If you watch Fox Snooze (and I feel sorry for you), you may have heard Fox commentators/blowhards Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson pontificating about the alleged “War on Christmas.”

According to O’Reilly, Gibson and other conservative demogogues, secular forces are working to eliminate Christmas from the US of A, leading to the downfall of this great Christian nation.

(I use those words sarcastically, please note.)

Their latest tactic is to enumerate how many retailers use the word “Christmas” in their adverts. The Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian group associated with the late Jerry Falwell, has published a “naughty and nice” list of major retailers; nice retailers preserve Christmas, naughty ones use the generic word “holiday.”

Avoiding the word “Christmas” is just more evidence of a vast anti-Christian conspiracy, O’Reilly & Co. contend.

This nonsense derives from Christians losing several court cases in which the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully argued that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause precludes governmental agencies from erecting overtly religious displays.

No creches in city hall, in other words.

Those Christians given to delusions of paranoia have taken these signs and wonders as evidence of an anti-Christian movement in the United States. O’Reilly and Gibson, in particular, have created a straw man argument with their “war on Christmas” diatribes.

A straw man argument is a logical fallacy. You caricature the opposing viewpoint and focus your attacks on the “straw man,” instead of the opponent’s actual statements, hoping to score a few points in your favor.

November 20th, 2007 | Tags: The media | Category: Commentary, Random rants | Comments (2)

A surprisingly progressive school board in Portland, Maine, voted last month to allow students at one middle school to receive contraceptives confidentially from the school’s health clinic.

Parents of students at King Middle School have to give their children written permission to visit the clinic, but anything that happens in the clinic, including prescribing birth control pills, would be private, even from the parents.

True to our democratic process, the policy was suitably debated in public meetings, and the school board by majority vote approved the new policy. Since we have a decentralized educational system in the States, the birth-control policy only affects this one school in this one district.

But sex is an emotional subject in the US of A, and handing out contraceptives to pre-teens and teens is even touchier.

O the horror!

Those guardians of all that is pure and holy, the religious right, had to stick their nose in Portland’s business, of course. A Maine legislator is posturing about the whole affair, proposing new laws making it illegal for schools to hand out contraceptives without specific parental consent.

I suppose they hope to save the nation, and the state of Maine, from eternal hellfire and damnation. These are the same folks who push abstinence-only sex ed, after all.

The King Middle School policy, if you check it out dispassionately, is perfectly sensible. Out of 510 students, only five would actually qualify for contraception, according to The Associated Press. Those five are apparently sexually active.

November 14th, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

My latest assignment for my students has been to participate in the Cassini Scientist-for-a-day Essay Content. In the process of working with them, one of my kids told me something I found very disturbing.

She doesn’t care about space and space exploration.

Woof. It’s hard to come back with a short and snappy answer to that comment, other than the standard teacher admonishment, “Well, do the essay anyway.” It was honest, and I suppose a somewhat legitimate reason for not being keen on doing the assignment, but it is simultaneously a sad comment on her intellectual curiosity.

It’s a feeling that is shared by many others, I suppose. It explains why the US public is now so bored by space exploration, almost 40 years after two guys walked on the Moon. The gee-whiz has gone out of space.

[Since writing this post, I discovered Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, blogged on "Why Explore Space?" He answers the question better than I can.]

Cassini is part of a long-term mission to explore Saturn, its moons and its ring system. Its companion probe, Huygens, landed on Titan, the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Together the two probes have sent back spectacular images of the ringed planet and its moons since their arrival in July 2004.

To connect students with space exploration, the Cassini team is sponsoring a contest in which students have to argue in a 500-word essay why one of four possible imaging targets is the best. They have to provide evidence that their chosen target would provide the most scientifically useful information.

November 12th, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools, Science | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

The other burning election issue here was a initiative to fund the public libraries with an increase in the city occupational tax. It’s the words “increase” and “tax” that doomed the proposal from the start.

Metro Louisville voters killed the library funding proposal by a 2-1 margin, even though the tax increase of $2 for every $1,000 earned would have added only a pittance to most workers’ tax levies. I guess it’s the principle of the thing.

Louisville spends less money per capita on its libraries than most other cities its size, about $24 a head. Nashville by comparison spends almost twice that. There is a proposal before the Metro council to expand the library system dramatically over the next few years. The main question was, naturally, how to pay for such a worthy cause.

Taxing the citizenry for any project is never a popular idea, so I’m wondering what the council expected in proposing such a numbskull idea when the economy seems to be teetering toward a recession, people are losing their homes, and Fortune 500 companies are laying off workers by the thousands.

Supporters of the tax, which would have cost a person making $40,000 a year a measly $80 over 12 months, spent scads of money — $400,000 by one account — trying to drum up support for the tax hike. Meanwhile, opponents raised a fraction of that to lobby against the tax.

Only in Kentucky can we make molehills into mountains, I’ll tell ya.

November 8th, 2007 | Category: Commentary, General stuff | Comments (1)

Normally, I try to avoid commenting politics in this blog, since are so many political blogs that do a much better job than I can. After yesterday’s elections in Kentucky, I just have to say something, though.

