Ken Paxton's registries

When the Nazi party first came into power in Germany in the mid-1930s, one of the first things they did was to dramatically improve the efficiency of record-keeping, especially with regards to people they considered "undesirables."

A 1946 report on their practices by Robert M. W. Kempner, which appeared in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, is as impressive as it is horrifying. Kempner writes:

The most important are the Gestapo card indices: the register of persons politically undesirable to the National Socialist regime, such as former members of democratic parties, lodges, etc.  This register consists of five different sets of alphabetical card indices for (1) highly dangerous persons, (2) less dangerous persons, (3) dangerous persons, (4) Jews, (5) part Jews (Mischling).  These card indices were kept in the offices of the Secret Police (Gestapo), i.e., in the central headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin, Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Duplicates were kept by the supervisory offices (Staatspolizeileitstellen) or the approximately 100 district offices of the secret police (Staatspolizeistellen) which are located in the larger cities throughout Germany, e.g., in Munich, Stuttgart and the seats of the district governments...  The index cards are brown for males and green for females.  The first item is year, day, month, and place and county of birth.  Then follow the statements about occupation, name, marital status, school, and professional education, examinations passed, residence in foreign countries, knowledge of foreign languages, special abilities, service in the armed forces, or in the labor service, and residence...  Cards of Jews are marked by black index tabs.

The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust were only possible because of the extensive records the government had on damn near everyone in the country.

You may be thinking, by this point, "how is this so different from the records governments today keep on citizens?  Most of this same information is now routinely kept by government agencies, and no one bats an eyelash."  It's a reasonable question.  Census and tax forms, drivers' license registration, school registration, job applications... unless you somehow have avoided all that, which is hard to imagine, you're a known quantity.

The difference, of course, is intent.  What do the governments of the United States and other democracies intend to do with the information they have?  My own probably Pollyanna-ish idea is that most of the time, the answer is "nothing."  As long as you pay your taxes and abide by the law, the powers-that-be have neither the time nor the interest to worry about what color your eyes are, what your marital status is, or what exactly you're doing.

It's the exceptions that are downright terrifying.  Which brings us, unsurprisingly, to Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas.

It was just revealed that earlier this year, Paxton demanded a list of all of the people in the state who requested a change in their gender designation on their drivers' licenses.  In other words, trans individuals who wanted to have legal documentation of their gender identity.  It's disingenuous not to see the comparison to the "black index tabs" on Jewish registration cards in Nazi Germany.  Add to this the fact that earlier this year, Texas passed one of the harshest anti-trans laws in the nation -- it explicitly forbids gender-affirming medical treatment for teenagers, and mandates criminal prosecution and jail time not only for medical professionals who carry it out, but for teachers, counselors, therapists, and so on (people considered "mandated reporters" for child abuse) if they find out about a teenager's trans status and fail to notify the authorities.

Don't tell me that LGBTQ+ people are "overreacting" if they're terrified by Paxton's demand for a trans registry.  And if you think I'm engaging in hyperbole by comparing it to the Nazi registries, you're being willfully blind.

"This could be a mass outing of a whole bunch of trans people because a lot of us change our documents and then choose to live in private," said Eden Rose Torres, a trans Texan who chooses to be out.  "We don't have to disclose our transness."

The only good news is that the request from Paxton's office was denied -- but not on the grounds of its being potentially used to harm trans Texans and the people who aid them, but because of practicality.  "Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced," said Travis Considine, of the Department of Public Safety, to which the demand had been directed.  "Thus, no data of any kind was provided...  It [would] be very difficult to determine which records had a valid update without a manual review of all supporting documents."

What really needs to happen, of course, is that Paxton be required to produce, in writing, a statement (1) justifying why he has the right to the information, and (2) outlining in detail what he intends to do with it.  Not, frankly, that I trust Paxton as far as I could throw him.  But at least then it would push him into defending his actions, rather than what's happened thus far, which is giving him carte blanche.

The refusal of the DPS to cooperate is not going to be the end of this.  People like Ken Paxton are never, ever going to give up their campaign against LGBTQ+ people, despite the fact that all we queer people want is to live our truth in peace and safety, the same as straight White Americans do, and to be in control of when and to whom we reveal our private lives.  Paxton sees himself as the leader of a religious-inspired crusade, and if he succeeds with his attempt at a trans registry, that's only going to be the beginning.

