Eye on the sky

In the brilliant, mind-bending dark comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh plays (to absolute perfection) the laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang, who finds that the universe has been shattered into hundreds of parallel time streams, and her job is to get all of reality back on the rails.

Along the way, Evelyn discovers that in these different timelines, she had many other possible fates, including a martial arts master, an award-winning dancer, and an acclaimed movie star.  At one point she asks why she (the laundromat-owner version) is being asked to save the universe, and receives the hilarious answer that of all the possible Evelyns, she is the one who is the biggest failure.

So basically, whatever she decides to do, there's no way she can fuck things up any worse.

Oh, and the wonderful Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu also have fantastic roles, and Jamie Lee Curtis just about steals the show as an absolutely fed-up IRS agent named (I shit you not) Deirdre Beaubeirdre.

If you haven't seen it, put it on your list immediately.  It's that good.

The reason it comes up is that I have to wonder if we're all actually trapped in the stupidest of all possible timelines.  Just in the last couple of days, Donald Trump threw a major temper tantrum because people are telling him he can't have Greenland to play with.  Trump's response to everything is always one of three things: belligerent social media posts, lawsuits, and tariffs.  He selected the last-mentioned, threatening tariffs against any nation that sides with Denmark and Greenland, because there's nothing like raising the price of imported goods paid by your own citizens to make a point with the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, that point seems to be summed up in psychologist Abraham Maslow's pithy line, "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

If you needed another example of how ridiculous things have gotten, look no further than my home state of Louisiana, which recently enacted a law establishing an agency (a branch of the Department of Environmental Quality) to handle reports about "weather modification."  How ordinary, untrained laypeople would recognize weather modification if they saw it is an open question, but that hasn't stopped them from making hundreds of reports, because apparently a founding principle of the United States is (to swipe Isaac Asimov's phrase) "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge."

So I had a look at a few of them.  And...

... yikes.

One from my hometown of Lafayette describes "multiple chemtrails crisscrossing the sky."  Another, from New Iberia, says (and I quote), "There was a large fog that covered New Iberia within the past few weeks; materials (nanochip/bacteria) were dropped into the fog causing parasitic infections (per a medical source).  Who is authorized to poison citizens?"  Then there was the one from Covington, which I reproduce here verbatim, because you can only write [sic] so many times:

I haven't noticed especially this past Sunday and Monday on a clear sky clear blue sky.  Small Plains will appear.  This is not the first time there's several up to three and they will make a Chris cross pattern in the sky, admitting white substance and it clouds the sky when they're done the sky is cloudy before it was a clear sky.  I don't know what they're admitting.  I don't know who's doing it.  I don't know who's paying for it.  I don't know why it's being done, but I want answers to all of my questions because of this should not be happening in Saint Tammany Parish and it happens all the time.

Then, from Thibodaux we have:

Obvious they are not naturally occurring clouds but remnants of the last spray.  They take hours to dissipate where regular jet trails disappear immediately.  Also the rippling effect caused clearly by frequency emission should be looked into.  Hmmmm wonder what towers emit those.

Last, we have the guy from Lake Charles who said that there were chemtrails all over the place, and he would be happy to show anyone who was willing to come to his house, but first, visitors must prove that they are"not robots."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the National Weather Service]

Okay, let me just make a few clarifications for any yo-yos who think all this makes sense.

The combustion of jet fuel produces two main waste products: carbon dioxide and water vapor.  When water vapor is released into the (cold) upper air layers, it condenses into a line of tiny water droplets called a contrail.  How long it takes a contrail to dissipate and/or evaporate depends on a variety of factors, including temperature, windspeed, turbulence, and humidity.

In particular: the higher the humidity, the slower the evaporation.  And the air down in Louisiana is really fucking humid.

I grew up there, remember?

Also, allow me to point out that if there was some sort of nefarious program to poison U.S. citizens, adding toxins (or nanochips and bacteria) to jet fuel so that the remnants in the exhaust would settle, and then hoping the right people would be outside to breathe in the Bad Stuff and die, has to be the all-time stupidest idea I've ever heard.  Despite this, these wingnuts filing all the reports seem to picture a bunch of Boris-and-Natasha-style villains mwah-hah-hahing and gleefully rubbing their hands together over what a brilliant and devious plot this is.

Although now that I come to think of it, this is actually not a bad comparison.  Chemtrails are about as plausible a superweapon as Goof Gas, which was Boris's invention that (if inhaled) makes the victim suddenly much stupider.  (It didn't work on Bullwinkle, you might recall, because he was already so stupid there was nowhere else to go.  A little like the people filing all these reports.)

What galls me the most about the chemtrails agency, though, is that every single one of these claims has to be investigated by agents who are getting paid by taxpayer money that could be used for something more worthwhile, which is, oh, just about anything.  Say, the education system, so the next generation grows up smart enough to know that "frequency emissions" don't create clouds.

Me, I'm torn between laughing and flipping my desk.  I don't know how Evelyn Quan Wang managed to keep her sanity, but I'm getting worn out from living in the stupidest of all possible timelines.  I mean, I guess you have to try and find some humor in it, like the guy who posted the pic of Donald Trump as a crying, messy-faced toddler in a high chair, and his mother is saying to him, "No, Donald, you can't have any Greenland until you've finished your Venezuela."

But at the moment, I'm just shaking my head over the whole thing.  Maybe I can appeal to Michelle Yeoh to help out.  If she's not up to the task, I'll settle for Rocky and Bullwinkle.

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The echo of evil

One of the more horrifying stories from my home state of Louisiana is the more-or-less true tale of Madame Delphine Macarty LaLaurie.

I qualify it with "more-or-less" because being gruesome, even by New Orleans gothic standards, it's certainly been embellished along the way.  Plus, as you'll see there's a supernatural twist to the whole thing, and -- at least in my not-always-so-humble opinion -- that makes it fictional by default.  But with that caveat in place, here's what we know.

Delphine was born on the 19th of March, 1787, in New Orleans, to Louis Barthélemy de Macarty (or McCarty or McCarthy or MacCarthy) and his wife, Marie-Jeanne L'Érable.  Louis's father was from Ireland, but the rest of the family was French -- as well as influential and rich.  Her uncle by marriage was the governor of the Spanish colony of Louisiana, and a cousin later became mayor of New Orleans.  Delphine married three times; first to a prominent officer in the Spanish military named Ramón de Lopez y Angulo, then to a wealthy banker named Jean Blanque, and last to a doctor, Léonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie.

