In the past, I have had no problems updating WP. You upload the files, update the database when prompted, and bingo! you’re up and running. Not this time. I did everything by the book (except forgetting to logout first and deactivate plugins), got the login screen, typed in my username and password, and … came right back to the login screen.

Shades of php-nuke!

Since I use Firefox, it was easy to clear cookies and authenticated sessions, the usual culprits in situations like this one, but to no avail. I changed my password, both by using the official WP method and by changing directly in the database. No go.

I checked the WP support forums, tried a different browser, checked error logs, uploaded all the files again (twice!). Same situation.

So I downloaded version 2.5 PC3, uploaded it to my server space, updated the database, and woof! I’m back in business again.

So, if you’re considering updating your site to 2.6, wait until the WP gurus fix this little problem. Not being able to administer your site is a bit of a handicap.

An appellate court today reversed the $550,000 fine, effectively telling the FCC to cool its jets.

The Philadelphia court based its decision on two factors, apparently.

First, it ruled that Jackson and fellow performer Justin Timberlake (who had grabbed the part of her costume that “malfunctioned”) were “independent contractors” and not CBS employees. Thus, the court ruled, CBS could not be held responsible for their actions.

Second, it sided with CBS’ opinion that the number of actual viewers protesting the boob flash could not be accurately determined. The FCC said in its brief that there had a record-setting 542,000 protests against the halftime (strip)show. But CBS in its brief noted that 85% of the protests were actually copies of a form letter prepared by single-interest groups.

Or to put it more simply, most of those 542,000 protesters probably weren’t even watching the Superbowl, so Janet’s split-second exposure could not possibly have scarred their tender sensibilities.

Unlike cable and satellite TV outlets, broadcasters like CBS that use the airwaves have to follow strict FCC programming guidelines. The rationale is that cable and sat-TV subscribers choose their programming by paying for it, but broadcast viewers have little control over what they see or hear on the TV.

So, that means no nudity (although some programs have pushed that envelope with bare butts), no cussing (though this restriction has been loosened as some words have become more socially acceptable), no sex (well, there’s soap operas …), and so on.

Technically, then, it was against FCC regulations for Janet Jackson to have revealed a breast on air, even accidentally. There’s still some debate about how accidental the flash really was, but the exposure was so short that only the sharpest eye (or someone recording the game) could have caught it. Check it out in this clip courtesy of YouTube:

Dismayed by the “ebbing morality” on TV, there are several conservative media watchdog groups that obsessively monitor broadcasters for any minor infraction of their moral code. They jumped on Jackson’s boob-flash like a dog in heat, whipping their loyal followers into a froth by pointing out the number of children watching the football game.

Imagine the millions of kids scarred for life by (maybe) seeing Jackson’s breast …

So, these groups have form protest letters on their sites for loyal followers to fill out and send to the FCC, whether they saw the program or not. And in this case the already conservative FCC board of directors caved in to this overwhelming hue and cry, nailing CBS with an excessive fine — I suppose to make an example of it.

Only in America could a split-second exposure turn into a half-million-dollar regulatory fine.

Anyway, calmer and wiser appellate judges have seen through some of the bullshit resulting from this on-air gaffe, putting it in better perspective. Janet Jackson’s boobs are really not that earth-shaking.

Since I already had some familiarity with the court case it narrates, the 224 pages went by quickly, and I finished it in an afternoon. [Yes, I do read fast. It’s how I survived four years at Princeton.] For a readable account of the Kitzmiller v. Dover case of 2005, I can recommend none better. Only the PBS Nova episode on the same case matches it for clarity and, yes, drama.

Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al., was a watershed lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design in the ninth grade biology classes of the Dover, Penn., Area School District. A conservative, religiously biased school board sought to weaken the teaching of evolution in the schools by requiring teachers (all of whom refused, as it turned out) to read a four-paragraph cautionary statement about the theory of evolution, specifically mentioning Intelligent Design as another explanation for the origin of life.

Lebo’s narrative clearly lays out the religious motivations of the board members, who before hammering out the four paragraphs, had discussed in open meeting the need to bring creationism into the science curriculum. (Those same members later stated, under oath, that they had never used the creationism and accused the two reporters covering the board meetings of fabricating the statements. During the trial, however, it became clear the reporters were in fact correct.)

To make a long story short, a group of parents joined with the American Civil Liberties Union to contest the introduction of ID into their children’s classes. Tammy Kitzmiller, whose daughter would be among those first affected by the policy change, became the first plaintiff listed among the several, acquiring in a sense of kind of immortality, since the title of case is usually abbreviated Kitzmiller v Dover. After days of testimony, the presiding District Court judge, John E. Jones III, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, declaring that ID was not science, but religion thinly disguised, and as such had no place in the public schools. He chastised the defendants for the “breathtaking inanity” of their decisions to pursue both the new policy and risk a legal challenge.