For me, the two big issues were the gubernatorial race between Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher and Democrat Steve Beshear and the library funding resolution in Louisville. This post will deal with the first issue.

For you out-of-towners, the governor’s race was basically about three issues: casino gambling, God and Fletcher’s shady hiring practices, in about that order. There were other issues, of course, but from my lofty vantage point in the Knobs of Indiana, it seemed all anyone talked about was gambling, God and grand jury indictments.

Kentucky has had a lottery for years. When it was first proposed, the proceeds were to fund education. In the end, the schools really didn’t get much, but here it is, never to go away. That kind of gambling seems to be OK now.

Kentucky has had horse racing practically since the invention of the horse. People wager money on horses (”Go, baby, go!”), but apparently that kind of gambling is OK. It’s tradition, after all.

Kentucky’s basketball teams at U of L and UK usually go the NCAA tournaments. There are gambling pools for March madness, sometimes out of sight of management, but they’re generally OK, too.

November 7th, 2007 | Category: Commentary, General stuff | Leave a comment

Biologist Stephen Matheson has an elegant discussion on his blog, Quintessence of Dust, about the evolution of corn from its wild ancestor, teosinte, a Mexican grass that looks nothing like its domesticated descendent.

As Matheson notes, IDists argue that evolution proceeds by adding no new genetic information; instead it removes genetic information. So organisms could not become more complex than their progenitors. IDists also contend that since evolution occurs through “random,” rare mutations, mere chance could not possibly explain the complexity of modern day organisms, like people. Ergo, Godidit.

Genetic analysis of teosinte and corn, on the other hand, refutes both contentions, Matheson says. Although corn is a product of 9,000 to 10,000 years of genetic manipulation by humans, its evolution from a humble, unappealing wild grass clearly demonstrates the validity of our current understanding of how evolution in nature works.

Check out the full story on Matheson’s blog.

October 26th, 2007 | Tags: Science | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

A week after his antagonizing racial remarks in a newspaper interview, Nobel-prize-winner James D. Watson, 79, has stepped down as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island.

Watson had told a London Times reporter that people of African descent are not as intelligent as those of European descent. The resulting furor led to Watson cancelling many of his scheduled book-tour engagements, including one here in Louisville this week.

While later stating that there was no scientific evidence linking race with intelligence, Watson has neither apologized for his remark nor recanted it, suggesting that he might at some level believe he is correct.

The CSH Labs, which for decades have pioneered research in genetics and produced several Nobel prize winners, relieved Watson of his duties as chancellor soon after the Times published the interview, but stopped short of dismissing him. Bruce Stillman, the president of the Labs, told The New York Times today that the decision to step down formally was entirely Watson’s. One wonders.

Watson had been associated with the Labs since 1968, and was president from 1994 to 2003. As chancellor. he also served on the Labs’ board of directors.

In 1962, he and Francis Crick shared a Nobel Prize in Biology for describing the double-helix structure of DNA. Some scientists since then have contended that Rosalind Franklin, a co-worker, should have shared the award with the two men.

In a prepared statement, Watson said he was “overdue” to surrender his leadership positions at the Labs.

October 26th, 2007 | Tags: Professional skeptic, Science | Category: Commentary | Comments (5)

My otherwise trustworthy Geo Metro has been sidelined for a month, because I suspected terribly expensive repairs were needed. Instead the problem was something very simple, and I feel damned foolish.

We were driving the short distance to the local Jay C supermarket one day when the Geo just quit running less than a mile from our house. It had done this before, and would usually start right up again after sitting for a while. So we got a lift to the market and back home, and let the Geo sit alongside the road to cool off.

After waiting a reasonable length of time, we walked back to the car, started it up and drove it home.

The next day, it refused to start. With a shot of starter fluid, the motor would run a bit, then die. OK, I said to myself, it’s gotta be something in the fuel injection system: bad pump, bad injector, bad electrical relay. The next chance I got, I checked the car for the obvious, John-can-fix-it items in the fuel system.

October 18th, 2007 | Tags: Technology | Category: General stuff, Physics | Comments (2)

Yes, you read that right. If he were alive today, James Watson Wheaton would be 150 years old. Needless to say, perhaps, I never met him. He died long before I was a glimmer in my parents’ eyes. Over the years, however, I have pieced together enough information to give me a fair picture of the man, which I will try to impart publicly here.

I am the product of two “generation stretchers,” my grandfather and my parents. Jim Wheaton married twice, once as a teenager and second as a middle-aged man. His second son, my father, and my mother married when they were each 38 and I was born when my mother was almost 42. As it turned out, I met none of my grandparents.

Jim Wheaton’s father, John Wheaton, was born in Atlantic County, in southern New Jersey. His family farmed there, but John headed for the big city, New York, which even then was a magnet for opportunity. By 1850 he was gainfully employed as a wholesale grocer and living in a boarding house in what is now the Tribeca section of Manhattan. The owners of the boarding house were Chauncey and Anna Watson, who were important to my grandfather’s later life.

October 1st, 2007 | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment