In the nifty cool corner, we have NASA scientists discovering a strain of bacteria that actually likes arsenic so much to incorporate it in their DNA. No word yet on their reactions to old lace. Or elderberry wine.

In the dunce-cap corner, we have Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear crowing that the Commonwealth is giving millions of dollars in tax breaks to a Noah’s Ark-themed (as in religious) amusement part.

The first bit of news is exciting, because until this week biologists believed all life on Earth is based only on CHONPS (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur). Now we know some bacteria can live on CHONAsS. (I can just hear the jokes in high school biology classes now …)

Phosphorous and arsenic are neighbors in the periodic table, with similar chemical properties. It’s what makes arsenic (As) poisonous. Our cells grab hold of the arsenic, thinking it’s phosphorus, but, alas, it’s just different enough that it kills us.

These bacteria, found in an arsenic-laden lake in California could care less. Arsenic, shmarsenic.

Chances are, they were not aboard the Ark with Noah’s kin and all those animals. Genesis says nothing about bacteria, and given the lack of microscopes back then, it’s doubtful Noah could find any, much less identify them. (Unless God gave him microscopic vision. And why are Clark and Jo Nah checking each other out, and not the comely Lana Lang? Hmm.)

Kentucky, as the world knows to its great chagrin, is already home to the Creation Museum, which offers such anachronistic treats as a dinosaur with a saddle, a T. rex trying to eat fruit, and a gracile dinosaur sharing a meadow with Adam. It should come as no surprise than the same folks behind the Museum are also proposing Ark Encounter, which will feature a life-size replica of Noah’s big boat, a walled city à lá Jericho (please leave any trumpets in your cars) and the Tower of Babel (which I hope will not be too tall — we don’t need even more language confusion).

People are entitled to believe what they like, and a Bible-themed amusement park is nothing really new, but one wonders what legal genius signed off on the state government giving an unabashedly religious group $37.5 million in tax breaks? Church-state separation much? Nah …

At least, 56% for Rand Paul and 44% for Jack Conway is not the overwhelming landslide Paul had been hoping for, but it does put him in the Senate. Keep on eye on him, to see which way he votes. Will Mr Tea Party abandon his populist, libertarian platform and play with the big boys like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), or will he stick to his guns and be the maverick-y kind of guy he said he was during his campaign?

On the bright side, some other Tea Party candidates, like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, failed in their election bids by closer margins than the Paul-Conway split. This tells me there are lot of other crazy people in Nevada and Delaware beside Angle and O’Donnell, but at least they haven’t taken over yet.

Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN) kept his seat. No big surprise.

And big spender Margaret Whitman failed (54% for former Gov. Jerry Brown to her 41% ) to buy her way into win the governorship of California.

So it’s a mixed bag. It should make for an interesting end to Obama’s (perhaps first) term in the White House. Maybe the Senate will play with him, but the House will be a free-for-all.

JISHOU, HUNAN — Yeah, I’m several thousand miles away from my polling place in Floyd County, Indiana, but I still voted. So, you’d better not have lame excuse about not being to get your butt out to vote. Just sayin’.

I’ve been watching the political polls closely for the races in Indiana and Kentucky (and California, for entirely different reasons), and I’m worried.

Let’s say you’re dissatisfied with the Obama administration. I know I am, and I voted for the guy. But look it at this, most of Obama’s problems in getting the things done that he promised to get done have originated in the Party of No — the Republicans. It makes no difference what Obama proposes, the GOP will just say no. Bipartisanship has been officially dead in Washington for so long I’ve forgotten when Democrats and Republicans actually worked together on something to benefit the entire nation, and not just their own party’s chances of re-election.

So, you’re disappointed with Obama. Voting for a Republican will only make Obama’s job even harder, since none of the Repubs running for office have even remotely suggested they will work with the Democrats, only against them. Choosing a Democrat may have the same effect, but at least there’s a chance the newly elected Dem will stick with his party.

