An Iron Man open thread

By now, many of you have probably seen the latest super-hero summer blockbuster, so the time is right for opening up a discussion.

I thought it was excellent and loads of fun, although the irony did not escape me that it was about a conscienceless weapons merchant who has an epiphany about the tragic consequences of his industry, and decides to end his contribution to the bloodshed…so he goes home to build a new, super-powerful personal weapons system that allows him to beat up bad guys. Whatever you do, don’t think deeply about this movie! It’s just some good acting, excellent special effects, and a fast-paced series of events wrapped around an unbelievable fantasy premise.

Anyway, beware: I’m not saying anything that isn’t well-known here, but our amoral godless commenters might reveal a few spoilers.

No, not the bats!

I love bats — they’re almost as glamorous as squid. So I am greatly dismayed to learn that there is a virulent bat illness spreading out of the northeast US, a serious die-off that has as one of its symptoms a fungal growth that has led to calling it “white nose syndrome”. Bats are behaving oddly, starving to death, and dropping dead.

Earlier I was complaining about the limited imaginations of television executives, who do such a poor job of translating science to the screen. Here’s a story full of drama and tragedy, with photogenic stars (the bats!) and scientists doing real, serious investigative work to solve a mystery. Wouldn’t that make for great television if done well?

Maybe politicians should just avoid evangelicals and used car salesmen

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Why do they waste their time with these idiots? Barack Obama has been struggling against the guilt-by-association of having been a regular member of a lunatic’s church, this odious little ignorant rat-bag named Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Yet at the same time, McCain joyfully accepts endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley…and if Wright is a rat-bag, those two are festering, reeking mountains of putrefying rat-shit. Does the media give a damn? No. They’re also white members of the televangelical racket, and ever since the anti-semitic backwoods babbler Billy Graham was canonized for introducing the appearance of delusional piety into the hypocritical Nixon White House, it’s become the habit to defer to the liars for Jesus who brag about bringing morality to government.

And yet, someone who refuses to sit quietly as these nutjobs rave, who refuses to endorse the lie of religion, who does not suffer through the weekly tedium of sitting in a pew to listen mutely to a know-nothing air his ignorance to a flock of sheep, cannot possibly be elected to the presidency. Meanwhile, if the press is antagonistic towards you, they will cheerfully take some stupid sermon you listened to and blame you for its contents (and if they don’t want to trouble your march to election, they’ll quietly ignore it). It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.

So why not just Kobiyashi Maru your way out of the whole corrupt situation and stop pandering to the churchies all together? That’s my advice to the candidates right now. You’re screwed no matter which way you jump, so you might as well take the rational route and announce that you’re washing your hands of the whole wretched lot of preachin’ scalliwags, whose faith-based advice doesn’t belong in government anyway. Be bold! Be free of gods, or at the very least, free of god-bothering liars.

(By the way, if you don’t know how vile Hagee and Parsley are, Revere has video clips.)

Let’s not forget Hillary Clinton. She’s entangled with a far right-wing fellowship of fascists.

Charles Darwin watches television

And he is dismayed at the absence of science. Charles Darwin’s blog reviews a week’s worth of programming, and finds a near total lack of any kind of science. The one exception, sort of, are the police procedurals.

Not a single factual science programme on any of the channels available to everyone who has a television. However in the dramatic presentations it is clear what science is for: it is to help the police elucidate which American has killed which other American. It is also clear who becomes a scientist: people of eccentric appearance and manner with peculiarly arranged hair. They inhabit extremely modern, uncluttered and strangely lit laboratories, there is usually only one of them and he or she possesses an extraordinary range of scientific specialities and skills. They are sessile, but propel themselves on chairs which swivel and have small wheels, often making verbal ejaculations as they do.

It’s a growing genre, I fear: there are all these shows like Bones and the multitude of CSI spinoffs that portray this utterly bogus version of science as an enterprise that is all exceptionally well-funded, laden with glittering chrome and well-coifed and made up people, and everything is directly results-driven: like Chuck says, it’s all about catching the bad guy. It’s also very magical, that the wizards of the crime lab push a few buttons and get The Answer with impossible speed, and everyone bows down and accepts the authority of these faux scientists.

It’s a peeve of mine, too, so I’m pleased to see that Darwin and I share an opinion.

The question now is about how to get Hollywood and the television industry to portray science both accurately and as an intrinsically interesting process. Too often the media veer between two equally false portrayals: it’s either 1) a talking head reciting formulas at a camera, or 2) that boring science stuff is jettisoned for soap operas and crime set in a lab. At least the nature programs come a little closer to the idea, but even there they rarely couple the charismatic animals behaving wildly with the science that the observers are trying to work out.

Radio reminder

It’s almost time for another episode of Atheists Talk on Air America! Tune in at 9am Central to hear the notorious Greg Laden; he’s going to be talking about academic freedom bills…ferociously and profusely. Lois Schadewald will also be on to talk about studies of pseudoscience. Mike Haubrich has more details.