Lebo is a reporter for the York Daily Record, born and raised in and around the Dover area. Throughout the book, she describes her agnostic’s struggles with religious faith and frustrations with reasoning against her fundamentalist father’s close-mindedness. Her personal battles reflect similar forays played out in Dover and elsewhere in the U.S. — that of a conservative, literalist faction of self-described Christians against everyone else.

While reading the book, I reflected on a potentially thorny question: When is a religious minority’s battle in the secular world “righteous” and when is it just plain wrong?

As a member of the Religious Society of Friends, a minority if there ever were one, I am familiar with the Society’s struggles against war and slavery, and for civil rights, decent prisons and humane mental hospitals. There were many times that the Quakers suffered for their testimonies, which spring from their understanding of the Scriptures and their own communion with the Divine. In many ways, the Friends were well ahead of their time — manumitting their slaves a century before the Emancipation Proclamation, for example — and now we would perhaps describe their efforts as “righteous.”

Contrast their efforts with those of the current religious right, which in many ways wants not only to rewrite U.S. history and the Constitution, but to bring God back into the public schools and other secular instiututions. Like the Quakers’ of the 18th and 19th centuries, their positions are unpopular among the majority and are obstensibly derived from an understanding of God’s word. Certainly, they believe their struggles to be “righteous,” but will future generations agree with them?

I would hope not. Let me try to explain why.

I’ll use the Friends’ attitudes toward slavery as an example of now widely accepted “righteous” behavior. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, many well-to-do colonial Quakers, including a branch of my own family, owned slaves. The practice was widely accepted by the community at large, in both the northern and southern colonies. Religious leaders pointed to the apparent acceptance of slavery in Scripture, giving the ownership of other human beings a kind of religious blessing.

Being an introspective bunch, the Quakers were not as easy with the practice as other Christians, however. Whereas most other Christian sects relied almost exclusively on the Bible (and their ministers’ interpretations of same) for guidance, Friends believed that Scripture was just one source of divine guidance, that the Divine could speak to each and every person individually. For that reason (and others), early Friends had no pastors or programmed worship, preferring if necessary to spend an entire Meeting for Worship in silence if the Spirit failed to move anyone to speak.

It was perhaps the treatment of slaves in the market, or by owners, that troubled some Quakers first. They could not see how the horrific treatment of slaves by the traders could be in any way “Christian,” in the light of Jesus’ example of loving-kindness. Another Quaker testimony is the belief that there is “that of God” in each person, regardless of skin color or religious background, using Jesus’ treatment of the Samaritan woman and other shunned members of Jewish society as examples. They saw the African slaves (and native Americans) as children of God in a very literal sense, worthy of respect and kindness. Quaker pioneers generally had an easier time co-existing with native Americans than other whites did as a result of this deep-seated belief.

Gradually it became clear to Quakers, first in the north and later in the south, that to own a slave was to disobey God’s Word and Jesus’ lessons. It was in direct contradiction to their own testimonies, for how can a person own another if both have “that of God” in them? The process took decades. George Fox, the founder of the Society, first advised Friends in Barbadoes to free their slaves in 1671. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (to which my slave-owning forebears probably belonged) circulated a series of queries to its member meetings in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. (Quaker tradition is to ask members to contemplate weighty issues in their hearts, seeking Divine guidance, rather than to simply tell them to follow the party line. The practice helps explain the snail-like pace of major changes in Quaker practice.)

1743: Do Friends observe the former advice of our Yearly Meeting not to encourage the importation of Negroes, nor to buy them after imported?
1755: Are Friends clear of importing or buying Negroes and do they use well which they are possessed of by inheritance or otherwise, endeavoring to train them up in the principles of the Christian Religion?
1765: ditto
1776: Are Friends clear of importing, purchasing, disposing of or holding mankind as slaves? And do they use well those who are set free and are necessarily under their care and not in circumstances through nonage or incapacity to minister to their own necessities? And are they careful to educate and ecourage them in a religious and virtuous life? [From Friends for 300 Years, by Howard H. Brinton, (c) 1952]

By the time of Revolution, there were virtually no Quaker slaveholders in the North. Southerners had a harder time letting go of their slaves, since the local governments passed laws forbidding the freeing of slaves. Instead, most of the Quakers from the Carolinas and Georgia picked up and moved into the Northwest Territories (Ohio, Indiana and Illinois), after the Revolution, freeing their slaves there.