Delphine Macarty LaLaurie [Image is in the Public Domain]

Until 1834, Delphine and her husband(s) showed every sign of being completely normal upper-class citizens, participating in the high society of the New Orleans French Quarter.  A few hints had gotten out about the LaLauries, especially Delphine, alleging that she mistreated slaves, but in that day and age it had to be pretty extreme before anyone would do anything about that even if it were proven true.

Eventually, it was.  And the reality turned out to be so bad that even the privileged White people of the antebellum South were revolted.

In April of 1834, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the LaLaurie mansion.  Responding to calls for help, neighbors came in to extinguish the blaze -- and found the family cook chained to the stove by her ankle.  This spurred an investigation, and the police found the family slaves in deplorable shape, showing evidence of torture and deprivation.  At first Dr. LaLaurie responded to the inquiry with derision, saying, "some people had better stay at home rather than come to others' houses to dictate laws and meddle with other people's business," but when the condition of the slaves was made public, the outrage was so strong that a mob descended on the house.  The couple fled, eventually making their way to Paris, where they lived for the rest of their lives.  Dr. LaLaurie's death is unrecorded, but Delphine's shows up in the Paris Archives, saying she died on 7 December 1849 at the age of 62.  She never publicly acknowledged any guilt over how she and her husband had treated the slaves; in fact, a letter from Paulin Blanque, her son by her second marriage, states that his mother "never had any idea about the reason for her departure from the city."

So either Dr. LaLaurie was the real villain, here, or Delphine was amoral and an accomplished liar.

Perhaps both.

Certainly the legend, though, favors the latter.  The tale of a depraved and sadistic woman had a cachet that grabbed people's attention, and the story began to grow by accretion.  The 1946 book Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, by Jeanne deLavigne, went into explicit detail about what Delphine supposedly did -- I'll spare you the details, not only because they are downright disgusting, but because the more grotesque of the claims are entirely unsubstantiated by the records.  Now, I'm not saying the LaLauries were innocent, mind you; at the best, they were cruel, heartless people whose escape to Paris is the very definition of "getting off lightly."  But any time there's a claim like this, people always want to add to it -- and they have, throwing in enough gory details to do a slasher movie proud.

The LaLaurie house was rebuilt -- there wasn't much left but the frame after the fire and the attack by the enraged mob -- and over the years has been a private residence (the most recent owner was none other than Nicolas Cage), a music conservatory, a high school, a residence for delinquents, a bar, and a furniture store.  It's widely considered to be haunted, and features prominently on New Orleans ghost walks; some call it "the most haunted building in Louisiana," where at night you can hear the moans of the poor tortured slaves and the evil, cold laugh of the wicked Delphine, as she walks the hallways and staircases looking for new victims.

LaLaurie Mansion, 1140 Royal Street [Image licensed under the Creative Commons APK, LaLaurie Mansion, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason the topic comes up is because the home just went up for sale again -- target price, a cool $10.25 million.  So if you have a good chunk of cash and want to live in one of the most notorious haunted houses in the Deep South, here's your chance.

Predictably, I don't put much stock in the paranormal side of this, but the author of the article about the sale makes a trenchant point; ghosts or no ghosts, isn't it pretty tasteless to be using the evil reputation of the site as a way of jacking up the price?  After all, no one doubts that real human beings were treated horribly here, many of them ultimately dying of their injuries.  There's not even the relief of a just ending to fall back on; the LaLauries pretty much got off scot-free.  The article's author suggests that maybe the thing to do is turn the place into a museum chronicling the plight of slaves in the South, who even after they were nominally freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, still had to endure generations of prejudice, persecution, and injustice.  (And to our nation's enduring shame, in many places their descendants still do.)

It's a nice idea, but money will talk, as it always does.  Some rich person will buy the LaLaurie Mansion, and it'll still be featured on ghost tours, cashing in on a legacy of human suffering.  Whatever the horrible details of the story of Delphine and her husband, having a building standing in their name is still on some level celebrating them, leaving an echo of evil on the streets of the French Quarter.

I understand the argument about leaving up places with horrific historical associations as reminders, but this is a case where I think the most fitting thing is to raze the damn place and erase every last trace of Delphine LaLaurie.  She got off easy (extremely easy) in life -- perhaps eradicating her memory after death is a fitting end for someone who was judged as sadistic even by the cruel standards of her time and place.

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Indoctrination

By now, I'm sure you've all heard that my former home state of Louisiana has passed a law requiring all public school teachers to post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.  The argument, if I can dignify it by that term, is that the Ten Commandments represent a "historical document," not a mandate of religious belief.

Shall I refresh your memory about what the First Damn Commandment says?

"I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me."

How, exactly, is that not a mandate of religious belief?

Others include "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," and also "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor shalt thou covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his male or female servant, nor his ox, nor anything else that belongs to him," which has the added fun of being a tacit endorsement of slavery and the subjugation of women.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The latest in this christofascist attack on separation of church and state -- a principle which, allow me to remind you, is mentioned explicitly in the Constitution of the United States, unlike God and Jesus -- is a sparring match between CNN anchor Boris Sanchez and Louisiana state representative Lauren Ventrella, wherein he tried to corner her on various points revolving around the secular basis of the United States and the fact that the new law is inherently discriminatory against non-Christians.  Of course, you can only corner someone with logic if they're arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence, so it was bound to end in failure.  Ventrella did what the MAGA types always do; launched into a Gish gallop of irrelevancies such as what Sanchez's salary was, the fact that "In God We Trust" is printed on the dollar bill (neglecting to mention, of course, that it was only added in 1956), and ended with her solution for people of other religions (or no religion at all) to a clearly religious document posted on the classroom wall, which was, "Then don't look at it."

Fine, that's the angle you want to take, Representative Ventrella?  Two can play that game.

A teacher wants to put a Pride flag up in the classroom, and you don't like it?  Don't look at it.

You don't like books representing racial or religious diversity, or ones that feature queer people?  Don't read them.

You think drag shows are immoral?  Don't attend one.

You're against gay marriage?  Then the next time a gay person proposes to you, say no.

Or does that approach only work when you're trying to shoehorn Christianity into public schools?  

And more importantly, are these people really so stupid they don't see how easily their arguments could backfire on them?  

The problem here is that christofascists like Lauren Ventrella only want students exposed to straight White Christian... well, anything.  Fiction?  Of course, that goes without saying.  Non-fiction, too -- Florida's banned books list included biographies of prominent People of Color and LGBTQ+ individuals, for no other apparent reason than their not being about straight White people.  History has to be whitewashed to emphasize the benevolence of White Christians and downplay (or ignore completely) anything that casts them in a negative light -- or anything that brings up the contributions of other cultures.  

