We need a revolution in policing

An awesome editorial from Richard Carlson in the Strib:

Jamar Clark in Minneapolis. Philando Castile in Falcon Heights. And now Justine Damond — in Minneapolis, again.

For the record, I want it to be known that I object to being policed this way. As between the Minneapolis Police Department and the civilian authorities in my town, it is the civilians who must be in control, not the police. These days it appears to be the opposite. It is well past time for our mayor and our City Council to assert their authority. They can start by firing our ineffectual police chief. After that, the City Council should take charge of a complete overhaul of the department.

Since the department can’t seem to hire and train anything but Blue Warriors, the council, rather than the department, should set the rules for what qualifies a person to become and remain a Minneapolis police officer. If the council doesn’t feel it has the expertise to micromanage how cops are qualified and trained, it can hire experts from foreign jurisdictions who don’t think of the citizenry as the people of an occupied country. The council should break up the entire command structure of the department, and demote, fire or reassign everyone in management, because these are the people who have stubbornly failed or refused to reform the culture of our paramilitary Police Department despite scandal after scandal.

I make no exception for the innocent, if there are any, because despite their oath to uphold the law, they did not stop the others.

Finally, the council should make it known that it will no longer negotiate labor agreements with the police union (yes, my Carroll ancestors are no doubt rolling in their graves), because for years the union has done everything it could to defend unfit officers and to block reform. If these things lead to expensive litigation by retrograde elements in the department, feel free to increase my taxes to pay for it. It’s time to decide who runs this town — the citizens, or the schoolyard bullies in uniform.

I’d like to think that a thorough overhaul of the Minneapolis Police Department and its policies will not be happening just because this time the victim is a white woman who holds citizenship in a predominantly white first-world country and who was shot in an affluent white neighborhood, rather than a black or American Indian person shot in downtrodden north Minneapolis. I’d also like to think that the police and the city won’t try to solve their PR problem by simply throwing the Somali-American police officer who shot Damond under the nearest bus. But I’m not that naive.

There are more ways for this case to go wrong than I can count. Minneapolis, which prides itself on its liberalism, has in reality led the nation in hypocrisy on the issue of race. I am ashamed of my city, of its arrogant, hypocritical police force, and of its civic leaders who have shrunk from taking on the elephant in the room for fear that they will lose the political endorsements of the all-powerful police union. Included in those civic leaders are the judges and prosecutors of the Hennepin County District Court, who have tortured facts, law and logic to justify almost anything cops chose to do to the people that I spent 28 years bringing before them for justice.

I’ve had enough. Haven’t you?

YES.

It seems pretty bad already

So I’m not pleased to see a report on sexual harassment by faculty titled Worse Than It Seems. It summarizes the results of a survey of harassment in academia, and takes an objective, outsider’s look at the problem.

“A Systematic Look at a Serial Problem: Sexual Harassment of Students by University Faculty” seeks to cut through the noise with data, analyzing nearly 300 faculty-student harassment cases for commonalities. The study, which focused on complaints by graduate students, led to two major findings: most faculty harassers are accused of physical, not verbal, harassment, and more than half of cases — 53 percent — involve alleged serial harassers.

Data “confirm that faculty harassment of students is more widespread than many may appreciate” says the study, forthcoming in Utah Law Review. Perhaps most importantly, it says, a “disturbingly high proportion of available cases indicate evidence of higher-severity sexual harassment that includes unwelcome physical contact and/or a pattern of serial sexual harassment of multiple victims by the same faculty member.”

In other words, data challenge what the study calls “stereotypes” about sexual harassment, including that the current reporting environment has compromised faculty members’ academic freedom.

That last bit is also surprising: treating students and colleagues with respect compromises academic freedom? Who claims that? It’s a new one to me, although given the stupidity of so many arguments from affronted men, I guess I should expect it.

It’s also eye-opening to get the perspective from the inside, close-up: read about Gina Baucom’s informal query about “what’s the crappiest thing you’ve heard said about a woman academic?” It’s horrifying.

