J.T. McDaniel's blog

Not a Good Place to Learn Science

I know people who think Tennessee is a wonderful place. How much longer, though? Or is it a function of age? The Tennessee people I know are all older, with grown children. Would they be as fond of the place if they still had kids in school?

Tennessee is one of two states -- the other in Louisiana -- where there is a law allowing science teachers to throw actual science out the window and teach fairy tales instead. It may actually be the only state where an anti-bullying law makes bullying legal as long as the bully can claim that his religion says it's okay to persecute the victim.

In the science classroom, the idea is that teachers should be allowed to teach the "controversy" about evolution, climate change, and other subjects. So far as evolution is concerned, you'd have to ask why such a law would be needed. The only actual controversy about evolution is whether Gould's punctuated equilibrium idea or the older Darwinian gradualism is the correct mechanism. There's no controversy at all as to whether humans represent the current evolutionary level of our particular branch.

But the controversy that Tennessee and Louisiana want taught is the old argument between evolution and so-called Intelligent Design. It's a false controversy at best. Science supports evolution, and nothing at all supports ID, which is just the same old biblical creationism plastered over with a little new illogic, misinterpretations of legitimate science, and quite a lot of pseudo-science.

This sort of law is wasteful on several levels. It wastes the legislature's time, it wastes the state's money, and it wastes the time and efforts of students when it would be far better employed learning something useful. In the monetary area, it not only wastes money paying the salaries of the people who came up with this nonsense, but it also wastes the money that will be spent in a pointless effort to defend the law itself. ID is religious doctrine, with no science in it, so teaching it violates the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights. Several other states have already wasted a lot of taxpayer money defending this sort of nonsense. People were designed by an omniscient, omnipotent creator. If we were, obviously, we'd all remain young, vigorous, and completely healthy until we were about 95, then die painlessly in our sleep. Anyone claiming there was a designer is also going to have to  admit that the designer was an incompetent boob.

The anti-bullying law is even stranger. I doubt you'll get anyone in the legislature to admit it, but the intent seems to be to insure that it remains legal for high school students to torture gay classmates by reminding them that they're going to spend eternity in a very unpleasant imaginary afterlife (as opposed to the much more pleasant imaginary afterlife the bully is expecting). I can see the law having unintended effects, for while Christians may be the majority, they're not the only religious nuts in Tennessee. How will the cheerleaders feel after being repeatedly harrassed and called prostitutes because they're not covering themselves with burkas? That would be legal, too.

And speaking of harrassment, Jessica Ahlquist is still getting death threats because she had the nerve to force her high school to remove an illegal banner from the auditorium. Or, more precisely, because she wanted them to remove the line that designated it a prayer, and a benedictary line at the end. Most of it was just a collection of non-religious, positive thinking platitudes that no one would have cared about. The letter that was released a couple days ago has the appearance of having been composed by a particularly nasty middle school student, but the content violates any number of criminal statutes. It also provides a good reminder that the only reason Christians stopped killing anyone who disagreed with them is because they now live under secular governments that won't let them. Otherwise, you'd just have the Pilgrim Fathers, whose idea of religious liberty included the persecution and murder of anyone who didn't believe in their particular Calvinistic interpretation of Christianity.

Predictions for 2012

I know this is a little late, but I've decided there is still time to put forward my list of predictions for this year. These are all based on the most reliable of all psychic principles, as explained after the list.

• The sun will come up tomorrow.
• There will be an earthquake in California.
• Someone will be elected President of the United States in November.
• Jesus will return. This will be a previously deported carpenter from Guadalajara, not a religious figure.
• A well know evangelist will be involved in some sort of scandal.
• I will write another book.
• A large number of children will be born.
• A politician will say something stupid.
• The world will not end in December.
• Love Never Dies will finally get a Broadway production.

I suppose the psychic principle involved is now obvious. With the exception of the presidential election, it would be a very odd year indeed when most of these didn't occur. Okay, I don't write a new book every year, but as the new one is nearly done, I feel safe enough predicting it will be completed this year.

As for the others, musical theater references are always handy, and there are always earthquakes (mostly minor) in California. Children are born every day, evangelists (like other con men) are always screwing up in one way or another, and politicians can always be counted upon to say something stupid (it seems to be congenital with a certain Pennsylvanian). Jesus the carpenter returning is a little more tenuous, but it's an extremely common name, so the odds are actually pretty good. It's the Guadalajara part that's iffy.

As for the final prediction--well, you expect to get at least one wrong, don't you? It would be nice if it happened though.

My Next New House?

With all the tornadoes over the last couple days, and the way that it seems the non-violent rainstorms of my youth have utterly vanished from nature, I was thinking about what my next house should look like. I figured that I needed to take the weather into consideration, because it's likely to get worse before it gets better. Energy efficiency was another factor. The weather is getting worse, and nothing is getting cheaper.