So they're not against indoctrinating kids; quite the opposite.  They love indoctrination.  They just want to make sure the indoctrination lines up with the way they were indoctrinated.

And that's not even getting into how the hell the leaders of a state that ranks 49th in education think this kind of nonsense is the priority.  Or the screeching hypocrisy of the same people who want the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and who claim to follow an incarnated deity who said "Let the little children come unto me," regularly voting against aid for underprivileged youth and subsidized school lunches.

Seems like the idea is keep 'em poor, hungry, uneducated, and brainwashed.

I hold out some hope that the inevitable lawsuits this is going to trigger from the ACLU and the FFRF will strike down this law as unconstitutional, but given the unabashedly far-right leaning of the Supreme Court, I have no confidence that they might not end up siding with Ventrella et al. on this.  The only thing we moderate and left-leaning people can do is to get our asses to the polls in November and vote.  Vote like the future of democracy in the United States depends on it -- because it does.

Otherwise, I fear that the christofascist takeover of the country may well be a done deal.

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Geological toothpaste

One of the fun things about science is that sometimes, when you look closely at a phenomenon, you find out that what you thought was fairly simple turns out to be not only complex but just flat-out weird.  That was my reaction to something I first heard about only a couple of days ago, which (like the topic of yesterday's post) comes from the realm of geology.

Continental slopes are generally pretty straightforward.  They represent a sharp boundary between continental crust (usually thick, cold, and relatively old) and oceanic crust (by contrast, thin, hot, and fairly recent).  The slopes are steep dropoffs -- the topography of the ocean floor is no gradual decline down toward the abyss -- and the continental shelves, the shallow regions of varying widths that ring the continents, are actually geologically part of the continent.  (They just happen to be covered by sea water.)

So the continental slopes shouldn't be that complicated.  They're a narrow transitional band separating shallow regions connected to the continental land masses from the very different geological realm of the deep ocean.

But then there's the Sigsbee Escarpment.

The Sigsbee Escarpment is a stretch of the continental slope in the Gulf of Mexico, south of coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.  The first clue that there was something weird going on there is that the continental shelf north of it is a good bit wider than it should be -- certainly wider than a lot of continental shelf regions.  This is great for the fishing industry, which thrives in shallow continental shelf regions.  The deep ocean has far less in the way of life, largely due to the fact that the depth makes significant vertical mixing difficult, so nutrients that settle to the ocean floor tend to stay there.  Any given cubic meter of surface water over the deep ocean is unlikely to have much living in it beyond single-celled organisms.

Most continental shelves are relatively narrow, but the Sigsbee Escarpment sticks way out into the Gulf, and the reason why has to do with the combination of something that happened 150 million years ago and something that happened two thousand kilometers away.

[Image courtesy of Harry H. Roberts and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

At the beginning of the Jurassic Period, around two hundred million years ago, North and South America were joined (well, everything had been joined not long before; Pangaea had lasted through most of the Triassic Period).  Rifting opened up what would eventually become the Gulf of Mexico, letting seawater into a new embayment that initially was quite shallow.  The climate was generally hot, so for the next fifty million years, the evaporation rate was high, and this water became extremely saline, leading to the deposition of huge quantities of crystalline salt on the seafloor.

These salt deposits are found all over the southeastern United States, and what are responsible for the Lake Peigneur disaster in November of 1980.  Lake Peigneur is a broad, brackish lake near Delcambre in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, which unfortunately is right above a huge salt deposit that had been mined for years by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company.  The problem is, the area is also a prime spot for oil drilling -- oil deposits and salt domes are frequently found in the same geological context -- and a Texaco oil rig drilling in the lake floor accidentally punched through into a cavern that had been excavated by the Salt Company.  Suddenly the bottom of the lake collapsed, creating a vortex like water going down a bathtub drain as the entire lake drained into the cavern.  The sinkhole swallowed the oil rig, eleven barges, a tugboat, hundreds of trees, and 26 hectares of land from the lake edge.  Where the lake had been, all that was left was an expanse of salty mud.

But back to the Sigsbee Escarpment.  The salient point here is that this same salt deposit, created during the Jurassic Period, extends offshore.  And that's where the second factor comes in.

The Laramide Orogeny is a complex series of events that is mostly responsible for raising the Rocky Mountains.  What had been relatively flat terrain, from Arizona up to Alberta, was now rapidly increasing in elevation and steepness.  Well, there's a general rule in geology that if you increase the angle at which a land surface sits, you increase the rate of erosion from running water; rivers run faster, can carry more suspended debris, and have a greater capacity for abrasion.  The raising of the Rocky Mountains meant that as they were lifted, the forces of erosion started tearing them down -- and all of that pulverized rock had to go somewhere.

Ultimately, any of it east of the Continental Divide ended up in the tributaries to the Mississippi River, and was flushed out into the Gulf of Mexico.

This plume of debris -- some of it from thousands of kilometers away -- settled out over the Jurassic salt deposits, and the weight of it started exerting significant downward pressure.  And salt -- especially the saturated salt mush that was at the bottom of the sea -- flows when it's compressed.  So like toothpaste squeezed from the world's largest tube, the salt domes squished outward, forming the lobes that are on the southern edge of the Sigsbee Escarpment.

Geologist Harry H. Roberts, of Louisiana State University, writes, "This process continues today.  As sediments have been continually added to the northern and northwestern Gulf rim, salt has been squeezed seaward in front of a constantly thickening wedge of sediment.  Today, the steep transition between the bottom of the continental slope and the deep Gulf floor, called the Sigsbee Escarpment, represents the old Jurassic Louann salt formation being squeezed seaward over much younger sediments."

So what started out seeming simple -- the steep boundary between continental shelf and deep ocean -- turns out not to be that simple after all, and way more interesting.

But that's how science is, isn't it?  Answering one question raises a hundred more, but that's the thrill of it.  As physicist Brian Greene put it, "Science is a way of life.  Science is a perspective.  Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable -- a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional."

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Deus ex machina

If you needed further evidence of how powerful surveillance technology has become, consider that Google Street View has captured a photograph of god.

At least that's what some people think.  The photograph, taken near Quarten, Switzerland, shows two blurry figures hovering above a lake, and some people have decided that they are the Father and the Son.