We have only to look back ninety years to see where this kind of thing can lead.

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The least of these

A friend of mine quipped that Republicans are the party that believes your rights begin at conception and end at birth.

Yeah, I know, I know, "not all Republicans."  But looking at the behavior of the GOP elected officials, it's hard not to come to that conclusion.  Across the nation, they're known for eliminating programs to combat poverty, reducing jobless benefits, blocking mandates for life-saving vaccines, and cutting funding for education.  But if you needed more proof of how anti-life this party has become, look no further than the removal from the Texas child welfare website of a page offering resources to LGBTQ youth, specifically ways to cope with discrimination and avoid self-harm.

The removal was due to pressure from former state Senator Don Huffines, currently campaigning for the GOP nomination for governor.  As such, Huffines is doing his best to paint his opponent, current Governor Greg Abbott, as a closet liberal.  "These are not Texas values, these are not Republican party values, but these are obviously Greg Abbott’s values, that’s why we need a change, that’s what my campaign’s about," Huffines said.  "We aren’t surprised that state employees who are loyal to Greg Abbott had to scramble after we called their perverse actions out.  I promised Texans I would get rid of that website, and I kept that promise."

This makes me so angry I'm actually feeling nauseated.  LGBTQ youth face struggles that most cis-straight children never do.  A survey this year by the Trevor Project found that 42% of LGBTQ teenagers have "seriously considered suicide."  They are four times more likely to go through with it.  "State agencies know that LGBTQ+ kids are overrepresented in foster care and they know they face truly staggering discrimination and abuse," said Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas.  "The state is responsible for these kids’ lives, yet it actively took away a resource for them when they are in crisis.  What’s worse, this was done at the start of Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month."

The most horrifying part of all this -- and there's a lot to choose from -- is that most of the people who support Huffines and others like him are self-professed devout Christians, who follow a guy who said, "Then [God] will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in,  I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'  They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'  He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'"

Apparently what Jesus actually said was, "Whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me, as long as the least of these were also cis-straight-white-Christian-conservative Americans.  The rest of y'all can go fuck yourselves."

I know it's unlikely Huffines will ever read this, and if he did, it's even less likely it'd make any difference.  Huffines and his ilk revel in their reputations as callous, anti-humanitarian hardasses.  As Adam Serwer said, "the cruelty is the point."

But I don't know how anyone who claims to follow a compassionate God isn't sickened by bullshit like this.  So let me end with this: the Suicide Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.  If you're considering harming yourself, reach out -- there are people who can help.  You are not alone; a great many people have gone through this, and considered suicide, and understand where you are.  (I'm one of them.)

It is also probably worthwhile getting the hell out of Texas as soon as you can.

**********************************

During the first three centuries C.E., something remarkable happened; Rome went from a superpower, controlling much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to being a pair of weak, unstable fragments -- the Western and Eastern Roman Empires --torn by strife and internal squabbles, beset by invasions, with leaders for whom assassination was the most likely way to die.  (The year 238 C.E. is called "the year of six emperors" -- four were killed by their own guards, one hanged himself to avoid the same fate, and one died in battle.)

How could something like this happen?  The standard answer has usually been "the barbarians," groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and Huns who whittled away at the territory until there wasn't much left.  They played a role, there is no doubt of that; the Goths under their powerful leader Alaric actually sacked the city of Rome itself in the year 410.  But like with most historical events, the true answer is more complex -- and far more interesting.  In How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how a variety of factors, including a succession of weak leaders, the growing power of the Roman army, and repeated epidemics took a nation that was thriving under emperors like Vespasian and Hadrian, finally descending into the chaos of the Dark Ages.  

If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book.  It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The Guardians, the fourth dimension, and a lawsuit from Saturn

Given how surreal this year has been, I was thinking a few days ago that it was a little surprising that we haven't had any completely batshit insane stories lately.  But far be it from 2020 not to rise to such a challenge and say, "y'all hold my beer and watch this."  Just yesterday, two different loyal readers of Skeptophilia sent me unrelated links (at least I think they're unrelated, although as you'll see, it's a little hard to tell) that wind up the year with style.

If by "style" you mean "wearing an enormous tinfoil hat."

In the first, we have a guy named Mark Russell Bell over at Metaphysical Articles commenting on the Trump administration's decision that the "U.S. Space Force" sounded way too much like something that would be led by President Skroob and Dark Helmet, and decided to find something with fewer comical associations...