You can listen to AM 950 KTNF; it will ask for a Minnesota zip code to listen direct. If you can’t catch it then, subscribe via iTunes or RSS.

That gay religion

Sometimes, I am extremely annoyed with the principle of separation of church and state — it leads to absurdities, like this recent court decision that a gay student support group was was using unconstitutional tactics — it was using materials that mentioned that some religions are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. This is, apparently, an endorsement of particular religions and therefore violates church-state separation.

Well, yeah, it is — for specific subjects, like gay rights, science education, and pacifism, some religions clearly are better than others — yet because we have to mindlessly avoid any perception of preference for one over another at any official level, the more enlightened faiths must be lumped with the dumbest, vilest, crudest kinds of religions, and you are not allowed to distinguish between them. I’ve said it before: church-state separation is a principle that protects and privileges religious belief in the United States, and furthermore as we can see here, it isolates pathological, dangerous beliefs from valid criticism.

This decision could be of some concern for future court battles over creationism, too, because science support organizations clearly do have a preference for some kinds of religions over others, and actually do promote certain doctrines over others. This is a fight driven by religious ignorance by the creationists, so of course we’ve got to engage them on the wrongness of their stupid claims about science … but if they wrap those up in the protective mantle of their holy and sacred religious beliefs, this decision says criticism is violating their religious protection. Will we have to worry that someone in the court system will take seriously the claim that teaching that the evidence says the earth is 4½ billion years old amounts to belittling religions that preach that the earth is 6000 years old, and favoring those that are agnostic on the age of the earth?

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the Pharyngula strategy is still safely on the side of the constitution: I don’t favor any religion at all, I despise ’em all equally.

Two almosts

Did you all catch Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person in the World segment? Ben Stein almost made the top of the list — he was beaten by Ann Coulter, though, so the competition was fierce.

The other “almost”…what prompted the nomination was Stein’s claim that listening to me reminded him that science is all about killing people. Alas, Olbermann only mentioned me as a generic scientist, not by name. Oh, well.

Louisiana is next

Fast political action is needed to stop another anti-science bill in Louisiana. Below is a message from Barbara Forrest, who says it all better than I can.

Friends, fellow educators, and concerned citizens,

First, please accept my thanks to those of you who helped in the effort to stop SB 561, especially those who went to the Capitol to testify. Second, action is needed IMMEDIATELY to ask members of the House Education Committee to kill HB 1168, which is the House twin of SB 561. As far as I know, no newspapers have carried the story of its being filed on Monday, April 21. The bill could be heard in the House Education Committee as early as this week of April 28, so immediate action is crucial.

As you may know, SB 561 was amended to SB 733, the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” in which form it is less pernicious but still bad because it contains code language that creationists can exploit. However, the creationists were unhappy with the amendments, so Rep. Frank Hoffman of West Monroe has introduced HB 1168 in the House of Representatives. HB 1168 is identical to the original SB 561. (Mr. Hoffman was the Asst. Supt. of the Ouachita Parish school system in 2006. He helped persuade the the Ouachita Parish School Board to pass its creationist “science curriculum policy” that is the basis for both SB 561 and HB 1168.)

SB 733 will probably pass the Senate and be sent to the House, where it could be merged with HB 1168, which means that we are back where we started with SB 561. So HB 1168 must be killed in the House Education Committee, which means that we must generate as much opposition to the House Education Committee **NOW.** The bill could come up in the House Education Committee this week, but we are not sure. We need to act immediately to request that House Education Committee members kill HB 1168. And please also contact everyone else you know INSIDE LOUISIANA to do the same. We want opposition from inside the state, not outside. We want the House Education Committee members to hear from people who live here and vote here. We may need to generate outside opposition later, but not at this time.

I have written a revised backgrounder for HB 1168 based on the one I wrote for SB 561. You may download it here:

http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/Backgrounder_HB_1168_4.27.08.pdf

There are talking points, contact information, and some instructions for you at the end of this document.

A shorter set of talking points, also with contact information, is here:

http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/HB_1168_Talking_Points.pdf

The contact information in these is for ten members of the House Education Committee who may be receptive to our contact based on what we have been able to learn. If you personally know another member who is approachable, please also contact that person.

I have talked personally to three committee members and found those three very nice and very interested. Some of the committee members have been teachers and served on their parish school boards. Some are attorneys. The three to whom I talked were aware of the Dover trial, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005), in which I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, a case that cost the Dover school board one million dollars. This seemed to resonate with them. You may wish to keep that in mind as you contact them. If I may make a suggestion: remember that this is a political problem, not a scientific one. Please try to avoid “science talk.” As Eugenie Scott, our executive director at the National Center for Science Education says, we will not solve this problem by throwing science at it. We must appeal to the legislators as fellow citizens, parents, and educators. No academic-speak! :)

The children and teachers of Louisiana are being used as pawns by the Louisiana Family Forum and, most likely, the Discovery Institute, about which I have written so extensively. These people will assuredly not be around to clean up the wreckage they will leave in their wake if we don’t stop them. We have to stop them.