Of course, if you didn’t support Obama in 2008, none of the above applies. Consider this, in that case. The mess that Obama inherited — two unsuccessful wars, a major economic crisis and a huge federal deficit, to name a few — were not his doing. Eight years of Republican control of (and Democratic acquiescence in) Washington created that mess, and I have not heard anything from the GOP that suggests they will do things any differently than when G.W. Bush was in office. Voting for a Republican, then, is a step in the wrong direction.

What about the Tea Party candidates, such as Rand Paul? None of them, in my opinion, have any viable, logical, or suitable platform. So it makes me very sad to see Paul leading Conway in the election surveys. Conway may not be the best candidate, but Paul will be a disaster as a Senator. He does not have the best interests of Kentuckians in mind, only some la-de-da adherence to some cockeyed libertarian/Christian ideals. Conway is the lesser of two evils by far.

Louisvillians, re-elect John Yarmuth. ‘Nuff said.

In Indiana, Baron Hill has not done a bad job these last two years. And Brad Ellsworth, the Senate candidate, seems like a good choice to represent the average working guy, though I don’t agree completely with his platform.

I have lived in Indiana and Kentucky most recently, but as for California, I went to school with one of the gubernatorial candidates. Yes, indeed, Margaret Whitman and I not only were classmates from kindergarten through 11th grade (she graduated early), but also attended the same university.

If the polls are correct, Jerry Brown will beat her easily. Good. Nothing personal against Meg, but her campaign platform sucks, and the amount of money she has spent out of her own pocket ($160 million, the last I heard) is scandalous. And she ruined eBay.

No matter what side you’re on, get out and vote. At the very least, you will be able to do something that no Chinese citizen can, at least for the foreseeable future.

Please take a look around my space here, in between reading these great submissions to the current edition of Carnival of the Godless.

The Postman at “Gone Fishin’: Postcards From God” delivers a heartfelt letter from Gawd to His/Her/Their/Its peeps in “Dear People of the Book.” Gawd has not improved His/Her/Their/Its writing style much in the last 2000 years, since this letter is every bit as confusing and self-contradictory as the Book itself. Perhaps there’s a lesson there for us.

(By the way, judging from His/Her/Their/Its blogroll, I think Gawd lives in Kentucky now. This explains a lot about the Bluegrass State’s politics – confusing and self-contradictory. But I digress.)

Tomas de Torquemada

Speaking of strange religious practices, how about The Church of Body Modification‘s? No, we’re not talking about chopping and channeling a ‘49 Mercury, though it would be a lot more fun. We’re talking about your body, as in tats and piercings. Matt at The Village Heathen tells us about a member of the church, a 14-year-old girl, who was suspended from school for sporting a teeny, tiny nose stud. The family intends to file a complaint against the school for religious discrimination.

Matt’s got some body modifications himself, but not for religious reasons. In his post, “How I Overcame Childhood Indoctrination,” he credits the comments left by atheists at a Christian youth message board to get him to thinking about Gawd. The results were not pretty (from Gawd’s perspective). Matt went on to the harder stuff, like visiting atheist websites and blogs, and reading the Bible with a critical mind. It took years, but finally Matt left religion — and a childhood phobia about going to Hell — behind.

Signý is another refugee from theism, but from the Muslim community. In “When We Were Single,” she relates how men of her faith suddenly took a keen interest in her when she, a lukewarm convert, started hanging out with more devout Muslim sisters. But that interest had a downside: she discovered that converts are second-class citizens, and Muslims are every bit as racially divided as Baptists in the South are.

Nevertheless, Signý did get married, but if you want to hear about what happened after, you’ll need the check out the rest of her blog, Here in Glitnir.

Churches are losing a lot of young people from the flock. Raithie, The Teenage Atheist, is one of them. This thoughtful 16-year-old blogger offers two posts for our consideration. Here’s an extract from the first, “I’ll Create My Own Meaning, Thanks.”

If you depend upon a celestial skydaddy to enrichen your life, your life can’t be all that meaningful. Meaning is what you extract from your life and surroundings. It’s an entirely personal discovery. You acquire it from your memories, experiences and from the people who you love and consider close. What is meaningful and special to you, is what essentially offers your life meaning. Your the one with the chisel, not any ethereal, invisible being.