...so they settled on "The Guardians."  

A lot of us thought this was pretty amusing, but Mark Russell Bell loves it.  The reason why he loves it has to do with some weird combination of the following:

• "deep trance mediumship"
• the "Higher Self" and "Christ Consciousness"
• Thomas Edison
• a rejection of "pseudo-scientific flubdub"
• "the incursion of the aeroform space people"
• a "fourth-dimensional" explanation of flying saucers
• light, heat, color, sound, and motion all being attributable to the flow of electrons
• something about vaporizing and recondensing a brick
• frequency being dependent on the inverse square root of the mass-density of the ether

Along the way you get the impression that (1) Mark Russell Bell is extremely serious, and (2) that he loathes people like me who are orthodox science types and require evidence before they'll believe in something.  My sense is he'd be entirely in favor of coming after people like me with a machete.  So if Mark Russell Bell ever reads this, allow me to mention that my wife and I recently moved to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique.

In the second story, we meet someone with an even poorer grip on reality, one Rickia Collings of Allen, Texas.  Collings, who prefers to go by "Capricornus God of Sun Rickia," has filed suit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, claiming that his civil rights had been violated by the federal government...

... given that he actually comes from Saturn.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL and the Hubble Space Telescope]

"Capricornus" also includes as defendants in the lawsuit the United Kingdom and the United Nations, and states that the alleged civil rights violations began on July 4, 1776, which is a little odd in the case of the United Nations because it wasn't founded until 1945.  As far as how this could all work, "Capricornus" claims he's way older than he looks and has been living on the Earth since before the American Revolution.

The lawsuit itself, which you can read at the link provided, is highly entertaining.  Some highlights include his national origin, in which he says he is from "Saturn and Capricorn," his mother is "w/ Picies [sic, I'm assuming he means Pisces] from Neptune and Jupiter" and his father is "w/ Aquarius from Uranus W.O.G. III."  In the section where he's asked to describe how the defendant(s) discriminated against the plaintiff, he says, and I quote:

Moon KAF = the Messiah.  DA6T = the Messiah, which from of make a person or an animal lame.  A small enclosure in which a sheep or other domestic animals are kept put or keep in a pen, confine someone to a restricted place.  A rare astrological aspect involving any celestial body 3 plants, points, planets are sextile to each other& both are then quincunx to a 3rd.  Beginning history and reconstruction -- the first morning tet. book = kreate [sic] a fighter.  Hand, mouth, connected to speech, drum beats.  That which from of mitzvah of Torah child of commandment, law, ordinance, statute, contained in Torah, for that reason to be observed by all practicing Jews.  A mixture of natural & manmade landmarks.  To see and rejoice in the goodness and greatness of God.

See affidavit.

Well, from that stinging indictment, I think we can all agree that the United States, United Kingdom, and United Nations will have no choice but to make significant reparations.

If the above didn't meet your desired quota of weirdness, the affidavit "Capricornus" refers to is seven pages long, and having waded all the way through it, I can say that it makes precisely the same amount of sense as the bit I quoted above.  It does bear mention, however, that a central point he makes has to do with the fact that "Si" (the chemical symbol for the element silicon) can also stand for "systematic internaliser," "standing instruction," and the sacroiliac joint.

How this has anything to do with violating his civil rights, I have no idea.

If you look at the lawsuit paperwork, you'll see that it's all been officially stamped by the District Court, so apparently they're required to take it seriously.  I wonder on what basis they'll throw it out?  Perhaps because Saturn isn't technically in east Texas?  Will "Capricornus" get his day in court even so?  Will his father and mother show up from Uranus and Neptune and/or Jupiter in support of their son's cause?

These questions and more will be answered on next week's episode of Wingnuts on Parade!

So anyway, as you can see, although 2020 may be in its last week, we're not done with complete lunacy yet.  I keep on making the mistake of saying "Well, what more can happen?", and somehow, "more" always seems to "happen."  I'm rather looking forward to Friday and New Year's Day, although as a friend pointed out, 2021 is just 2020 reaching legal drinking age, so maybe my expectation that next year will be marginally saner is doomed to disappointment.

That's what seems likely from my knowledge of "pseudo-scientific flubdub," anyhow.