Once they let go of their own encumbrances, Friends then joined the abolitionist movement to eliminate slavery everywhere, leading to Britain freeing its slaves by 1838 and of course to the US freeing its slaves three decades later by presidential proclamation.

Anyone who has a passing knowledge of the abolition movement would know that the general society, especially in the US, greeted the concept of freeing the slaves as ludicrous, if not un-Scriptural. Most other Christians did not share the Quakers’ belief of “that of God in everyone,” preferring to see blacks and native Americans as savage heathens inferior to whites, and placed by some sort of Divine intervention under the command of white Christians. [To be sure, there are some whites who still believe it, nearly 150 years after emancipation.] Abolition back then was not popular, despite its proponents’ belief in its righteousness.

Flip the calendar a century or two ahead, and come to the present day. There is an active, influential minority of Christians who find a correlation between the “moral decline” of the US and the increasing secularism of our society. They see every threat to remove God and Christian teaching from public buildings and public school instruction as yet another step toward the end of American civilisation as we know it. Believing that ours is a “Christian nation” they want to restore, as they say it, the religious back into American government and school curricula. Like the early Quakers, they rely on their religious faith and understanding of Scripture for guidance.

Unlike the nearly two-hundred-year efforts of Quakers to rid the US of slavery, the Religious Right movement is barely three decades old, gaining prominence just before Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to the presidency. Led by Pentecostal and Baptist televangelists, this religious movement skipped the gradual spiritual awakening favored by Quakers and jumped right into the secular arena, forming what amounts to political action committees. Their support helped Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush win their presidential elections, though most of what the candidates had promised to the Religious Right never came to fruition. [Some commentators suggest the belief in the Second Coming happening in 2000 probably spurred the sudden, desperate efforts to influence American politics and society.]

One of the battlegrounds for the Religious Right is in the public schools. The aims there are many, but principally they want to re-establish prayer in schools, once again allow the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, teach that the nation was founded on Christian principles, and more pertinent to this discussion, teach “alternatives” to “atheistic evolution,” if not abolish the teaching of evolution altogether. These goals, their proponents believe, are righteous.

As Lebo describes in her book, the methods to achieve these goals are far from “righteous.”

Largely frustrated in their attempts to sway national and state politics and law, the Religious Right has tried to foment change from the grassroots level. Since there is no national curriculum for US public schools, each school district being locally governed, the logical starting point to change the public schools is with the local school board.

In Dover, the school board elections were in the spring of 2001. Alan Bonsell, one of the newly elected board members, had campaigned on “a platform of frugal spending and taxpayer reform.” (p. 10) At his first board meeting, while other members raised concerns about all-day kindergarten, stricter discipline policies and block schedule, Bonsell, a Fundamentalist, discussed school prayer and creationism. Not much came of his concerns immediately.

Then in 2003 two members resigned from the board in a dispute over financing the high school renovation project. Bonsell asked two fellow conservative Christians, Jane Cleaver and Bill Buckingham, to fill the empty seats. It was at this time, as Lebo relates, that the school board took a sharp turn to the right, with Bonsell and Buckingham privately speaking of plans to teach creationism alongside evolution. In executive sessions, they talked with administrators about the Christian foundations of the USA and need to balance evolution with creationism. (p. 16) Bonsell, as chair of the board, met with science teachers individually to suggest that teaching evolution would have serious repercussions. (p. 20)

As Lebo describes them, Bonsell and his like-minded board members were woefully ignorant of their Constitutional responsibilities and of scientific theory. Their ministers (and perhaps televangelists) no doubt shaped their (mis)understanding of American history, and completely confident in their righteousness, they never stopped to analyze whether their actions were either legal or logical. That Bonsell would overstep his authority and meet directly with teachers — something only school administrators and/or union representatives should do — indicates the bullheaded behavior of these “soldiers of Christ.”

In June 2004 the private discussion of creationism among board members became public. Pressed by a former board member, Barrie Callahan, the board members admitted that they wanted new biology texts that were not, as Bonsell put it, “laced with Darwinism.” Buckingham said he wanted a text that balanced evolutionary theory with creationism, suggesting that, “If students are taught only evolution, it stops becoming theory and becomes fact.” (p. 23)

Two weeks later, the board reiterated its intention to teach creationism, with Buckingham insisting that nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a “separation of Church and State.” (p. 24)

Then in July, after the board either approached a national right-wing legal foundation or it them, all mention of creationism disappeared from public meetings. Instead board members started talking about the more scientific-sounding intelligent design. In a Nixonian moment, audio tapes of the June meetings, during which creationism had been discussed, disappeared. Board members denied, under oath during depositions before the bench trial, that any of them had said anything about creationism, saying they had instead said intelligent design. When confronted with newspaper reports contradicting their statements, the board members accused the two reporters of fabricating the quotes. In later depositions, Bonsell and other defendants suggested that it was only Buckingham, who was in and out of recovery for OxyContin abuse, who had advocated teaching creationism. Buckingham himself said in his deposition that his drug use might have led him to say something about creationism, but it also affected his memory, so he could not be sure.