I've beaten unto death the whole why-the-human-brain-is-wired-to-see-faces thing, so I won't revisit that topic, but for myself, I'm not seeing Jesus and God the Father in the photograph.  The one on the left looks too tall and gawky, and the one on the right far too short and tubby, to fit my image of the Supreme Being and his Only Begotten Son.  In fact, if the rightmost is the one people think is God, my personal opinion is that the Big Guy needs to lay off the Hostess Ho-Hos and Little Debbie Snack Cakes for a few months.  On the other hand, if it's not God and Jesus, who is it?  After studying the photograph carefully, I've decided that it's Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria.  Why they'd be visiting a lake in Switzerland in the afterlife, I don't know.  I guess there are worse places to take a vacation.

On the other hand, if I were a deity, I'd definitely opt instead for a pub on the southeast coast of Australia, which is another place that Jesus has been spotted lately. The front wall of the Seanchai Irish Tavern in Warrnambool, Australia, was in need of a paint job, and the flaking of the paint left a bare patch that looks by some stretch of the imagination like a tall, thin figure with outstretched arms.
  

The manager, John Keohane, who is a devout Roman Catholic, immediately decided that it was Jesus.  Many of the pub's patrons agreed, which goes to show that pints of Guinness definitely don't contribute to rational thinking.  The priest of a local Catholic parish is apparently interested in the image, and encouraged Keohane to place a protective screen over the image so that over-enthusiastic tourists (evidently there have been busloads of them) don't touch the image and cause more paint to flake off, thereby causing Jesus to morph into Queen Victoria.

Lastly, there was a sighting in my home state of Louisiana of Jesus on the cross. Rickey Navarre, of Hathaway, Louisiana, saw a vine-covered telephone pole which looked to him like a crucifix.

Navarre was inspired to devotion by the image, which is not necessarily a bad thing, although I do wonder what he would expect a bunch of vines on a cross-shaped telephone pole to look like.   Concerned electrical company workers hastily cleared away the vines, fearing that hordes of the devout would attempt to climb the pole to touch the vines and summarily be ushered into heaven via electrocution.  One disappointed resident placed flowers at the base of the pole, but on the whole, I think that it's probably better that they're gone.  The last thing we need is people erecting a shrine around an electrical pole.  The electric companies think they're omnipotent enough as it is.

That's about it for Jesus sightings lately.  It's a bit of a nice change that he seems to be avoiding food items these days -- tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches really don't have the gravitas that you'd like to associate with the Almighty.  And although there are clearly rational explanations for all of the above -- vines on a cross-shaped pole, randomly flaking paint, and what was probably just two blobs of schmutz on a camera lens -- if you prefer to think of them as images of god, don't let me discourage you.  Humble human that I am, I wouldn't presume to tell Jesus where he should visit.  I will suggest, however, that if he appears anywhere near where I live, he should dress warmly, as this time of year upstate New York can be a little "brisk," as the eternally-cheery weather forecasters like to call it.  He might want to mention the same thing to Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria, in case they decide to tag along.

Reality blindness

I read an article on CNN yesterday that really pissed me off, something that seems to be happening more and more lately.

The article, entitled "Denying Climate Change As the Seas Around Them Rise" (by Ed Lavandera and Jason Morris), describes the effects of climate change in my home state of Louisiana, which include the loss of entire communities to rising seas and coastline erosion.  An example is the village of Isle Jean Charles, mostly inhabited by members of the Biloxi-Chetimacha tribe, which basically has ceased to exist in the last ten years.

But there are people who will deny what is right in front of their faces, and they include one Leo Dotson of Cameron Parish.  Dotson, a fisherman and owner of a seafood company, "turned red in the face" when the reporters from CNN asked him about climate change.  Dotson said:

I work outside in the weather on a boat, and it's all pretty much been the same for me.  The climate is exactly the same as when I was a kid.  Summers hot, winters cold...  [Climate change] doesn't concern me...  What is science?  Science is an educated guess.  What if they guess wrong?  There's just as much chance for them to be wrong as there is for them to be right.  If [a scientist] was 500 years old, and he told me it's changed, I would probably believe him.  But in my lifetime, I didn't see any change.

Well, you know what, Mr. Dotson?  I'm kind of red in the face right now, myself.  Because your statements go way past ignorance.  Ignorance can be forgiven, and it can be cured.  What you've said falls into the category of what my dad -- also a fisherman, and also a native and life-long resident of Louisiana -- called "just plain stupid."

Science is not an educated guess, and there is not  "just as much chance for them to be wrong as there is for them to be right."  Climate scientists are not "guessing" on climate change.  Because of the controversy, the claim has been tested every which way from Sunday, and every scrap of evidence we have -- sea level rise, Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, earlier migration times for birds, earlier flowering times for plants, more extreme weather events including droughts, heat waves, and storms -- support the conclusion that the climate is shifting dramatically, and that we've only seen the beginning.

At this point, the more educated science deniers usually bring up the fact that there have been times that the scientific establishment has gotten it wrong, only to be proven so, sometimes years later.  Here are a few examples:

1. Darwin's theory of evolution, which overturned our understanding of how species change over time.
2. Mendel's experiments in genetics, later bolstered by the discovery of the role of DNA and chromosomes in heredity.  Prior to Mendel's time, our understanding of heredity was goofy at best (consider the idea, still prevalent in fairy tales, of "royal blood" and the capacity for ruling being inheritable, which you'd think that any number of monarchs who were stupid, incompetent, insane, or all three would have been sufficient to put to rest).
3. Alfred Wegener's postulation of "continental drift" in 1912, which was originally ridiculed so much that poor Wegener was forced to retreated in disarray.  The fact that he was right wasn't demonstrated for another forty years, through the work of such luminaries in geology as Harry Hess, Tuzo Wilson, Fred Vine, Drummond Matthews, and others.
4. The "germ theory of disease," proposed by Marcus von Plenciz in 1762, and which wasn't widely accepted until the work of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur in the 1870s.
5. Big Bang cosmology, discovered from the work of astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble.
6. Albert Einstein's discovery of relativity, and everything that came from it -- the speed of light as an ultimate universal speed limit, time dilation, and the theory of simultaneity.
7. The structure of the atom, a more-or-less correct model of which was first described by Niels Bohr, and later refined considerably by the development of quantum mechanics.

There.  Have I forgotten any major ones?  My point is that yes, prior to each of these, people (including scientists) believed some silly and/or wrong ideas about how the world works, and that there was considerable resistance in the scientific community to accepting what we now consider theory so solidly supported that it might as well be considered as fact.  But you know why these stand out?