******************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Invitation to a haunting

If any loyal readers of Skeptophilia live in Texas -- or are willing to take a road trip -- there's an opportunity for you to do some empirical research and report on your findings here.

The destination is the town of Seguin, in Guadalupe County, in the central part of the state.  Seguin is the home to the Magnolia Hotel, which has been nicknamed "the most haunted spot in Texas."  Unfortunately for us paranormal-investigator types, the Magnolia has been closed for extensive repairs since 2013.  The building itself was built in 1840, and started out as a private home, but after renovation and expansion was turned into a hotel, in which capacity it continued until the mid-20th century.

Eventually, though, wear-and-tear and poor maintenance shut the place down, and it was on the docket to be demolished, but a wealthy family purchased the place and decided to restore it to its 19th-century glory.

This, apparently, did not sit well with the spirit world.

The Magnolia Hotel, Seguin, Texas

According to the reports, more than one contractor quit after "paranormal activity ramped up."  A psychic was called in, and she found that the place was rife with ghosts, including:

• the original owner, James Campbell, who makes rocking chairs rock back and forth and stinks the place up with his cigars
• a serial killer named Wilhelm Faust, and one of his victims, Emma Voelcker, whom he killed right there in the hotel
• a friendly woman named Idella Lampkins who sits next to people while they're sleeping and strokes their hair and tries to hug them
• two unidentified male ghosts who committed suicide in the hotel
• a weeping woman who evidently is still distraught because her sweetheart told her he was going to come for her and never showed up

In addition -- if that's not enough -- people have seen faces in mirrors, had doors slam suddenly, heard disembodied footsteps and voices, and seen furniture move on its own.

Enticed?  The hotel is reopening on August 12, and since there are only two guest rooms in the place, it's going to be hard to get on the reservation list if you don't act quickly.

Living in upstate New York, Texas is a bit of a hike for me, but if there are any readers in central Texas who would like to do a little first-hand research, I encourage you to book a night or two.  Bring along a camera, not to mention any other ghost-hunting equipment you may see fit to take with you.  (In fact, there are bunches of apps you can get for cellphones and iPads for detecting electromagnetic field fluctuations, which are supposedly a sign that a ghost is near, or possibly the air conditioner just turned on.)

Let me know if you found anything (or even if you didn't), and in fact, if you're so inclined, you could even write a guest post about your experience here at Skeptophilia.  Yeah, I know the plural of
"anecdote" isn't "data," but I'd still love to hear about anything you might have witnessed.  And if lonely Idella strokes your hair during the night, please accept my apologies, because that's some creepy shit right there.

***************************************

Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

The child in the cemetery

It's astonishing how little a skeptical, rational approach has insulated me from having a purely visceral reaction sometimes.

I've commented to my wife that I seem to have two brains, and they don't talk to each other.  In fact, most of the time each one seems to be bound and determined that the other doesn't exist.  One is my rational brain, that tells me things like "You've been very healthy, all things considered, and the physical you had two days ago is really unlikely to have turned up anything even remotely questionable."  The other, my emotional brain, says, "You haven't gotten the results yet, which means that they are reluctant to tell you that you're dying of a rare, incurable, and horribly painful disease."

Even with less personal things, it's curious how I can have two completely independent reactions at precisely the same time.  Take, for example, the image captured on Google Street View in the Martha Chapel Cemetery, Huntsville, Texas last week.

How anyone thought of zooming in like this, on an image of a (supposedly) empty cemetery, I don't know.  At least that's my emotional brain speaking.  My rational brain says there's a clear reason -- because it's a hoax, a digitally-altered photograph.  But without further ado, here's the image in question:

If you'll look closely, there's a very convincing image of a little girl's face peeking from around the left side of the tree.

The link I provided shows the image in a variety of angles and magnifications, and also says that there's a second "ghostly image" in the picture.  You can see it in the rectangular space framed by the sapling and the two dark tree trunks on the left side of the image.  Here it is, magnified:

This one, on the other hand, just doesn't do it for me.  If you go to the link (the YouTube video it brings you to is only a minute and a half long), you can see it in even greater magnification, and it looks to me like...

... a leaf caught on the fence.  I don't see it as creepy enough to need further explanation; even considering pareidolia, the thing just doesn't look like a "human figure," but just a dark, irregular blob.