During the trial, plaintiffs’ attorneys returned to the June board meetings and to the despositions. First up was Buckingham, who once again denied used the word “creationism” during the June meetings. The attorneys then played a TV news interview with Buckingham after one meeting, during which he clearly stated the board wanted a textbook balancing evolution with creationism. Buckingham then fumbled through a lame explanation of his interview, accusing the reporter of “ambushing him.” She hadn’t. (p. 163-4) Asked to explain how the board obtained a set of pro-ID textbooks, Buckingham repeated his statements during deposition that he had no idea who had donated the funds for the books. Attorneys then confronted him (like those legal eagles do so dramatically on Law and Order) with an $850 personal check signed by Buckingham, made out to Donald Bonsell, Alan’s father. It was the elder Bonsell who had purchased the books.

Once again Buckingham backpedaled, with the plaintiffs’ attorney pressing him to admit he lied under oath, until the judge asked the lawyer to proceed with larger matters.

Another board member, Heather Geesey, comes off in Lebo’s book as bit of an airhead. She repeated board members’ insistence that creationism never came up during the June meetings, and that a letter she had written to the local paper clearly encouraged the teaching of intelligent design. Trouble is, the letter, which was produced during the trial, only mentions creationism and not intelligent design. In a scene reminiscent of a Gracie Allen or Lucille Ball sitcom, the judge (played by George Burns or Desi Arnaz) asked the ditzy Geesey to clarify how the letter supported the concept that the board discussed intelligent design while referring only to creationism.

“Right. The part where it says, ‘what we are doing.’ I — since all the meetings run together, I didn’t realize back then that I knew everything that was going on because it’s not my committee,” Geesey said cheerfully. “But by me saying that what we were doing was to choose a book that teaches the most prevalent theories, I mean that — that’s what I was talking about.” (p. 167)

In the old sitcoms, this kind of illogic would either be followed by Burns’ slow, steady gaze at the camera or Arnaz throwing up his arms in exasperation, trying to make sense of it all. Less humorously, Judge Jones instead later submitted the board members’ depositions and testimonies to the US attorney general’s office, recommending it examine them for evidence of perjury. (p. 199)

In the end the ID skirmish in Dover ended with science and the Constitution winning, and ID and religious imperiousness losing. The pro-creationist board members all lost their seats in the next school board election, and the folks in Dover have tried to put the acrimony splitting the community behind.

Were their efforts in Dover “righteous?” Probably they and their fellow-thinkers believe it was, but as Lebo recounts, the road to their crusade was littered with bullying, deceit and outright lies. She does not allege, since there is no evidence, that Bonsell, Buckingham and other board members were working in concert with an organized religious movement to force creationism/ID into the Dover schools. Instead it appears they were taking it upon themselves, as “Christians,” to change local school policy, while being woefully unprepared to see the unfortunate end to their almost successful efforts. Unlike the abolitionists of old, they were not steeped in either theology or the law enough to see that their cause was not righteous but sectarian, and ultimately unconstitutional. To put it another way, these foot soldiers of the Religious Right didn’t have the creds to be righteous.

Another aspect of Lebo’s book bears discussion before I close. The struggle in Dover was not between “Christians” and “atheists.” The majority of the plaintiffs were faithful churchgoers, one of the lawyers said prayers before trial each day, and the science teachers countered their students’ fundamentalist beliefs with nuanced religious sensitivity. The struggle was instead between a small group of believers so blinkered that they did not realize they were still looking through a glass darkly, and less dogmatic, more progressive Christians.

Using the abolitionist movement as a counterpoint, the Dover school board members were the slave-owners, doomed by their devotion to tradition. Kitzmiller and her co-plaintiffs were the abolitionists, and it was they who were the righteous ones.

It was during a CNN Special Investigation Report on food safety. The camera supposedly was trained on the Sun as it rises above the horizon. Diagonally. Toward the top left of the screen. In California.

Well, it cannot have possibly happened, not in the Northern Hemisphere anyway. Clearly the cinematographer was just running a sunset backwards to create a “sunrise,” a geographically wrong sunrise. Here’s why.