The worst thing I’ve personally and directly heard? She’s an Asian girl, they’re always so good with their hands followed by a snigger and a leer. And my decision that I wasn’t going to work with that guy. That was in my first year as a grad student, so I got disillusioned early.

Ken Ham’s Big Wooden Box has been sold!

The price? $10! The buyer? Well, it’s … Ken Ham. That’s right, Ken Ham sold his theme park to himself for a sawbuck. You will not be surprised when you learn that this pointless shuffle was done for the purpose of scamming the government out of taxes, so it wasn’t pointless at all. It’s all part of a long con.

On June 29, Williamstown city attorney Jeffrey Shipp sent a letter to the biblical amusement park Ark Encounter, rejecting its request to be exempted from a new safety tax because its is a religious organization.

Shipp said it was clear that Ark Encounter is a for-profit entity, which is how it has been listed with the Kentucky secretary of state’s office since 2011.

But the day before, Ark Encounter LLC sold its main parcel of land — the one with the large-scale Noah’s Ark — for $10 to its nonprofit affiliate, Crosswater Canyon.

Remember way back when Answers in Genesis was begging for all this support from Kentucky, claiming it wouldn’t be an endorsement of religion, because it was going to be an economic boon to secular businesses in the region? It should be treated as an amusement park, not a church. So they got their breaks and the state improvements in access roads, etc., but now that’s not enough — so they’ve flipped it back to the control of their religious non-profit side, because they’re irate about a tax that would pay for fire and emergency services to their park.

The tax would have been about fifty cents on each grossly over-priced $40 ticket. They simply refuse to pay that pittance.

And that makes we wonder how solid AiG’s finances are. They seem awfully desperate to avoid losing that 1.25% of the ticket price to essential services. It’s only the beginning, too.

That’s the latest salvo in an escalating dispute between local officials and Ark Encounter, but some people are worried that Ark Encounter’s maneuver is a precursor to declaring itself exempt from all taxes, including property taxes that help finance Grant County schools.

“I believe this is the first step,” Williamstown city councilman Kim Crupper said. “The impact would be far larger than just Williamstown.”

It’ll happen, and Williamstown and the state of Kentucky will get the screwing they deserve for propping up this shambles. Everyone who has been following Ham knows what to expect.

He got his start working with Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International, was sent off to manage the American branch of that organization, and then absconded with their mailing list and split off to start his own circus. There was much acrimony and howling and furious lawsuits between the two. And don’t forget the time Ham was kicked out of a homeschooling conference over his nasty and intolerant behavior.

The one thing you can rely on is his greed. If you just look for the choice that will line his pocket the most, you can predict Ken Ham’s behavior perfectly.

Williamstown is so screwed.

Hey, how about if we end that religious tax exemption everywhere and for everyone?

Orac’s on it

I’m just a cell and developmental biologist (whines faintly that cancer is a cell and developmental disease…), but Orac is a real, genuine, bona fide cancer doctor, and he agrees with me that Paul Davies’ atavism theory of cancer is full of crap. He leads you through Robert Weinberg’s authoritative papers on known causes of cancer to show that the idea that cancers are regressions to an ancestral state is nonsense.

I’ll add that I’ve taught a couple of classes on cancer biology and have gone over Weinberg’s The Biology of Cancer, and there’s a lot of developmental biology in there — every time he writes about transcription factors or signaling molecules, it’s all old familiar stuff from fish and fly development. When I see someone like Davies making analogies to evolution, though, I get a sense of deja vu. Once upon a time, people like Haeckel and other natural philosophers looked at how markers (in their case, morphological markers rather than molecules) changed during development and got all excited and claimed that they were recapitulating their evolutionary history. It took someone like Karl Ernst von Baer to come along and say, “You daft wankers, they’re repeating embryological patterns; this is what you see as you develop from the general form to the specific.”