Because they're so infrequent.  If you count the start of the scientific view of the world as being some time during the Enlightenment -- say, 1750 or so -- that's 267 years in which there have been only seven times there has been a major model of the universe overturned and replaced by a new paradigm.  Mostly what science has done is to amass evidence supporting the theories we have -- genetics supporting evolution, the elucidation of DNA's structure by Franklin, Crick, and Watson supporting Mendel, the discovery of the 3K cosmic microwave background radiation by Amo Penzias and Robert Wilson supporting the Big Bang.

So don't blather at me about how "science gets it wrong as often as it gets it right."  That's bullshit.  If you honestly believe that, you better give up modern medicine and diagnostics, airplanes, the internal combustion engine, microwaves, the electricity production system, and the industrial processes that create damn near every product we use.

But you know what?  I don't think Dotson and other climate change deniers actually do believe that.  I doubt seriously whether Dotson would go in to his doctor for an x-ray, and when he gets the results say, "Oh, well.  It's equally likely that I have a broken arm or not, so what the hell?  Might as well not get a cast."  He doesn't honestly think that when he pulls the cord to start his boat motor, it's equally likely to start, not start, or explode.

No, he doesn't believe in climate change because it would require him to do something he doesn't want to do.  Maybe move.  Maybe change his job.  Maybe vote for someone other than the clods who currently are in charge of damn near every branch of government.  So because the result is unpleasant, it's easier for him to say, "ain't happening," and turn red in the face.

But the universe is under no obligation to conform to our desires.  Hell, if it was, I'd have a magic wand and a hoverboard.  It's just that I'm smart enough and mature enough to accept what's happening even if I don't like it, and people like Dotson -- and Lamar Smith, and Dana Rohrabacher, and James "Snowball" Inhofe, and Scott Pruitt, and Donald Trump -- apparently are not.

The problem is, there's not much we can do to fix this other than wait till Leo Dotson's house floats away.  Once people like him have convinced themselves of something, there's no changing it.

I just have to hope that our government officials aren't quite so intransigent.  It'd be nice to see them wake up to reality before the damage done to our planet is irrevocable.

Suppressing reality

Back in the 1950s, scientists were beginning to identify a causal connection between smoking and lung cancer.  Prior to that, there was an extensive advertising campaign to convince the public that smoking was actually good for your health:

Once the connection between tobacco use and a whole host of ailments became clear, tobacco company executives were quick to see what was happening -- and to launch their own disinformation campaign.  Public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, hired to manage the situation, made their approach clear in documents that have only recently come to light:

We have one essential job -- which can be simply said: Stop public panic…  There is only one problem – confidence, and how to establish it; public assurance, and how to create it...  And, most important, how to free millions of Americans from the guilty fear that is going to arise deep in their biological depths – regardless of any pooh-poohing logic -- every time they light a cigarette.

Industry officials made sure that the consumers viewed them as open and transparent, not to mention caring about their customers' health.  A 1953 public statement from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee included the following disingenuous comment:

We will never produce and market a product shown to be the cause of any serious human ailment…  The Committee will undertake to keep the public informed of such facts as may be developed relating to cigarette smoking and health and other pertinent matters.

Except for the fact that they were doing exactly that -- doing everything in their power to cast doubt upon the research, and actively suppressing the research of scientists who were working in the field.  In 1954, TIRC issued a "Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers:"

Distinguished authorities point out:

1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.
4. That statistics purporting to link smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves are questioned by numerous scientists.

Some industry operatives actually thought about trying to turn the crisis into an opportunity.  A researcher at Philip Morris wrote:

Evidence is building up that heavy smoking contributes to lung cancer.  But there could be benefits to any company with the intestinal fortitude to jump on the other side of the fence, admitting that cigarettes are hazardous.  Just look what a wealth of ammunition would be at his disposal to attack the other companies who did not have safe cigarettes.

That three-pronged approach -- discredit the scientists, sow doubt in the minds of ordinary citizens, and portray the industry as caring and concerned -- must be sounding awfully familiar, if you've been reading the news lately.  Because we're seeing the whole scenario play out again, this time with regards to climate change.

The scientists don't agree.  There is no consensus.  Besides, the climate researchers who argue the most vehemently that anthropogenic climate change is happening are probably being paid to say so by eco-wackos like Earth First.  And think about it -- wouldn't it be nice if the world warmed up a little?  Just think, upstate New York would be snow-free.  You could grow palm trees in Maine.  And in any case, doing anything about it would be (choose any that you think apply): (1) economic suicide; (2) disastrous for states that depend on oil, gas, and coal; (3) the cause of massive unemployment; or (4) impossible in any case.

This cynical move by the fossil fuel industry to play on the doubts, fears, and ignorance of the general public is exactly analogous to the strategies of the tobacco industry fifty years ago.  Of course, in the latter case, the facts eventually came out despite their best efforts, along with their role in trying to cover up the correlation.  And now, it's to be hoped that history is once again repeating itself, with the Department of Justice getting involved -- and pursuing an investigation to find out whether industry giants like Exxon-Mobil actively suppressed climate change research, and lied to their investors about the dangers.

Like back in the 1950s, however, the industry has political clout, and there are elected officials whose debt to the corporate world is higher than their ethical standards.  Just last week, five senators -- Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, and David Perdue -- signed a letter demanding that the Department of Justice halt their inquiries.  "We write today to demand that the Department of Justice (DoJ) immediately cease its ongoing use of law enforcement resources to stifle private debate on one of the most controversial public issues of our time," the letter states.

The problem is, it's not controversial any more, any more than the connection between tobacco and lung cancer was controversial fifty years ago.  This is a manufactured controversy, with one aim in mind -- providing protection for fossil fuel markets.  The industry, and their mouthpieces in so-called "think tanks" like the Heartland Institute, know full well that what they are doing is affecting global temperatures.  Anyone who can read a scientific paper can no longer claim that the issue is undecided.  What they are doing is denying reality to save their profit margin, damn the cost to the future.

And that future is looking like it's coming awfully soon.  Sea level rise is already taking its toll -- interesting that David Vitter's home state of Louisiana is one of the first places to see the effects, with a coastal island called Isle St. Charles having already lost over 50% of its land area to flooding from rising waters in the Gulf of Mexico.  Its residents have applied for, and received, a $48 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- not for levees and flood mitigation, but simply to resettle as eco-refugees.

It's to be hoped that the officials in the Department of Justice will respond appropriately to Cruz, Vitter, et al., to wit, with a phrase that ends with "... and the horse you rode in on."  I'm optimistic that just as with the lung cancer deniers back in the 50s, today's climate change deniers will eventually be steamrolled by facts, evidence, and research.  The dangers of tobacco became public too late to save tens of thousands of lives, however -- perhaps we'll wise up sooner this time.