The Sun always rises in the east and sets in the west, no matter where you live, because the entire Earth rotates in the same direction. The path of the Sun across the sky, however, depends on your latitude, because the Earth is round.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, facing east, you will see the Sun rise over the horizon and follow a diagonal path toward the upper right (also known as the southern sky). At sunset, facing west, the Sun will slowly dive toward the horizon from the upper left (still the southern sky). The angle of that path relative to the horizon matches your latitude. (Where I live, that angle is about 38 degrees.) As you head north, that angle gets closer and closer to zero. So, during the Arctic summer the Sun cruises above the horizon, never setting.

Heading the other way, toward the equator, the angle of the Sun’s path increases to 90 degrees. At sunrise or sunset, the Sun drives straight up or down from the horizon.

Traveling onward, the “tilt” of the Sun swings the other way. Standing at a point 38 degrees south of the equator, you would see the Sun rise above the eastern horizon and follow a path slanted 38 degrees toward the northern hemisphere (the upper left.)

So, the CNN snippet of “sunrise” was either a time-reversed sunset filmed in the USA, or a sunrise in the southern hemisphere. Economics (and suitable videography conditions) probably dictated the time-reversed sunset. Maybe it was cloudy at sunrise. Or an ugly building was in the way. Or it was just easier to use a stock shot of a sunset and run it backwards. Whatever the case, it was wrong.

And so I got to wonder, what if we did not keep moving forward, as some members of our society would prefer? Where would be today?

The concept is the stuff of a myriad of science fiction novels, but let’s focus on just a few possibilities.

Nicolaus Copernicus, a Catholic cleric, on his own poked his nose into the organizations of the solar system. At the time, the prevailing belief (and church dogma) was that the Earth stood at the center of everything — Moon, Sun, planets, stars. This paradigm (there, I used Thomas Kuhn’s terminology) dictated that astrologers/astronomers had to undertake a frightening number of calculations to predict the locations of celestial objects in the sky.

By Copernicus’ time, those calculations were not all that accurate. Copernicus painstakingly measured the positions of celestial objects, and undertook to recalculate their motions. In the process, he apparently realized that life would be so much easier if the Sun was at the center, and not the Earth. While it did not make the calculations easier, at least it made them less exhausting.

Historians disagree whether Copernicus believed the traditional position of the Earth was wrong. He was reluctant to publish his findings, since there was that whole dogma problem, enforced by something called the Holy Inquisition. As it turned out, he died the same day as his work was published (according to legend), so he eluded the Inquisitors. Nice trick.

He needn’t have feared. Since Copernicus wrote in a very obtuse version of Latin, only scholars grasped his ideas. The Church was pleased — Copernicus’ work enabled it to reform the calendar. Getting Catholics into church on major feast days at the same time everywhere was part of the whole Counter-Reformation plan, after all.

Suppose Nicky had decided to leave things alone, and not spend all his time out in the dark with his cross-staff, measuring the positions of the planets, etc. He could have just gone with the flow, agreed with his religion’s dogma, and lived an otherwise obscure life.

The “great man” theory of history suggests that someone else would have come to the same conclusions as Copernicus, but when? His work was published in 1543, just as the Renaissance was building up a head of steam, in time for Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei (and others) to read and study it. If Copernicus’ hypothesis had come later, say around 1600, both Kepler and Galileo might have missed it entirely. Then where would we be? As Kuhn suggests, the Copernican Revolution was not just a scientific revolution, but a major change in how humans conceived of their place in the universe. That new humility and new understanding that reason — not dogma — could enable us to answer some very important Big Questions.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Western civilisation (and science) have this underlying impatience with the status quo. We want to keep moving forward. Witness the Revolutionary War and the Industrial Revolution. It is a painful process, this moving forward, but it continues nonetheless.

Contrast this cinematic message with that of the Religious Right (and by extension, an apparent majority of Republicans), who would just as soon have our society based solely on their narrow interpretations of an ancient text commonly called the Bible.

One doubts if they have thought through their proposals very carefully, since to take their proposals to their logical ends would require us to not move forward, to be stuck in some nether-world of stagnant thought, a new Dark Ages. If Europeans had not cut their slavish ties to Biblical laws, monarchs would still rule European nations (and potentially the American colonies), free speech and free assembly would be restricted, and scientific progress would be practically non-existent.

How many Religious Rightists would be willing to live in a country where there was one state church, no electricity, no decent medical care, no Internet and no TV to spread their antediluvian messages? None, I would bet. Even the Amish admit that using the telephone once in a blue moon can be advantageous.

Sure, in a fairy tale world, everything is cut and dried. Everyone has a place in it and they stay there. So simple. So … feudal. It would be so much easier to assume God made Heaven and Earth (and us), since that would relieve us of the problem of explaining how it all got here. Politics would be a piece of cake — observe strict Biblical laws and dissension would be non-existent. No more Congress! (Now there’s a mixed blessing …)

And it would never work. Unless someone came up with a method to turn us all into automatons (like the robotic bowler hats in the movie do), the fairy-tale world of the Christianists would fall apart (messily, I’ll bet) in short order. Humans are too contentious, too resistant to top-down authoritarianism, to live in that kind of world.

Like it or not, we have to keep moving forward.

I am not upset. In fact, working as an extra in the next Hannah Montana movie (to be released next May) was an educational experience, if not a lucrative one. Ideally, you would have to be a local resident (which most of my co-workers are) to justify even taking the job.

Union extras get paid more, but to become a member of the Screen Actors Guild you have to have three separate speaking roles to qualify. A speaking role apparently means you say at least one line of dialog. Apparently, yelling “Hey, Hannah!” doesn’t count.

Today we have science bloggers musing on some of the greater profundities of the universe as well on more concrete issues closer to home. Some of these posts ask more questions than they answer, but heck that’s what science is all about, hey?

I’m the resident physics teacher, so we’re going to start the ball rolling with our lone physical-science submission, from Yoo Chul Chung at Yoo’s Ramblings. (Sorry, life scientists, a little physics never hurt anyone!) After reading the July issue of Scientific American, Yoo contemplates the meaning of hypothetical “building blocks” that can organize themselves to create the space-time we know and love. These “space-time quanta” curiously exist in two dimensions at the quantum level, but exhibit four dimensions at larger scales. Further, causality is integral to this system, closing any fancy relativistic loopholes to would-be time travelers hoping to jump through a wormhole to watch history unfold in real time. There goes about half the world’s Star Trek plotlines …

While Yoo ponders whether the universe is made of building blocks, the Evolved Rationalist considers whether William Dembski is clever enough to even play with blocks. In Dembski: The failure that keeps on failing, our author glosses on Bill’s seeming immunity to rational, logical thought as Bill gripes about the lack of theology in Kenneth Miller’s biology textbooks. Yes, dear friends, you read that right. Check out the Evolved Rationalist and see what we mean.

Now that we have visited these two unfathomables, let’s see what other questions our bloggers have in store for us, before we get sucked into either the vacuum of space-time or the vacuousness of Intelligent Design. How about this one, submitted by the fellows behind Submitted to a Candid World? Can the USA recover from the past eight years of scientific stagnation to once again be a pre-eminent intellectual force on the world stage? Our writers candidly aver that it is our country’s duty to ignore the know-nothings (like the DI) and get back on track, lest we lose our place at the top to China or England, or some other country that actually accepts evolution and global warming as likely.

Not to beat up on Intelligent Design too much, but ID-ists spend a lot of time worrying about bats and where they came from, perhaps because the DI has a belfry infestation. One of our submissions actually discusses bats, specifically their genome size. Greg Laden files a report from Evolution 2008 about a paper delivered by Jillian Smith, a bat genomist. (Is that a real word? Sounds like some gimmick Bruce Wayne would use on his night job …) Smith and her co-author, T. Ryan Gregory, have found that bats in general have a genome size that is small, like that of birds, and unlike other mammals’. Small genomes are happy (as larks?) in small cells, and small cells are like the Powdermilk Biscuits of flying critters: they help bats and birds get up and do what needs to be done – move their wings quick enough to fly! Evolution wins again!

While we’re on the subject of bats and birds, the Brooklyn birder, pinguinus at Great Auk – or Greatest Auk, has some happy news. Apparently, three members of a threatened species of kite have for the first time in memory been spotted nesting far north of their usual hangouts. Hopefully, the Mississippi kites in question are just enjoying a change of scenery and are not trying to tell us something about global warming or the next New England ski season. Time will tell.

On the flip side, we have a report from Charlie at 10,000 Birds about a species that not doing so well. The Sharpe’s Longclaw has dwindled in numbers in its native Kenya to between 10,000 and 19,000 individuals. Charlie has some excellent photos of this charming yellow-bellied bird in its natural habitat on the veldt.

Since we’ve veered into the natural history wing (ha ha, wing, get it?) of this edition of The Tangled Bank, the writers at the Agricultural Diversity Weblog wanted to be as diverse as one site can be and offered not one, but two submissions for us to consume.

Luigi questions whether the meme of dwindling biodiversity has any validity, at least when we look at the varieties of sorghum grown in Ethiopia. The diversity of sorghum strains there endures, he says, belying the notion of genetic erosion. (And while it was well outside the scope of the studies he reviews, sorghum endures here in Kentucky, too. The folks out in western Kentucky, where I lived for a spell, use sorghum for silage and to make a tasty pancake syrup. Yum!)

