Should an online poll determine what is cruel and unusual?

The Berkeley County jail in South Carolina has a terrifying policy:

Our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher. They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books.

First thought: I’d die if I were arrested in Berkeley County.

Second thought: it says something about the county that they’ve had this policy for years, and are only now moving on one complaint made in 2008. The comments section on the article is enlightening, too — apparently, prisoners ought to be digging ditches, not reading, and if we let them read magazines, next thing you know they’ll be demanding vacations in Vegas.

But here’s a snapshot of the South Carolina citizenry’s views on this issue. The numbers might change soon, though, as a more enlightened world intrudes.

Should prisoners be able to read whatever they want?

Yes 22%
No 66%
It depends on the crime. 11%

So that’s why Koch funded a major evolution exhibit

I was mystified why Chief Teabagger David Koch would invest so much in a Smithsonian exhibit on human evolution — usually those knuckledraggers object to people putting their ancestry on display. An explanation is at hand, though: his big issue is denying the significance of global climate change, and the exhibit is tailored to make climate change look like a universal good.

There are some convincing examples of the subterfuge being perpetrated. There is a big emphasis on how evolutionary changes were accompanied by (or even caused by) climate shifts, which evolutionary biologists would see as almost certainly true, and so it slides right past us. But, for instance, what they do is illustrate the temperature changes in a graph covering the last 10 million years, which makes it easy to hide the very abrupt and rapid rise in the last few centuries. They also elide over an obvious fact: we’d rather not experience natural selection. Climate change may have shaped our species, but it did so by killing us, by pushing populations around on the map, by famine and disease, by conflict and chaos. Evolution happened. That doesn’t mean we liked it.

I suppose it wouldn’t leap out at an evolutionary biologist because it is true: there have been temperature fluctuations and long term changes that have hit our species hard, and nobody is denying it. However, it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that we should therefore look forward to melting icecaps and flooding seaboards and intensified storms. It’s probably also worth pointing out that our technological civilization is certainly more fragile than anything we’ve had before. The fact that we could be knocked back to a stone age level of technology without going extinct is not a point in favor of welcoming global warming.

Now we have a new question: how did this devious agenda get past the directors of the Smithsonian?

Michael Behe’s son has a surprise

He’s come out: Behe’s son has abandoned Catholicism and is an atheist.

It’s actually a bit sad: he comes right out and says that he’s an anti-theist, but that he’s never told his parents (I guess the news is out now!). It also sounds like he’s a bit estranged from his father, saying “I really dislike my father”. He’s still living with them, but is “quarantined” in the basement so he doesn’t contaminate his brothers and sisters with his weird godless ideas.

It’s a very interesting discussion, but I just have to say that seeing fathers and sons unreconciled, even if the father is a bit squirrely, is rather depressing to me. I simultaneously want to praise the younger Behe for being smart and articulate, and also urge him to make peace with his family while he can.

Disillusionment

“Oh,” I thought, “I’ve never seen a video of George Bernard Shaw before,” so I clicked on the link.

I’ve never had my opinion of someone plummet so rapidly.

I was also thinking that he looks pretty old here, and probably can’t carry hod or dig ditches well enough to earn his keep, so maybe someone should have euthanized him.

New Mexico: Don’t vote for Steve Pearce

It’s so easy to find candidates who are unqualified for office. I wish it were easier to find good candidates. I was sent the campaign page for this Republican bozo in New Mexico, and one of the important issues he addresses is the atheist effort to outlaw prayer.

Christians are just sick and tired of turning the other cheek while our courts strip us of all our rights. Our parents and grandparents taught us to pray before eating, to pray before we go to sleep. Our Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. Now a handful of people and their lawyers are telling us to cease praying.

God, help us. And if that last sentence offends you, well, just sue me.

The silent majority has been silent too long. It’s time we tell that one or two who scream loud enough to be heard that the vast majority doesn’t care what they want. It is time that the majority rules! It’s time we tell them, “You don’t have to pray; you don’t have to say the Pledge of Allegiance; you don’t have to believe in God or attend services that honour Him. That is your right, and we will honour your right; but by golly, you are no longer going to take our rights away. We are fighting back, and we WILL WIN!”

God bless us one and all…Especially those who denounce Him, God bless America and Canada, despite all our faults We are still the greatest nations of all. God bless our service men who are fighting to protect our right to pray and worship God.

I almost hate to break the news to him. There are no godless laws criminalizing prayer. There aren’t even any atheists trying or hoping to make prayer illegal. Go ahead — you want to pray before a football game, no one is stopping you. You want to pray before eating and sleeping, and you want to teach your kids to do that, too, then you may.

All we plan to take away is your privilege of being able to seize a bullhorn as a public official, and in your official capacity order everyone else to pray. If Pearce were actually sincere in his claim that he wants to tell us that we don’t have to pray, then there is no issue here. But of course, he’s not sincere. He wants to win a secular public office so he can bray that this is a Christian nation, and put his superstitions about God into our government.

So that makes him a lying sack of soggy sewage and an idiot, which ought to disqualify him for office if it weren’t for the fact that too often those seem to be prerequisites for getting elected.

Does everything have to be laced with religion?

The Smithsonian has opened a new permanent Hall of Human Origins exhibit, which means I need to get out to Washington DC sometime. Unfortunately, it gets a mixed review from Greg Mayer. It sounds like the museum faced the standard dilemma of whether to emphasize information or interaction, and parts of the exhibit steered a little too far in the direction of interactive fluffiness. It also has some underlying weirdness: the hall was funded by a Tea Party bigwig, David Koch, and it also had a “Broader Social Impacts Committee” of mostly religious advisors, which is just plain odd — what was their purpose? Was the USNM trying to intentionally filter the information, somehow?

Jerry Coyne looks a little deeper at that part of the exhibit, and there is a lesser subtone of pandering to religion, and while it doesn’t overwhelm the story at all, there’s still an element of turning an exhibit on the science of evolution into an opportunity to promote theology. Which may partly explain why a wealthy kook like Koch was willing to throw money at it.

Isn’t this an abuse of power?

Do something, Virginia. Your attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, is on an absurd crusade against Michael Mann and the University of Virginia. His previous attempt to defame Mann with accusations of fraud was recently shot down in the courts, but now he has thrown another pile of accusations at him, all just as pointless.

The attorney general’s logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend — all because he does not like what science says about climate change. Among other things, the attorney general demands that U-Va. turn over any correspondence it may have between Mr. Mann and 39 other scientists. Mr. Mann points out that among those Mr. Cuccinelli did not list by name are the two other researchers on the African savannah research grant that the attorney general is supposedly investigating.

What is this farce costing? To defend itself from Mr. Cuccinelli’s investigation into the distribution of a $214,700 research grant, the University of Virginia has spent $350,000, with more to come, and that doesn’t count the taxpayer funds Mr. Cuccinelli is devoting to this cause. Sadly, though, that’s the smallest of the costs. The damage to Virginia’s reputation, and to its universities’ ability to attract and retain top-notch faculty and students, will not be easily undone.

It seems to me that a recall is long past due, and that someone ought to sic an army of lawyers on the real phony here: Ken Cuccinelli.

Fear them: students writing on the web again

Once again, my developmental biology students generate some science content for the web.

They also address the minor contretemps that arose last time over the fact that they are competent to handle themselves on the web. Rev. Frost reassures us that he’s not evil. But wouldn’t he say that even if he were?

SciFri on the chopping block?

I will suspend my contempt for the HuffPo for one brief moment to link to an important message: Science Friday is being starved to death. Here’s what Ira Flatow says:

We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying they love what we do, we are sorely needed, but it’s not their job to fund us. At the same time, NPR has said the same thing, telling us that if we want to stay on the air, etc, we now have to raise all our own money. Despite what listeners may think, NPR only gives us about 10 percent of our funding.

Oh, man. This month I’m hitting you up to contribute to DonorsChoose, and now I have to suggest that you might also donate to Science Friday. It’s as if our culture is busily throwing away our science education infrastructure, and it’s all being thrown on the backs of a few. A few elites, of course, but still…