What I came up with was something like this. Not an entirely new idea, but one we may want to start thinking about as a serious contender for riding out the bad weather.

The house is constructed of poured, reinforced concrete. After the house is completed, the whole structure is thoroughly waterproofed, then covered with maybe six to eight feet of dirt, with grass planted over the whole area. This does, of course, mean that the homeowner will have to add "mow the roof" to his chores list, but I think I could live with that.

I just couldn't resist the round windows and (rounded) doors. If I ever build this thing, I supposed I'd end up settling for the usual types instead. If you don't get the joke, just ask someone about round windows and underground houses. It won't take long to find someone who can enlighten you.

The storm resistance factor is obvious. With the doors and window back under a ten foot overhang, and provided with functional (instead of decorative) storm shutters, instead of having to run to the storm cellar in the event of a tornado, you're already living in it. A tornado has a much harder time tearing up a low hill than a free standing house.

Keeping with the theme, I'd want to use geothermal heating and cooling. Probably a lot of solar panels, too, stuck out behind the house out of sight from the road. Those would obviously be vulnerable in a storm, but they can be replaced easier than people or the decades of personal items you'll have accumulated  inside the house.

I do want a fireplace in the living room. One with high end electric logs. Want to keep that carbon footprint down. The whole design of this place emphasizes that. Dirt isn't a great insulator, but eight feet of it is sufficient that, in most parts of the country, the actual concrete outer shell of the structure will never reach the freezing point in winter. It should also help keep things cool in the summer.

People like straight walls, and the most structurally sound form for this sort of house in more dome-like, so the one thing that shouldn't be lacking is storage space. There would be all sorts of room to tuck things away in the big cavities behind the exterior walls. On the inside, I doubt you would even be able to tell you were living in what amounts to a three bedroom bunker.

On the First Amendment

Why does the Bill of Rights begin with the First Amendment? It has to, of course, but why is this particular amendment first and not one of the others? It's first because the men who created the  Constitution and Bill of Rights--in particular, James Madison--recognized that it was the most important.

We need to remember that the Bill of Rights was never intended to grant rights. Madison and the others worked from the premise that these rights were innate. The Bill of Rights didn't give you these rights, it stated in no uncertain terms that these were rights you already had, and the government was never to be allowed to take them away.

Recently, the First Amendment has come under attack yet again. The most vocal of its enemies are often those who most loudly claim to be defending it, and this time is no different.

When it comes to religion, the First Amendment contains two equally important, but to some minds conflicting clauses. First there is the establishment clause, immediately followed by the free exercise clause. Both are frequently misinterpreted or ignored, but the establishment clause is probably attacked more often.Usually by those who feel that the free exercise clause is the only one that counts (as long as it's their religion being exercised).

The most literal meaning of the establishment clause is that Congress is forbidden to establish an official religion for the United States. A lot of very loud fundamentalist Christians think it should be limited to precisely that and nothing more. They feel that religious involvement in government is just fine, as long as no one is trying to declare the United States as officially Baptist, or Methodist, or Catholic, or whatever. They have no trouble at all with the idea that there should be no official Church of the United States, not least because  you'd never get them to agree on which denomination should get the franchise.

Madison, who would certainly be the expert on original intent, had a much broader idea in mind. His actions as President, as well as his writings when out of office, make it quite clear that the intent of the First Amendment is that there should be no government support of religion, nor of anything that might create the impression of such support. Religion wasn't to be harmed or hindered, but it was to be left to thrive or whither on its own. Madison vetoed measures that would have given government money to churches for the purpose of poor relief (he would certainly have vetoed the current faith base initiatives), and another measure that would have spent government money printing copies of scripture. After leaving the White House, he also expressed the opinion that paying chaplains for the legislature out of government funds was certainly unconstitutional, though he was willing to allow the chaplains as long as the legislators paid them out of their own pockets.

One  could easily say the same for military chaplains. There's no good reason for the government to pay them when they could just as easily be paid by their denominations, or out of the collection plate. There are probably some television evangelists who could provide the entire military chaplaincy budget for a year by donating their take for a couple months. True, the chaplains would no longer be military officers, but most of them don't act like officers anyway, and they've never been allowed to command troops or carry weapons.

Well, that's not going to change. Congress and the military will continue to have chaplains based on nothing more than precedent. Madison himself recognized that the legislative chaplains would probably get to keep their jobs simply because they were already established (and even then you couldn't expect legislators to pay for things themselves).

The real First Amendment battleground is in the schools. In Rhode Island recently a student went to court to remove a prayer banner from the auditorium. The school had an easy compromise offered, simply remove the word "prayer" from the title, the invocation "Our Heavenly Father," and the "amen" at the end. The rest of the prayer was a simple collection of platitudes to which there could be no objection.