Luigi’s partner in biodiversification, Jeremy, explores how the terra preta (“black earth”) of Brazil may provide a solution to the disposal of “bio-char” — the ash of burned biofuels. Originally a skeptic, Jeremy now admits that adding bio-char to the soil may just balance the “carbon equation” — while we add CO2 to the atmosphere by burning biofuels we can also return some carbon back to the soil. It may not answer all the problems created by oil addicts, Jeremy says, but the procedure may just save the planet for the rest of us.

Skeptics like Jeremy (and we hope most of the readership here) need reliable information. Where we get it? Certainly not Fox Nooz or Yahoo Answers. A presenter at TAM6 has a possible answer, reports Kylie Sturgiss at PodBlack Blog (say that ten times fast!). The solution? Another website! Well, I’m not convinced, either, and neither is Kylie. Down in Ozland, where she dwells, there are plenty of reliable sources of sound information on the Web. Adding one more “skeptic’s toolbox” may not be all that helpful without some serious study of how people actually use and interpret electronic information, she suggests. More may not be better.

Along those same lines, the health of lab mice seems to benefit much from heroic doses of resveratrol (equivalent to 1,000 bottles of red wine a day!). Can smaller, more realistic doses also help our mousy friends? Ouroboros says yes! And studies suggest lower doses of the compound might just help us humans, too. The Ourobor-ans review a recent paper by Barger, et al., that indicates reasonable doses of resveratrol partially mimic the effects of caloric restrictions and seem to retard the effects of aging in lab mice. Lose weight AND live longer! How cool is that? Makes me want to slosh down a couple more glasses of the chianti I have in the kitchen, but I guess I’ll wait until this Tangled Bank is put to bed.

The oenologists of Ouruboros have their solution to a happier, healthier life, but The Uncredible Hallq takes it one step further: Hey kids! Opioids and cannibinoids are good for you! Nahh, we’re just kidding. Chris Hallquist is not suggesting we all light up a reefer, or some heavier stuff, man. He wants us to understand how chemicals (and drugs, legal or otherwise) affect our brain cells, our body chemistry and our behavior. Beneficial drugs inevitably have side effects, because, like, you know, the brain’s biochemistry is pretty complex, man, so you have to take the good with the bad, and like, hope the bad is less than the good. You dig?

And on that irreverent note, we now leave this edition of The Tangled Bank and resume our regularly scheduled programming. It’s been a pleasure being your host. Thanks for stopping by. Be sure to visit our contributors’ sites. They said it all better than I did, I’m sure.

Greg Laden over at ScienceBlogs takes the helm next time for Tangled Bank #109. See you there on July 9th!

– Wheat-dogg

On Friday, the Mount Vernon school board reviewed a 15-page investigative report on Freshwater’s actions in the classroom, and voted to dismiss the science teacher of 21 years.

Freshwater had been accused, among other things, of using a Tesla coil to burn a cross in a student’s arm, proselytizing students, teaching creationism contrary to school policy, and refusing to remove a Bible from his desk.

He and school officials still face legal action. The family of the student whose arm was burned filed a civil complaint in US District Court in Columbus last week, naming Freshwater and school officials as defendants. The law suit alleges Freshwater’s religious activities in the classroom violated the civil rights of the student, known only as John Doe.

The complaint also alleges school officials failed to reprimand Freshwater sufficiently after the arm-burning incident, and permitted him to proselytize students in class in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Freshwater, a fundamentalist Christian by all appearances, became a poster child for the so-called “war on Christianity” earlier this year when he refused to remove his copy of the Bible from his desk. Christian students in the school held rallies for his support, and a local right-wing Christianist radio commentator championed Freshwater as yet another victim of the secular war on religion. (See this story at WorldNetDaily, which quotes said commentator.)

Soon after, allegations of other Freshwater’s religious activities in the classroom came out, including most famously the arm-burning incident. School officials finally had to act like they were doing something and hired an independent investigator to check into the allegations. Meanwhile, they allowed Freshwater to continue to teach, but with an observer in the room.

Freshwater was very popular among the students; we can guess mostly among the Christians. Whether that popularity spilled out into students of other religious persuasions is doubtful. The hoo-roar about the Bible and Freshwater’s beliefs polarized the rural school’s student body, with so-called Christian students turning the whole issue into an Us-versus-Them deal.

Students who did not bring a Bible to school were assumed to be against the Bible, Freshwater, and probably God and country, too. One student who brought a Torah to school was taunted by students who didn’t quite understand that the Torah forms part of the Christian Old Testament.