Too high a price

If you wanted a further demonstration of why religious leaders and religious organizations should be subject to the same laws as the rest of us, consider the ruling last week in Louisiana in which a judge struck down a rule requiring priests to report suspected child abuse.

The rule, part of Louisiana's Children's Code, faced the challenge because of the case of Father Jeff Bayhi.  Bayhi had been sued by Rebecca Mayeaux, who had confided to Father Bayhi during confession that she was being molested by a sixty-year-old parishioner.  According to Mayeaux, not only did Bayhi not tell authorities, he gave Rebecca some stomach-turning advice:

Two years ago, Mayeux told us she went to Father Bayhi seeking advice when she was 14, because she trusted him more than her parents. Court records show when Mayeux went to Bayhi, Rebecca says he told her, “This is your problem, sweep it under the floor and get rid of it.”

When Mayeaux sued, Bayhi claimed that his religious freedoms were being infringed upon, based on the Roman Catholic doctrine of the inviolability of the "seal of confession."  And last week, State District Judge Mike Caldwell ruled that Bayhi was right.

I have a personal reason for finding this appalling.  When I was a teenager, I knew Father Gilbert Gauthé, who was one of the first priests tried and convicted for pedophilia.  He was the assistant pastor at Sacred Heart Catholic Church of Broussard, Louisiana, where my grandmother worked as the priest's housekeeper and cook.  Gauthé never approached me inappropriately -- fortunately for him, because my grandmother would have strangled him with her bare hands if he had -- but while he was there, he became a Youth Group and Boy Scout leader.  During his tenure in Broussard and in three other parishes, he molested dozens of young boys -- some say as many as a hundred.

Father Gilbert Gauthé (ca. 1983)

Part of the problem was that Gauthé was a charmer.  I remember that well.  He was funny, personable, and friendly; everyone liked him.  Even after he was caught, it was hard to believe that someone like him could do such horrific things.  His defense lawyer, Ray Mouton, found it difficult to stay impartial. "No one would have believed this nondescript, mild-mannered, soft-spoken person could have done the things he was charged with," Mouton said. "And then he began to speak about these things and being in that room with him was the creepiest experience of my life."

And the whole time Gauthé was hurting children, Bishop Gerard Frey knew what was happening, but because of the shame it would bring on the church, refused to turn Gauthé in.  Instead, he was transferred from parish to parish, bringing him into contact with fresh groups of children to violate.  Even when he was caught, the church leaders tried to do damage control for their own reputations rather than helping the victims.  "The church fought me at every turn," Mouton said.  "They wanted me to plead him out and make it go away."

Mouton himself was so disgusted by the whole thing that it drove him not only out of his law career, but out of the church as well.   "I honestly believed the church was a repository of goodness," he said.  "As it turns out, it wasn't...  When I decided to take that case, I destroyed my life, my family, my faith.  In three years, I lost everything I held dear."

And Caldwell's ruling last week, hailed as a "victory for religious liberty," is making it easier for predators to remain free, and for church leaders who are complicit in their abuses to retain their veneer of holiness.  Father Paul Counce, canon lawyer for the Diocese of Baton Rouge, explained that priests can be excommunicated for violating the seal of confession.

A fate, apparently, that carries a higher price than all of the lives ruined by pedophiles who will never come to justice.

A fight over decals

One of my guiding principles in life is "Don't be a dick."

I don't mind taking on battles when I need to, or when I think the outcome is sufficiently important; but I truly don't understand people who do choose to do things solely to piss others off.  What are they getting out of this?  At the end of the day, I do not judge how good a day I had, or how happy I am, based on the number of total strangers whose cages I rattled.

But to me, that seems like the only possible reason for the recent rash of police and fire departments slapping decals with crosses and "In God We Trust" all over their vehicles.  It's happened in Baytown, Texas; Youngsville, Louisiana; Covington, Louisiana; Cedartown, Georgia; Bay County, Florida; and Stone County, Missouri.

And those are only the ones in the last couple of months.  It's spreading like wildfire, and has generated more than one lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the most recent in Brewster County, Texas.

Most of the arguments you hear against the practice are that the decals imply two things.  First, that the decals are a sly way of hinting that anyone who is an agnostic or atheist (or a practitioner of another faith; no one's in any doubt about which god the slogan's referring to) is liable not to receive the same police protection as Christians do.  The second is to ask how non-Christian police officers might feel about having to ride around in a squad car with a Christian religious slogan on the side.  These are government-owned vehicles, and therefore paid for by taxpayers, Christian and non-Christian alike.  The idea that these vehicles are emblazoned with a decal promoting religion -- worse, one particular religion -- is an unfortunate reminder about policies regarding inclusion, tolerance, and equality.

[image from the Hutchinson County, Texas Sheriff's Department Facebook page]

And I certainly agree with all of that.  But the question no one seems to ask is why these decals should be on the vehicles in the first place.  What is the argument for why they're necessary?  If you claim that without the decal, god wouldn't protect the cops in the car, then all I can say is that you have a pretty odd conception of how a benevolent deity might be expected to behave.  If it's patriotism, there are many other patriotic slogans you could choose.  So what purpose do they serve?

What purpose, in fact, does "one nation, under god" in the Pledge of Allegiance serve?  Or "In God We Trust" printed on our money?  No one's saying you can't paint bible quotes on the roof of your privately-owned house if you want.  Or, like a farmer who lives near me, post signs with cheerful slogans like "The Wages Of Sin Are Death" along the highway.  But these are government-sponsored, government-endorsed declarations of religion.  Why do the religious feel compelled to promote religion on the sides of police cars and fire engines -- and on our money?  Why is it moral to require students in every public school in America to recite a Pledge every morning that forces non-Christian students either to refuse to say it (sometimes at the cost of punishment and humiliation), or to lie publicly about their beliefs?

The only good answer I've been able to come up with to this question is: the Christian majority, i.e. the people who make the laws in this country, do it simply because they can.  If it pisses people off -- well, that's just too bad.  In fact, some of the most vocal proponents of the religious decals on police cars seem to be happy that they're making people mad.  Take, for example, Police Chief Adrian Garcia of Childress, Texas, who was told he risked a lawsuit from the FFRF for his decision to put big decals saying "In God We Trust" on the backs of his squad cars.

"They can go fly a kite," Garcia said.