The little girl, though.  That one is, to put not to fine a point on it, freakin' creepy.  She even has a sly expression in her eyes.  I'm relatively certain it's not a ghost; I'll admit the possibility, but the likelihood of camera anomalies or an outright hoax is, in my opinion, far greater.

But my emotional brain doesn't agree.  My emotional brain, in fact, says it does not give a rat's ass about camera anomalies and hoaxes.  My emotional brain is saying, "OH DEAR GOD THAT'S A LITTLE GIRL GHOST AND THAT REALLY IS SCARY."

I'd like to be able to say that my rational brain wins the argument every single time, but truth be told, I am primarily an emotional creature -- odd, I know, for someone who is trained in science and who has waved the flag of rationalism at every opportunity.  In fact, I've often wondered if rationalism and skepticism appealed to me because it at least gave me some protection against going around having the screaming meemies every other Tuesday.

So it seems like I have to put up with having two personalities who give every evidence of hating each other's guts.  I guess it could be worse.  At least they don't get into verbal arguments.  Because people already think I'm eccentric enough without my going around acting like this guy.  Or these guys, depending on how you look at it.

*********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Liars and truthers

Words matter.

People with a commitment to the truth should demand that media and politicians make their statements using unambiguous language, and not hesitate to call them out when they don't.  Obfuscation is the next best thing to telling outright untruths; it misleads and confuses just as much.  Which, no doubt, is what was intended.

It's why my blood pressure spikes every time I hear how the media usually deals with the blatant falsehoods spoken by Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  They're not "alternate facts," not "opinions," not "differing interpretations."  They're lies.  And we should not waver in identifying them as such.

But the word I want to address today is "truther."  It's been appended to the loony claims of most of the current conspiracy theories.  We have 9/11 "truthers," Sandy Hook "truthers," flat Earth "truthers."  And it's a word the media, and everyone else, needs to stop using.  These people are not only not speaking the truth, they have no interest in the truth whatsoever.  All they want is to bend the facts to fit their warped view of how the world should work.  Any evidence that doesn't fit their claims is ignored, argued away, or labeled as a fabrication.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This comes up because of a pair of self-identified "truthers" who were arrested a couple of days ago for harassing the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, Frank Pomeroy.  This is doubly horrific; not only did Pomeroy have to deal with the massacre last November of his parishioners by shooter Devin Kelley, Pomeroy's fourteen-year-old daughter was killed in the tragedy.

But to people like Jodi Mann and Robert Ussery, this is just more fuel for the fire.  The "Deep State" engineered the event, they said, during which no one was actually killed.  Grieving friends and family members were played by "crisis actors."  The whole thing was staged to turn people against supporting the Second Amendment, which is the first step toward confiscating all guns and the government imposing martial law.

And the Sutherland Springs massacre isn't the only thing Mann and Ussery claim didn't happen.  According to Ussery and Mann's website, Side Thorn, neither did the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Boston Marathon, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and the Jason Aldean concert in Las Vegas.  All of them were complete fabrications.

This belief has led them to do things that any sane person would consider completely incomprehensible.  In the case of Pastor Pomeroy, the pair spray-painted "The Truth Will Set You Free" on a poster put up for friends of the pastor's slain daughter to sign.  Ussery and Mann demanded proof from her father that the girl even existed, demanding to see her birth certificate or other evidence that she wasn't -- as they claimed -- an invention of the media.  Ussery, Pomeroy said, repeatedly followed him around screaming threats, including one that he was going to "hang Pomeroy from a tree and pee on him while he's hanging."

So finally, the pair have been arrested for harassment.  Fortunately.  They've also sent threatening notes to the students-turned-activists who survived the Stoneman Douglas shooting.  They are, they said, actors, and the shooting was "100% a staged drill."

One of the students, Cameron Kasky, has responded to this allegation with his characteristic humor and grace, tweeting, "Anyone who saw me in last year's production of Fiddler on the Roof should know that no one would pay me for my acting."

The problem is, that's not going to stop Ussery and Mann and others like them.  These people are on a crusade, and welcome being arrested as a chance to give their lunacy a public forum.  But what prompted me to write this was not the craziness of an obviously false claim.

It's that the media has been consistently calling Ussery and Mann "truthers."

No, they are not truthers.  They are either delusional or else are outright and blatant liars.  They are promoting a dangerous conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact, and besides that, are attacking grieving family and friends of people who were victims of mass murderers.  There is no "truth" about this at all.