[An aside: I see a TV movie coming out of this whole thing. Better it be a documentary or a 60 Minutes segment, but some alert Hollywood writer has got to see the real-life drama here. You wait. The networks might be able to whip something up by spring.]

The District Court case will be interesting to watch. There is no jury, just a judge. As the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling proved, even conservative judges have a better understanding of the First Amendment than most Christianists do. Freshwater was so blatant in his proselytizing that he was clearly infringing the Establishment Clause, which essentially says that the government cannot establish a State Church.

The writers of the Constitution remembered what problems many colonists had with the State Churches in their home countries, after all, and made it a point to protect freedom of religion in the new United States.

Legal opinions since then have held that public schools, and public school teachers, are agents of the government and therefore cannot actively promote one religion over any other. Freshwater is bound to be afoul of that legal precedent, judging from all the evidence available publicly.

The “war on Christianity” nutjobs, of course, have turned the Bible-on-the-desk thing into a religious crusade of sorts, conveniently ignoring the arm-burning problem and the constitutional issues or characterizing them as “attacks” on the good Christian soldier John Freshwater.

Secular forces (you can read that to mean satanic forces, if you like; most Christianists don’t distinguish between the adjectives much) are trying to quash Christians’ freedom to be Christian. Freshwater, they say, is just another victim of this conspiracy.

Morons.

There is no legal requirement that Freshwater or any other teacher for that matter set aside his or religion in order to teach in a public school. There cannot be; his freedom to worship is a First Amendment right.

So, Freshwater can go off and pray somewhere, read his Bible, perhaps even discuss informally with students what he did in church last Sunday. If a teacher has to, he or she can take religious holidays off, wear a yarmulke or head scarf, or even funny underwear, as long the teacher does not tell his or her students that they have to do the same thing.

If Freshwater had his Bible out in the open and left it at that, his superiors probably would not have batted an eyelash. It was Freshwater’s blatant preaching and teaching in class that raised a red flag. He was effectively telling his seventh graders that they had to believe as he believes, or face the awful consequences.

Whether those consequences meant lower grades or an uncomfortable afterlife remains to be learned.

In a quasi-rural community like Mount Vernon, Freshwater’s activities might have been okay if everyone in the town was of the same brand of Christian as he. Times and demographics have changed, though. Mount Vernon is now a bedroom community for Dayton, as well as a farm town, so the formerly homogenous religious population, if it ever really existed, is gone.

The local schools now have Jews, atheists, wiccans, who knows what, and the kind of behavior that Freshwater was exhibiting stands out like a angry grizzly in a campground. Maybe Freshwater took that as a challenge, to win over the heathens, but his superiors should have shut him down right away.

Instead they dithered, probably to avoid offending all the old-timer Christians in the community, leading to the current chain of events. Now they’re in hot water in federal court and in news articles on CNN. Out of the frying pan into the fire.

So many other school districts have fallen into this same trap that it makes one wonder whether their officials ever pay attention to the news. I guess it’s easier to stick their heads in the sand and hope the difficult problems just go away.

Too bad it doesn’t work.

Having been included in previous editions of the Tangled Bank, I volunteered to host it at some point in the future. That time has come: Tangled Bank #108 will be here June 25.

For submission rules, visit the link provided above.

While Freshwater’s superiors at the Mount Vernon schools dither, the family of one of his students have resorted to the all-American method of getting to the root of things — they’re suing him and the school district.

The suit claims that Freshwater violated the student’s civil rights by allegedly burning a cross into his arm with a Tesla coil and and that his superiors were negligent in not disciplining Freshwater.

The school district hired an outsider to investigate the allegations against Freshwater, an otherwise popular seventh-grade science teacher. That report is due Friday, at which time the school board will make some decision about Freshwater’s future, supposedly.

Freshwater made a name for himself earlier last year by refusing to remove his Bible from his desk. Christians loved his “Christ’s warrior” decision, but civil libertarians demurred. It then came out that Freshwater was a bit of a religious nut, proselytizing students, teaching creationism, and on at least one instance, burning a cross on a student’s arm with a Tesla coil.

That apparently woke up his superiors from their overly cautious slumber. They put an observer in his classroom while the independent investigators did their thing, and delayed any disciplinary action until the investigators filed their report.

Anyway, the lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Columbus earlier his week. I don’t have a copy of the complaint, but Ed Brayton over at ScienceBlogs does. He is as aghast at this whole mess as I am. How any teacher could be allowed to get away with this kind of malarkey defies all logic.

I wish Mr Freshwater good luck in court. He’s gonna need it.