In his other submission, “I Fear Nothingness,” Raithie contemplates death, the end of his existence and the meaning of life from an atheist perspective. I am humbled. When I was 16, I was more worried about getting my driver’s license and getting that pretty blonde to talk to me.

Belief in supernatural influences is not limited to Christianity or Islam, of course. There’s all that New Age-y stuff that’s maybe even sillier. Maria at the Fledgeling Skeptic tells us in “Stomping Puppies” how she shot down her mom’s hopes that numerology can improve one’s love life. (Personally, I think the best number to start with is the other person’s telephone number, but to each her own.) Maria gave mom a Michael Shermer book, and is waiting for her mother to stomp on that now.

“Is Gawd dead?” Atheists would say Gawd was never there to begin with, but some theists object to the notion that He/She/They/It might be RIP. Kel at Kelosophy imagines a spectrum of responses to those timeworn questions, “How do you respond to the atheist’s charge that God is dead?” and “How would you respond to one who proclaims God is dead?” Here’s the Fundamentalist Theist response:

If God was really dead then why did blasphemer Christopher Hitchens get cancer?

I bet that fun-loving guy,Torquemada, would have enjoyed that one.

Why are there so many possible responses to these questions? Perhaps it’s because we each make Gawd in our own image. Andrew, the 360 Degree Skeptic, in “Freethought Musings: the political necessities of an abstract god” suggests losing the concrete depictions of the ancient pantheons enables monotheistic believers to imagine Gawd in whatever form suits their purpose.

How about the notion that religious belief is a virus of the mind? A writer for the Guardian in the UK tackled that question, and showed how clueless she is, according to Steve at the Socratic Gadfly. Susan Blackmore is ignorant on both memes and religion, he says.

Steve also takes the religious in Virginia to task for their lack of consistency about pro-life matters, as the recent execution of Teresa Lewis shows. Shouldn’t pro-lifers also oppose capital punishment? Or to put it another way, shouldn’t pro-lifers (if they’re really serious about this abortion = murder stuff), expand the death penalty to include the women who get abortions? I mean, come on, why stop with women who plot to kill their husbands?

(Of course, there’s always those nifty torture devices from the Inquisition, and those punishments listed in Leviticus. I bet some pro-lifers would get off on those.)

On a less serious note, let’s talk about the “Three Crazy Things Parents Worry About. As Dan at MyDadBlog.com argues, parents nowadays don’t really worry about the really big things, like a decent education or health care, they get their underwear in knots about protecting their kids against isolated events that get way too much media exposure. Their Number 1 fear: child molesters. Number 2: vaccines. Number 3: foods that can kill you.

And from Thailand Breeze we close with an observation from nature. Animals kill each other, but not because of their egos. Only humans have that nasty habit.

And that ends another Carnival of the Godless. Hope you enjoyed your stay here, and y’all come back now, y’here?

[Yes, it's the end. What, were you expecting the Spanish Inquisition? No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear! ...]

Wrong.

Here’s what he said to a Tea Party crowd in Shepherdsville:

"In the latter days of Rome, the economy was crumbling, the emperor ... would placate the mob with bread and circus -- food and entertainment to placate them since the economy was in shambles and dwindling around them," Paul told several hundred people gathered for the rally in a Bullitt County park.

 
"Now in our country, as our economy is in shambles, they give us Cash for Clunkers and a stimulus check and they tell us to go to the mall and spend your money and everything will be OK ... That's not how you become prosperous as an individual or a country," he told the crowd of supporters.

And the crowd cheered wildly, I’m sure. (“Yay! The USA is falling apart. Yay! Let’s go to Shoney’s afterward to browse the salad bar!”)

Comparing the USA to the declining Roman Empire is as sensible as equating President Obama to Adolph Hitler, the latter of which right wingers (like Glenn Beck) seem to do on a daily basis anyway.

