version of “purpose.”  These approaches are especially likely when panelists are paid by a well-endowed foundation that prefers its panelists to find some sort of “purpose” in the universe. 

“Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” looks like a real question at first glance, but it has no coherent meaning, no real world traction.  With this question Templeton showed that it’s reach is greater than its grasp. The Templeton question proved to be merely an invitation to emote or (as three panelists recognized) a request to help Templeton re-write its question. 

“Does the Universe Have a Purpose?”  The correct answer is “Huh?”

Four familiar words. Four words not even found in this form in the bible, at that. Why should we even pay attention to this ancient and revered phrase?

Actually, it dates back to a Christian political activist in the 19th century pushing the treasury to make sure that future archaeologists (on finding no evidence of our civilization but our coins) know that we were a Christian nation. It was thus briefly seen on the U.S. 2-cent piece at the end of the civil war. And then retired, not to be seen again for over a generation.

Then came the morality movement backlash from “The Gay 90’s”. Picture a disco era for your great-great-grandparents. This post-Victorian backlash eventually led to the 18^th and 21^st amendments (prohibition and its repeal). Meanwhile, this slogan started appearing on coins in 1908. There is nothing like the fear of pleasure to get politicians who need to appear churchy to move on a moral issue.

I just read an article “IN GOD WE TRUST” — STAMPING OUT RELIGION ON NATIONAL CURRENCY that suggests protest in the form of marking out the offending theist sentiment on any folding money that passes through our hands. Although it is petty vandalism, it is not a federal offense. As long as an alteration you make to money does not change its value in any way, it isn’t illegal.

(more…)

Three weeks ago, I took a 50-mile bike ride through Illinois, heading toward Pere Marquette State Park.  I kept thinking about the blog, however . . .

Remember when you were a college student who had just decided to attend journalism school “to make a difference?”  You wanted to change the world in a big way back then and the reasons were many.  You wanted to become a proud member of the Fourth Estate.  You understood that The Media had the power to change the world.  You knew that the flow of accurate information was the pulsing blood of our democracy. Perhaps you were inspired by reading the platform Joseph Pulitzer wrote in 1907:

I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

That was long ago, however, and you now realize you had those idealistic thoughts when you were young and naïve.  Now you realize that we all need to make compromises in order to get paid.  That’s why you are one of the proud creators of the various “Black Friday” articles in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Now that you are entrenched in a real job, you understand that working for The Media is all about printing the happy type of news that sells ads and that any hard critical news that gets printed in the process is an unexpected bonus.

Today, you are using your hard-earned journalism skills to tell people that it’s time to spend money on needless things in order to prop up the economy, in order to be patriotic. 

You are telling your readers that they should do their part to purchase trinkets and baubles And that they’ll need to do it again next year, and the year after that.  They’ll need to do this because we are a great country and that’s what great countries do. To help keep our country great, you reported this alert:

Some local malls report high volumes of shoppers, but an independent source says numbers are down from last year.

You reporters were extraordinarily busy with all the Black Friday news yesterday.  You wrote lots of stories, including this one, this one, this one and this one.

You wrote about all those folks who went shopping yesterday to buy Christmas gifts, “but also a little for themselves.”  (more…)

Poland is pulling out of Iraq, according to the Associated Press. 

Poland’s new prime minister outlined ambitious plans for the next four years in his inaugural address Friday, saying he plans to withdraw troops from Iraq next year but also push for stronger relations with NATO.

U.S. State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said Friday that the U.S. had been discussing the issue with the new Polish government and was grateful for Poland’s contribution.

So here’s my question:  Why isn’t the Bush Administration railing on Poland, accusing Poland of cut and run, accusing Poland of being unpatriotic, suggesting that Poland is now an ally of Osama Bin Laden?

And if Poland can quit the Iraq project without being disparaged, why not treat dissenting Americans with similar respect?

It’s time to discuss what we’re going to do about our depleting supply of oil. 

Here in the U.S., we’re doing nothing, though we call this technique “letting the free market solve the problem.”  The are many good reasons to question the “wisdom” of the free market in this context.  The consequences of doing nothing will be horrifying, however.  The first step to doing something will be to convince economists to wake up from their dangerous fantasies. 

This letter by Michael Lardelli, published by Energy Bulletin points out that those who are sounding the alarm about peak oil are primarily scientists — whereas the opposition consists largely of economists.  The scientists aren’t seeing eye-to-eye with the economists [Note:  Lardelli is a professor with the School of Molecular and Biomedical Science  at The University of Adelaide, in AUSTRALIA].

[The economists] seem to believe that the geological reality of finite conventional oil resources and the thermodynamic constraints on energy production from alternative hydrocarbon sources can be overcome by a sufficiently high price signal.

[However], there are many statistical and energy-production data supporting predictions of imminent energy decline. For example, a chart of annual discoveries of oil during the twentieth century shows that, despite tremendous advancement in discovery and extraction technology during this period, oil discoveries have been on a downwards trend for nearly 50 years (see ASPO Newsletter 73; January 2007).