But rather than compromise, the school decided to fight it out in court where, predictably, they lost. Official school prayers, whether led by faculty members, or just presented silently to the students, have been illegal since 1962. The result is that the banner remains in the auditorium, covered over pending an appeal, and the student has to be accompanied to school by police to insure her safety. The death threats were probably as predictable as the court decision. The church has always simply killed its enemies whenever it had the power, and many school kids are barely civilized to begin with. Still, much as some would like to limit the scope of the First Amendment, Madison's view continues to prevail. Government cannot be seen as supporting religion.The Founding Fathers had recently fought a war to escape from an oppressive government with an official religion, and they weren't about to allow the same sort of theological tyranny to compromise their vision of a secular nation.

The other area where fundamentalists continue to attack the First Amendment is school biology classes. The Indiana senate yesterday passed a bill that would "allow" teachers to introduce religious explanations whenever they discuss the origins of life. Creationists are as relentless as they are wrong. Despite the minor detail that the development of life, and even the existence of the universe, can now be explained without the requirement of supernatural input, the fundamentalists aren't about to give up the struggle. Particularly, their clergy aren't about to give up. After all, they recognize that reducing the supernatural to coincidence, misapprehension, and myth also means they'll have to go out and start earning an honest living.

Get a free book

Starting at midnight tonight, and for the next 24 hours, Kindle owners can get a free copy of my new book, This and That. If you love it, feel free to write a glowing review. If you hate it, well, it was free, so just keep it to yourself and go complain about something you actually had to pay for.

Up to this point, I have mostly written novels and edited history books. With this one you get a short story collection, followed by autobiography, and finishing up with all sorts of stuff ranging from the silly to the infuriating. I suppose some would be well advised to just quit reading when they get to the religion section, as I don't want anyone showing up in my front yard with a stake and firewood.

I had fun with the stories. As you might expect, I started out with a submarine story. Then I let the subjects range a bit, so besides the Navy, you get some mystery, some horror, a bit from the Army Air Forces, and baseball. I happen to like baseball, particularly if it's the Indians or, at the AAA level, the Clippers. What's not to like about the Clippers? They've only won the AAA championship two years in a row now, even with the Indians calling up their best players late in the season.

There's a certain amount of childhood in the autobiography. Not a lot of it. Every time I watch Glee I find myself thinking it's nice we didn't have any dumpsters handy. I was actually pretty good at getting out of a locker from the inside. There's a lot more about New York and Cleveland theater in the early 1970s. You'll also find some stuff about Viet Nam. Not my favorite place, all things considered, though you do get to hear about Sebastian Cabot's arse. I liked Japan a lot better.

The Real Problem with Climate Change

The real problem with global warming, or with the more generic term climate change, isn't the science. Even the most skeptical religious fundamentalist—yes, I realize skeptical fundamentalist is a bit of an oxymoron—is certainly capable of recognizing reality. Climates do change, and sometimes man is responsible.

The generally arid condition of Israel at the time national sovereignty was restored in 1948 was almost entirely due to human action. Specifically, to the presence of numerous Arabs and their even more numerous goats. Overgrazing had stripped most of the vegetation, allowing the topsoil to erode. In Roman time Israel was noted for its fertility, and was a net exporter of grain and other agricultural products. Goats have been responsible for creating a lot of barren land over the centuries.

The real problem with climate change is the inate skepticism of the American people when it comes to politicians. It's difficult for most of us not to recognize that the political "solution" will be exactly the same as it always is. Congress will raise taxes—or, more likely, create new taxes—to address the problem, and then use the money for something else. Most likely either raising their own pay and benefits, or funding some project that doesn't do a thing for the environment, but stands a good chance of helping them get re-elected.

Government naturally tends to think in terms of motivating change through methods that benefit the government in the short term. Voters are presumed to have no long term memories. So it makes more sense to a politician to impose penalties for failing to meet an arbitrary limit, rather than provide an incentive for meeting it. Penalties work, but the customers end up footing the bill through higher prices. It's similar to corporate income tax, which is actually a sales tax on the consumer disguised in the price of the product, and doesn't cost the company anything unless they've been saddled with an incompetent accounting department.

It makes a lot more sense to create incentives, but politicians tend to see these as a cost to government or, at least, not producing any government income. I think we need to provide some incentive to convert most transportation to hydrogen over the next decade or two. I've already suggested reactivating some of the older hydro powerplants as hydrogen production facilities, as locating such plants at dams provides both of the things needed for hydrogen production—lots of electricity, and a supply of water. The carbon footprint of a hydrogen powered car is, after all, essentially zero. You can easily make hydrogen from water, and when you burn it you get the water back (or some of it, anyway, the larger portion being converted to heat/energy).

But we also know that's not how government likes to work. Governments always prefer to tax rather than not tax. Most Conservatives wouldn't have that much of a problem with the concept of climate change if they didn't know it would be used mostly as an excuse to separate the taxpayers from their money, and that no one would actually do very much to fix the problem in return.