Paul is partly right, the economy of the Western Roman Empire was in the crapper, but he conveniently skipped the reasons. (This is assuming he and his audience know anything about history, which I suspect is not the case.)

Let’s review.

At the height of its power, the Western Roman Empire stretched from Spain east to the (unfriendly) Persian Empire and the (mostly friendly) Eastern Roman Empire, and from northern Africa to the middle of Europe. To maintain this vast domain, the Roman emperors had to build roads and aqueducts, and maintain armies of legionnaires to keep everyone under control.

Rome had a lot of enemies. The Germanic tribes to the north, the Huns to the northeast, the Persian Empire and the Arabs to the southeast, the Gauls, the British, the Picts … the list goes on. Then there were all the people within the Empire who really didn’t want to be in the Empire.

To pay for all this, the emperor raised taxes … a lot. Apparently, Rome didn’t really produce anything; it filled its state coffers with plunder from the lands it conquered. But no further conquests meant no more plunder, and so the government had to tax, tax, tax.

Heavy taxes did two things: they drove tradespeople out of the cities, because food in urban areas became so expensive they left to grow their own in the countryside; and they made keeping marginal land under cultivation pointless, since any harvests could not cover the taxes on the land and crops.

Then there was runaway inflation, since the currency was devalued repeatedly. So Roman citizens were getting less bang for their denarii. There was no reliable imperial budgetary system. The slave economy meant there was effectively no middle class with any buying power. (Slaves can’t buy anything; rich folk don’t need anything.)

Then there was infighting within the military, which relied heavily too much on German mercenaries. And several plagues decimated the population.

Now let’s compare this sorry state of affairs with the USA.

Overextended? Nope. Although, our infrastructure is kinda falling apart.

Surrounded by enemies on all sides? Nope. Our biggest nearby “enemy” is Cuba, and then maybe Venezuela. At last report, Canada and Mexico still mostly liked us, possibly because we are not trying to invade them.

Need for a vast standing army to control a restless population? Nope.

Heavy taxation? Nope. Europeans get taxed a lot worse than Americans are.

Farmland being abandoned? Nope. Cities being abandoned? Well, sorta, but not as bad as Rome had it back then. Lack of a budgetary system? Nope. Slave economy? Not any more.

Military infighting? One general notably lost his job recently for stepping out of line. Mercenaries? There’s Xe, but fortunately its influence seems limited. Plagues? Only if people stop getting their kids vaccinated. (I see whooping cough is becoming a problem in southern California, because the unvaccinated kids are screwing with the herd immunity.)

True, the Roman emperors gave the masses “bread and circuses,” to distract them, but it was a waste of time and money. In comparison, Washington’s recent stimulus packages were admittedly just bandaid solutions for a serious economic downtown, but they weren’t a complete waste of money.

Ultimately, what really brought the Roman Empire to an end was an invading army marching into Rome and telling the emperor to get lost. I don’t see that happening in the USA any time soon.

So, basically, Rand Paul is wrong. Again.

A blog criticizing Paul’s brand of politics has been simmering in my brain ever since he got the GOP Senate nomination in Kentucky last month, but it all gelled today when I read Paul wants to amend the Constitution so that children born on US soil do not automatically become US citizens.

Normally I avoid discussing politics on this blog, because there are so many political blogs that do a much better job, but this Paul guy is a definite nutjob. Don’t vote for him. Please.

So, we have this so-called problem with illegal immigrants. Apparently they are stealing all those cool jobs from all those legal Americans lining up to work 18-hour days for less than $5.25 an hour with no benefits and no paid vacations (or vacations at all). Paul’s solution is to rewrite the Constitution to remove a “loophole” in immigration law.

Because the first thought of pregnant immigrant women is to risk life and limb to sneak into the USA to get low-paying, backbreaking work and coincidentally have their babies.

Because the best way to get rid of annoying mosquitoes is to shoot them with a rocket launcher.