So it boils down to people who really don't care if what they do excludes, devalues, or angers other American citizens, doing something because they're in a position of power so formidable that no one can stop them.  Further evidence that the much-talked-about-on-Fox-News "war on Christianity" in the United States is complete horseshit.

But it's a position I really don't get.  Like anything, political correctness can get out of hand, and there will always be people who will get their knickers in a twist over nothing.  But deliberately setting out to marginalize a significant percentage of Americans for no good reason, at the public expense?

That is called "being a dick."

Science, heresy, and cherry pie

The battle over the LSEA just took another weird turn.

The LSEA is the Louisiana Science Education Act, a 2008 law that introduces "teach the controversy" and "academic freedom" provisions into state science education guidelines as a way of levering in creationism, intelligent design, climate change denialism, and other loony anti-scientific ideas that are currently in vogue with the powers that be.  Every year there's a push to have the law repealed, and every year it fails to achieve the requisite number of votes, despite the trenchant comment by science education activist Zach Kopplin, "We don't give teachers the academic freedom to teach that 1 + 1 = 3."

In 2013, the defense of the law reached a new height of bizarre desperation, with State Senator Elbert Guillory saying that the LSEA protected multicultural approaches by allowing science teachers to tell their classes about witch doctors.  (I swear I'm not making this up; the entire quote is in the link provided.)  And this year, Guillory made another baffling statement in defense of the LSEA, this time from the standpoint of historical precedent:

There was a time, sir, when scientists thought that the world was flat.  And if you get to the end of it, you’d fall off.  There was another time when scientists thought that the sun revolved around the world.  And they always thought to ensure that anyone who disagreed with their science was a heretic.  People were burned for not believing that the world was flat.  People were really badly treated.  My point, sir, is that not everyone knows everything.  And in a school, there should be an open exchange of ideas.  Knowledge only grows when people can talk about [sic], and have this intellectual back-and-forth, and discourse, with all ideas on the table.  To restrict ideas is against knowledge and against education.  

Okay, where do I start?

First, I think you're confusing "scientists" with "religious leaders."  There has never been a Scientific Inquisition, wherein anyone who disbelieves in the Law of Gravity is found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake.  You are free to disbelieve in science all you like, in fact; this doesn't make you a heretic, it makes you an idiot.

It was scientists who disproved the flat Earth and geocentric models, actually; Eratosthenes accomplished the first, all the way back in the third century B.C.E., and Nicolaus Copernicus the second with his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543.  Any serious opposition to these ideas came from organized religion, which by and large taught that knowledge comes from the bible and from divine revelation, not from experimentation and logic.

Then there's Guillory's claim that we're somehow stifling knowledge by telling biology teachers that they can't teach their students creationism.  "An open exchange of ideas," Guillory says, is critical.  On the surface, he's right; we do need to be able to talk about all ideas, and that's how our knowledge grows, and wrong ideas are winnowed out.

It's that last piece that's missing from Guillory's statement, and therein lies the problem.  Because if creationism and climate change denialism are "put on the table" for honest discussion, it becomes abundantly clear that there's not a shred of evidence in favor of either one.  What Guillory seems to want is not that all ideas are considered, but that all ideas are accepted. 

So a geology teacher is supposed to "put on the table" the claim that the Earth's mantle isn't made of liquified rock, but of cherry pie filling?  And that the crust is actually made of graham crackers?

Just in the interest of "intellectual back-and-forth," you understand.

I'm sorry, Senator Guillory; the claims that the LSEA shoehorn into the state science curriculum are simply wrong.  The only reason that creationism is being pushed into biology classrooms is religion; the only reason climate change denialism is being pushed into earth science classrooms is political expediency.  Neither view has the least thing to do with science.

None of that apparently mattered, as the repeal-the-LSEA measure failed again, having been killed in committee on a 4-3 vote.  The reality-denying CherryPieologists won the day.

I live in hope, however, that the tide is turning, however slowly, and that eventually we'll have educational oversight by people who trust scientific research over the philosophical meanderings of a bunch of Bronze-Age sheepherders.

But as Aragorn said, "That day is not today."

You're a mean one, Mr. Grunch

I grew up in Bayou Country, the Cajun heartland south of Lafayette, Louisiana.  My mom's family was Cajun to the bone, descended from a group of exiled Nova Scotia French who had been there in those swamps for over 200 years.

Cajun folklore is fascinating, and the tales and legends preserve a memory of times long past.  My maternal uncle, who was a fine storyteller, used to scare the hell out of us kids with stories (told in French) of the loup-garou (the Louisiana answer to werewolves) and the feu follet, or "crazy fire," a forest spirit that would lure you in with dancing lights and then steal your soul.  (The only way to escape was to run away and jump across a creek -- the feu follet was unable to cross running water.)

I grew up well-versed in the terrifying legends of the swamps, having not only the family background but a taste for such paranormal scary stuff.  So imagine my surprise when just yesterday I found about a south Louisiana cryptid that I'd never heard of before:

The "grunch."

[image courtesy of artist Alvin Padayachee and the Wikimedia Commons]

Yes, I know, "grunch" doesn't sound all that authentic south-Louisiana-French.  At least it should be "grunché," or something.  But no, it's the "grunch," and apparently it's sort of a Deep South version of El Chupacabra.  Here's what "Gina Lanier, Paranormal Investigator" has to say about it:

As a principal port, New Orleans had the major role of any city during the antebellum era in the slave trade.  Its port handled huge quantities of goods for export from the interior and import from other countries to be traded up the Mississippi River.  The river was filled with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships.  At the same time, it had the most prosperous community of free persons of color in the South. Many old stories from people who's [sic] family were around at the time have passed many oral traditions down to us concerning the Grunch.  Legend has it that the Grunch dates back to the days of New Orlean's [sic] early settlement and that its name ''Grunch'' comes from the name of a road.

So where did the the creature come from?  Was it always there, grunching about in the swamp?  No, Lanier said.  The grunch was created by the Voodoo Queen cutting off Satan's son's balls:

This Southern cryptid has been called The Vampire of Farbourgh [sic: she means Faubourg] Marigny, and Bywater area dating back to the early 1800's.  The Legend of Marie Laveau tells of how some believe this form of chupacabra came into existence. 