Although huge, non-conventional oil resources exist — for example: tar sands, shale oil and even biofuels — harvesting these resources is likely to produce little or no energy profit.

Third, scientists warning of energy decline are seriously disturbed by this issue, for many reasons. One is the annual increase in the world’s human population. Until recently this has been sustained by increasing grain production, made possible by the oil-driven ‘green revolution’. However, grain consumption now exceeds production and reserves are dwindling rapidly. The availability of food will be further eroded by the diversion of grain to production of biofuel.

Most people lack sufficient scientific training to appreciate the strong evidence for, and dire consequences of, an imminent decline in oil production. They are easily lulled into complacency by those with a vested interest in delaying any mitigating responses. The scientific community must unite behind the issue of energy decline.

It is shocking that no politician is addressing the possibility that the scientists (rather than the pie-in-the-sky economists) are correct.  What is the contingency plan for our country if oil rockets upward in price over the next decade yet no magic cheap substitute appears?  Conservatives, especially, brush off the issue by assuring us that the “free market” will take care of things.  This is utter nonsense.  No substitute (or combination of substitutes) is waiting in the wings, such that it/they could provide the amount of energy  currently provided by cheap oil (Americans use 5,000 gallons of oil per second). At least some media outlets are starting to take this issue seriously. But not all media outlets are brave enough to mention the issue, perhaps because peak oil is such abysmally unhappy news.  For instance, notice the refusal of the BBC to mention the elephant in the room. 

In its oil prices item on the 10 o’clock News tonight, the BBC mentioned rising demand in China, the falling value of the US dollar and investors/speculation, but nothing about falling oil stocks / demand outstripping supply. What’s going on at the BBC? 

And check out this gloomy note by Llewellyn King:

In 37 years of writing about energy, in boom and bust, I have never found the kind of fatalism that now grips the oil patch.

The cause of the furrowed brows is simple: The global production and supply of oil, at between 85 and 86 million barrels a day, is straining the system.

…The most gloomy predictions come from a loose agglomeration of economists and geologists who believe in the theory of “peak” oil.

… If you think the negatives are coming only from oil patch radicals, try Rex Tillerson, chairman of ExxonMobil. (more…)

Paul Krugman points his finger at the ever-more-visible source of the problem. Our economy is extremely fragile and we are all about to pay the price–we’ll not all of us . . .

Now the bill is coming due, and almost everyone - that is, almost everyone except the people responsible - is having to pay.

[The] people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.

But another part of the answer lies in what hasn’t happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven’t been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.

Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.

They want to know what to do about all the left-over turkey today. How do I know this? I check Google Trends. 

Google has many other new functions in the works.  To explore what Google is in the process of developing, go to Google Labs.  There is a lot to consider.  For instance:

Google Sets will extrapolate from a group of items you enter, to give you additional items that “belong.”

Google Mars lets you explore Mars via detailed maps.

Google’s latest search ideas.   New ways to run searches.

At least some atheists, some of the time. This is a long passionate piece by a woman who characterizes anger to to be a sign of health.

An ad hominem attack occurs when a person attacks the character of a person rather than attacking what that person said.  Here’s an example:

“Don’t listen to Tommy.  He’s a big fat slob.”

This argument is not valid because the attack has nothing to do with the content of Tommy’s statement (whatever it was).

Tonight I was wondering whether there was a term for the opposite of an ad hominem argument.  In other words, what do you call the fallacy where you support and defend a person’s statement (whatever it was) on the basis that you admire a person and you refuse to see his or her mistakes and faults.

Here’s an admission that Rush Limbaugh was often engaging in “ad hominem” arguments in favor of Republicans (he made this statement immediately after the 2006 election):

I’m just going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried.

This statement of Limbaugh shows that his arguments for the alleged correctness of various Republican positions had nothing to do with the merits of those positions.  He simply liked Republicans (or maybe he liked other Republican positions). 

I’ve searched the Internet for a term to represent this logical fallacy of arguing for a person’s position because one favors that person.  I have come up empty.  Here’s what I propose, based on no formal training in Latin (but making reference to this resource):  ex hominem instead of ad hominem. “Ex” means “out of, from; by reason of; according to; because of, as a result of.” 

My preacher says that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.  This is true, because my preacher is a holy and decent man. 

If you listen for them, you’ll hear as many ex hominem arguments as ad hominem arguments.  Many of our justifications for believing experts is based upon this fallacy, because we don’t really know enough to know whether experts are on-target with their conclusions.  We are often evaluating their opinions on things like their honesty or their mannerisms, because we don’t really know enough to judge them on whether they are carefully coming to the proper conclusions.

When you hear any such arguments, feel free to identify them as “ex hominem” arguments.  When you get those puzzled looks, remind the people that “good” and “smart” people can say incorrect things just as “bad” or “ignorant” people can sometimes speak the truth.  That’s why we need ad hominem and ex hominem labels to describe these two related fallacies.

A proposed new federal statute would prohibit politicians from wearing their pants higher than their cu