I’m serious. Amending the Constitution is big-time stuff. It’s intended to be a difficult task: we don’t want politicians mucking around with the very foundation of the US political system on a whim. The framers of the Constitution were wise; they knew politicians can seriously fuck things up given half a chance. Take health care reform, for example.

But I digress.

A little bit o’ history, simplified for Mr Paul …

About 150 years ago, there was a war. One side believed slavery should be legal. We’ll call it the “South.” The other side said, no, the federal government wants to make it illegal. (That was the “North” speaking.) The South said, “Over our dead bodies. Fuck you. We’re going to form our own government!” And so they did. The North said, “Uhhh, you can’t really do that. That’s treason.”

So, they went to war. Lots of people died. The North eventually won the war (known variously as the Civil War, the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on where you’re from). The slaves were freed.

But were they citizens? Big sticky legal problem here.

Before the Civil War, for the purpose of census enumeration, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person. Otherwise, the South would have had a helluva lot more votes in Congress than the North. Needless to say, slaves had no legal rights as citizens. The Emancipation Proclamation may have freed them (only some of them, in actuality), but that was it.

The Fourteenth Amendment on July 9, 1868, fixed all that. (Well, in theory.) It begins:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. ….

Short version: Freed slaves — everyone, actually — are American citizens if they were born in the USA. They are protected by all applicable laws, too. And each one counts as a whole person. Naturalized citizens also get the same protections.

Paul’s argument, and it’s a pretty thin one, is that Congress only intended this amendment to apply to the slaves, not to anyone whose mom just happens to be visiting the USA when her water breaks. He has suggested that the courts consider whether the amendment applies to children of illegal immigrants.

Do politicians ever check case law before they blather such nonsense? The courts have already ruled on the immigrant issue. Even the Supreme Court has. In 1898. Birthright citizenship applies to everyone, not just the slaves. The tip-off is the phrase “all persons.” The amendment doesn’t say, “almost all persons” or “only those people who used to be slaves but aren’t anymore” or “everyone except the people we don’t like right now, like Muslims or Mexicans — just sayin’.” The amendment specifically says, “all persons.” That seems like a no-brainer to me.

In case the courts reject Paul’s peculiar vision of constitutional law, he also suggests we just, well, do away with that pesky amendment. Close the loophole. One wonders how the wording of that new amendment would read. Probably nowhere near as concise as “all persons.”

But there’s more to this Paulian strategy. Among other things, the 14th amendment also restricts the states from doing whatever they fuck they want to do, including ignoring or abrogating federal laws. (Arizona, anyone?) It reiterates the supremacy of federal law over state law, which considering the events leading up to its ratification, is understandable. Congress was trying to prevent a repeat of that whole secession fiasco. (Texas, anyone?)

Of course, states rights supporters just hate the 14th amendment, because they say it gives the feds too much power. Bigots hate the 14th amendment because it lets blacks (and everyone else who ain’t white) have the same rights and privileges as whites, including public education. (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 )

Anti-immigration kooks hate the 14th amendment because it gives anyone born in the USA of immigrants (my mom, for instance) automatic citizenship.

And frankly speaking, I get just a little angry when someone suggests that my mom should not have been an American citizen. (My grandparents were legal immigrants, btw.)

So Rand Paul can go stuff himself.

My issues with Paul don’t stop with immigration and states’ rights. If you heard his interview with Rachel Maddow, you would wonder as I do what his exact position is on federal civil rights laws. Paul was not really emphatic when he said, after repeated prodding by Maddow, that he was sorta, kinda for civil rights.

Paul says he is a libertarian, so much of his political philosophy comes from the libertarian ideals of small government, free markets, and “natural order.” Trouble is, I’m not too sure he’s thought through all the ramifications of those ideals.

Take the Civil Rights Act of 1966, for example. (The act that basically finished what the 14th amendment supposedly took care of.) As I understand Paul’s argument, government should have no power to tell private businesses (a diner, for example) or even private citizens (a shop owner) what to do. The government can legislate what should be done by government officials and employees, or regulate what can be done on federal property, but that should be the limit of its powers.