An old Voodoo Hoodoo story says Marie Laveau castrated the Devil Baby when he was born.  Because she wanted him to produce no more of his evil kind.  The two bloody testicles fell to the floor as she used a very sharp hoodoo voodoo blade.  Immediately they turned into a male and female grunch, who it is said actually attacked the great Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau.  The grunch are said to have almost killed her with their fierce bites and punching.  The dark evil terror the old Voodoo Queen must have been unbearable as she struggled under their great strength before she fainted.  When she awoke the Grunch and the Devil Baby were gone.  Laveau was near death after this and many have said this is when Marie Laveau gave up her Voodoo Hoodoo ways and went back to being a good Catholic woman.

Well, it's a good story, but all that voodoo hoodoo stuff sounds like doodoo to me.  As you probably figured I'd say.  Marie Laveau was a real person, though; her tomb is in the historic St. Louis Cemetery in the French Quarter, and is a tourist attraction (especially given the fact that devotees still place gifts on her grave).

But the rest of it sounds like your usual silliness.  Of course, this hasn't stopped (un)reality TV from latching onto it, as they are wont to do.  The very first episode of the Destination: America series "Swamp Monsters," in fact, is called "The Grunch."  Here's the description of the episode:

In the mystical lagoons, marshes and swamps of Louisiana’s bayou, Elliot Guidry and his team of BEAST (the Bayou Enforcement Agency on Supernatural Threats) battle the elements while tracking down a pack of the infamous Grunch.  Born of the Devil himself, the Grunch have been terrorizing Louisiana residents for centuries.  These skin and bones, dog-like creatures have ridged backs, stand three feet tall and emit a horrible screech. After following these monsters into the middle of the swamp,  BEAST realizes that the hunter has become the hunted as they’re surrounded by a hungry pack of Grunch.

I commented, in a previous post, that if ever I founded a punk band, I was gonna call it "Government Death Plague."  Now I can add that if I ever found an alternative band, I'm gonna call it "Pack of Grunch."

(You can watch the entire episode for free here, if you don't mind giving BEAST forty minutes of your life that you'll never, ever get back.)

Anyhow.  Predictably, I think the whole thing is easily explained by wild dogs and wilder imaginations.  No need for voodoo hoodoo and devil baby balls.  I still am kind of surprised I never heard about this, growing up; I certainly had an ear for such tales, and more than one family member who was willing to pass along anything that was useful for scaring kids to the near bedwetting stage.  The fact that I grew up down there and never got wind of grunches is a little like the fact that it wasn't until I moved to Seattle that I first heard of cooking "blackened pork chops" and "blackened fish" and so on, a culinary technique that allegedly comes from southern Louisiana.  The only time my mom served anything blackened was when she put a chicken in the oven to roast and got distracted by a neighbor, and only took it out when it was somewhere between overdone and charcoal.  (My dad teased her for weeks about having created a new gourmet dish, "poulet noir.")

But who knows?  I may just have missed that one.  In any case, if you're down in the bayou, you now have an additional thing to worry about, over and above cottonmouths and alligators, not to mention the feu follet and loup-garou.  I wouldn't let it stop me from going there, though.  It's a beautiful place, with great music and even better food, and if I lived there for over twenty years without being attacked by a pack of grunch, I'm guessing you're safe enough.

The not-a-scientist dodge

I'm getting a little tired of politicians dodging questions -- usually about either climate change or evolution -- by saying, "Well, I'm not a scientist."

In other words, don't expect me to answer authoritatively.  Allow me to proclaim my ignorance as if it somehow implied open-mindedness, as if Not Knowing Stuff was a job qualification.

First there was Marco Rubio (R-FL), who back in 2012 was interviewed by GQ and was asked point blank how old the Earth is.  "I'm not a scientist, man," he said.  "I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States.  I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow.  I’m not a scientist.  I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that.

"At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all.  I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.  Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that.  It’s one of the great mysteries."

Rubio must have discussed strategy with the governor of his state, because when Rick Scott was asked this May whether he thinks climate change is real and/or anthropogenic, his response was similar in tone.  "I'm not a scientist," Scott told reporters.  "I've not been convinced that there's any man-made climate change... Nothing's convinced me that there is."

Right around the same time, Speaker of the House John Boehner was asked the same question, and gave a nearly identical answer.  "I'm not qualified to debate the science over climate change," Boehner said.

And just this week we have Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, joining the ranks of the proudly ignorant.  Asked at a public event whether he believed in the evolutionary origins of biodiversity, Jindal said, "Well, the reality is that I am not an evolutionary biologist.  What I believe as a father and a husband is that local schools should make decisions on how they teach...  I want my kids to be taught about evolution; I want my kids to be taught about other theories."

This despite Jindal's Bachelor of Science degree from Brown University, with a major in biology.

Can we just clarify one thing, here?  None of the politicians in Congress, or in the governors' mansions, are scientists.  If they were scientists, they would be doing research, or teaching in a university somewhere.  But politicians don't have to be scientists, you know.

They just have to be smart enough to listen to the scientists when they talk.

The statements by Rubio, Scott, Boenher, and Jindal are about as intelligent as a man who isn't sure he should take the antibiotics his doctor prescribed to treat his strep throat.  "Well, I don't know if I should take this medicine or not," he tells his friend.  "After all, I'm not a doctor."

No, you're not, you doofus.  That's why you just went to the doctor.  All you need to do is to trust his knowledge and expertise, and do what he says.

Honestly, however much I like to write about science, I'm not a scientist, either.  I'm a high school science teacher.  I've never done original research, never had a job working in a lab, never written a scholarly paper.  On the other hand, I do know how to read.  If I want to know what the latest research says, I can pick up a science journal and see what conclusions have been reached.  If it's an area outside of my expertise, I can find someone who knows more than I do to explain it to me.

Politicians have these guys, you know?  They're called advisors.  The job of an advisor is to help out elected officials when there are issues about which they lack information or depth of understanding.  Which there always will be; holding high office means dealing with extraordinarily complex situations, and doing what amounts to multivariable analysis on the fly.  And to be fair, you can't be an expert about everything.

But you can trust the experts when they reach consensus.  Which they have, on both the subject of evolution and of anthropogenic climate change.  There is no debate; and especially in the case of evolution, there are no other theories.  The alternatives to evolution are unsupported mythological worldviews, on par with an astronomical model that has the Earth resting on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic flying turtle.

Drawing by Camille Flammarion (1877) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Look, I understand that Rubio et al. were being disingenuous.  Given the religious fervor of their constituencies, especially in the American Southeast, it would not be politically expedient to say, "Of course evolution is true.  Duh.  Next question."  But dodging the question, and giving the impression that ignorance is the same thing as keeping an open mind, is simply handing the science deniers ammunition.

And the last thing we need here in the United States is to do something that makes the citizenry understand science even less than they already do.