It’s the same story here. Cancer is recycling genes and pathways that are retained because they’re developmentally significant, not because they’re a relic from greatgreatgreatgreat grandma, carefully preserved inside a secret nook in the genome in case we needed to re-adopt a single-celled lifestyle.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to oppose cruelty to animals

Here are the indisputable facts.

Mink are voracious carnivores. They eat small mammals, birds, fish, and frogs.

Mink are also playful, social animals with complex behaviors. They are wild animals, though, and don’t generally make good pets.

Mink farming is a deplorable practice in which animals are raised and butchered for their skins. The bodies are often ground up to make pet food.

These are all true statements, but they do set up a complicated ethical problem. What do you do with a mink farm in your neighborhood? I can tell you what you should not do, under any circumstances: you do not sneak onto the farm and release them all from their cages while singing “Born Free” and cheering them on as they scamper off to nearby farms, towns, wildlife refuges, and wilderness.

But somebody did that in Eden Valley, Minnesota. They freed 30,000 mink from a farm. You know what’s going to happen now, right?

Desperately hungry carnivores are going to radiate out, killing every small animal they can find. Rabbits and mice and birds are going to get hit hard; you might want to lock up your cats for a while, too. They won’t be particularly efficient at it, I suspect, since they’ve been raised in cages, so there will be some survivors. The mink are going to be competing intensely with each other for increasingly scarce food. They’re going to fight with each other, and most of them are going to starve to death.

It sounds like another PETA-inspired bit of ignorant fanaticism that does far more harm than good.

I’m not convinced that New Scientist gets it yet

Finally, they’ve come right out and said what we knew all along: most of our DNA has to be junk. I guess that’s progress, but they’re not doing a good job of explaining it.

After 20 years of biologists arguing that most of the human genome must have some kind of function, the study calculated that in fact the vast majority of our DNA has to be useless. It came to this conclusion by calculating that, because of the way evolution works, we’d each have to have a million children, and almost all of them would need to die, if most of our DNA had a purpose.

None of the biologists I know have been arguing for ubiquitous functionality, but I know they’re out there, so that’s kind of a strange opening: it’s as if the only way they know how to frame the story is as some kind of real conflict (see also every NS article about evolution vs. creationism). I don’t know where the 20 year timing comes from, either. JBS Haldane died 53 years ago, and he worked out this argument long before his death.

But worst of all, they just plop out this claim that we’d “each have to have a million children, and almost all of them would need to die, if most of our DNA had a purpose”. OK. Reading this as a naive layman, WHY? They present the conclusion with none of the evidence or logic behind it; there is no explanation here. The key part of the story that Dan Graur explained is that we know the mutation rate of human genes, and we can calculate the cost to the population of carrying around suboptimal genes, and we can estimate how many children you’d have to have to compensate for that load of mutations, and the load is going to depend on how many genes are present. It’s easy to put an upper bound on the number of genes we have, given our mutation rate and how many children an individual can have (hint: there’s no way you can have a million kids.)

The logic is clear and convincing, but you have to present it if you’re trying to communicate the science.

I feel like I’m grading an exam. Yes, you got the correct answer, but I’m not convinced that you understand how you arrived at it, and aren’t just regurgitating something you memorized.

It’s too bad they’re Not Alone

We’re nervous about admitting this. We were made this way. We’re different. It’s scary. We’re oppressed by society. We need to be more open and honest with each other. We can’t have a bigoted society. <breaks down crying>

It’s so mean that people call us bigoted because we want to deny people basic rights just because we think they’re icky.

That’s a video from a conservative political group called Catholic Vote. It’s a strange and oblivious little organization of hidebound Catholic reactionaries that is not supported by the Catholic church at all — they really don’t like Pope Francis and his liberal ways — and are more about right-wing wing-nuttiness than they are Catholic dogma.

Apparently they don’t like the idea of empathy, either. They think you ought to have empathy for them, but they seem incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of people who actually do have their rights suppressed.