So, Paul says, if a diner posts a sign out front that says, “No guns allowed,” the feds have no right to countermand that policy. Well, I have no problem with that, since there are laws limiting concealed weapons and/or packing heat in public. Where his argument falls apart is with the possibility that the diner’s sign says, “No coloreds allowed,” or “No Mexicans.” (Or “Irish need not apply,” if you want to go back further in time.) It seems he is not really comfortable with the idea that the government has the right to say, no, you can’t do that.

Rather, Paul suggests, the free market (customers) will take care of the problem. People who don’t like such discrimination won’t frequent the diner, the diner’s owner loses money, and then he realizes his policy is causing the problem. And voila! No discrimination!

Like that would work. Having failed Case Law 101, Paul may have flunked Seminar on US History (1865-1966), too. For a century after the civil war ended, there was institutionalized, government-backed racial discrimination throughout the South. Does the name “Jim Crow” ring a bell? Maybe Paul, in his rose-colored libertarian bubble, hasn’t heard of Mr Crow. The whole reason there had to be a Civil Rights Act was the “free market” of customs and ideas wasn’t really changing things in the South at anything faster than a glacial pace. I suspect that we lived in a Paulian alternate reality, we’d still have whites-only restrooms in 2010 in some parts of the deep South.

For that matter, imagine, Kentuckians, if we had a libertarian-inspired system of federal mining regulations, as in none. Given the long history of shoddy mine safety in eastern Kentucky, and almost non-existent company-sponsored environmental protection prior to the EPA, just imagine what the hills of Kentucky would look like now, if they were still there. And if a libertarian suggests that the state government would step in and enact such controls, he doesn’t understand Kentucky politics very well at all.

I’m not sure Paul understands politics, or human nature, in general. In a perfect world, libertarianism might just work. But the world is unpredictable, and people even more so. Worse yet, people are corruptible. Money talks, and it’s usually the little guy who gets shafted. Without some kind of so-called “intrusive” government, the USA would be in a worse fix than it is now. Much of the problems we’ve had with the banking, mortgage, financial, and oil-drilling sectors have happened because of limited or non-existent federal regulations.

Finally, another reason I just don’t trust this guy is some possibilities that, despite his avowed libertarianism, Paul seems to have ties to the Dominionists in the religious right, the kind of people who want to scrap the Constitution and replace it with Biblical Law. The last thing we need in the Senate is another religious extremist. The upper chamber seems to be filled with them lately.

I don’t live in Kentucky anymore — my official voting residence is Indiana — but I lived in Kentucky for almost 30 years. I have a lot of family and friends there. I plead with you, don’t vote for Rand Paul. It would be a big mistake.

There were just two little problems with this trip. One, not all the kid’s parents signed off on this trip. Two, the kids go to a public school, so the coach and his superintendent more than likely violated federal law (like the Constitution).

Except they don’t see it that way, because the trip was “voluntary.”

Predictably, the high school is smack dab in the Bible Belt, in western Kentucky.

Here’s a little cultural background about western Kentucky, which Coach Scott Mooney and Superintendent Janet Meeks should have already known. Back in Kentucky’s early years, there were two main religious groups, the Baptists and the Catholics. When I lived in western Kentucky, my friends told me about the stories they heard about the “other” people, how Baptists almost drowned their young or Catholics go drunk during services.

Suffice it say, the two groups did not exactly trust each other, for a long time.

So, for Mooney and Meeks to so blithely whisk away 20 teenagers to their Southern Baptist church for a revival, a free steak dinner, and coincidentally to have some of them baptized either indicates the two are stupid or playing some dominionist games.

One of the boys, 16, has a Catholic father and a Baptist mother. (How times have changed!) His mother is pretty pissed, because she says coach subverted parents’ rights. Case in point: When all of his buddies stood up to get baptised, her son did, too. Mind you, it’s his Baptist mother who’s as mad as a hornet.

So far the American Civil Liberties Union has not gotten involved, but I expect a civil rights complaint will be filed pretty soon, if the boy’s mom stays mad long enough.