It's a deranged false claim, and the people promoting it are guilty of threats and harassment.  Pure and simple.

We need to stop soft-pedaling things.  It gains nothing, and in this case, subtly lends credence to people who do not deserve it.  The media -- and by extension, we who consume it -- need to be unhesitating in labeling a lie as such.

That is how you become a "truther."

A vote for fraud

Yesterday morning when I was reading the news, I saw a story that induced me to use say some very bad words, that for the benefit of my more sensitive readers I will leave to your imagination.

The story that generated that result appeared in The Guardian, and the gist is that disgraced British doctor and anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield is campaigning hard for an anti-vaxxer running for the Republican nomination for a seat in the Texas State House of Representatives.

Wakefield, you may remember, is the man who is virtually solely responsible for the completely unfounded claim that there is a link between vaccines and autism.  The British Medical Journal posted an editorial in 2011 that did not mince words; the title is, "Wakefield’s Article Linking MMR Vaccine and Autism Was Fraudulent."  If that's not unequivocal enough, the editorial begins with the line, "Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare."

That should have been that.  That would have been that if it weren't for the fact that being caught red-handed engaging in scientific fraud didn't induce Wakefield to do what a normal human being would do in that situation, namely to admit what he'd done and retreat in disarray.  No, after the release of the paper calling him out on his fraudulent pseudo-research, Wakefield and his followers denied it -- and claimed that the doctors who wrote the paper were shills being paid by Big Pharma (which is up there with Monsanto as a stand-in for Satan) to shut down his research to protect their profits.

And the anti-vaxxer movement is still growing.  As is recurrence of dangerous and completely preventable diseases, such as the measles outbreak that happened in Wakefield's adopted home state of Texas this January.  But Wakefield evidently decided that this wasn't damage on a sufficiently large scale, so he's trying to ramrod his foolish and discredited ideas into the state legislature, so he can enshrine his false claims into law.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wakefield is completely up front on what he's trying to do, and how he's trying to do it.  Rather than believe the scientists and the peer-reviewed studies, he says, you should trust social media instead:

Social media has evolved, as a general comment, has evolved beautifully.  It has provided an alternative to the failings of mainstream media...  In this country, it’s become so polarized now… No one knows quite what to believe.  So, people are turning increasingly to social media.

To say this makes me furious is something of an understatement.  Distrust of intellectuals in general and scientists in particular is widespread, and that is reflected in the people we've elected.  We already have a president who is a climate change denier and more than one governor and congressperson who believe that the six-day biblical creation story is supported by science and therefore should be taught in public school classrooms.  The last thing we need is more people in positions of power who deny science in favor of their own biases and/or delusions -- and who rely on getting their information from Facebook and Twitter.

Jinny Suh, an Austin mom and activist who is attempting to counter Wakefield's message, highlights how difficult this approach is to fight.  "The biggest challenge we face is," Suh said, "if you go onto Facebook or Google and you do a search for vaccines – and we can imagine a lot of new moms do this… the anti-vaxx stuff out there outnumbers the pro-vaxx stuff by quite a bit.  It doesn’t matter how you started out thinking about the topic, when a person is inundated with that much misinformation a person can’t help but start to think it’s true."

Which is why it's so important to get the message out there, and speak plainly.  Wakefield is a proven fraud.  He continues to lie about this and to claim that the evidence against him was falsified or cherry-picked or means something other than it does.  There is zero evidence that vaccination causes autism or any of the other horrible side-effects that he and others like him claim.  Admittedly, there have been side-effects from vaccines; no medical treatment is completely risk-free.  But they are extremely infrequent, usually mild, and temporary.

And what you get in exchange is immunity against diseases that as little as 75 years ago, used to kill huge numbers of children and young adults.  I've related before that my paternal grandfather's two eldest sisters -- Aimée-Marie and Anne-Désée -- died at the ages of 21 and 18, respectively, of complications from measles, after being completely healthy up until that time.

Wakefield is not just wrong, he's dangerous.  We do not need more anti-science voices amongst our leaders.  I don't know what the chances are for his candidate to win the nomination, but I fear that this kind of unfounded rhetoric has still not reached its peak.

Stopping the rumor machine

Twenty-six people are dead in yet another mass shooting, this one in a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, a small community 21 miles from San Antonio, Texas.

The killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, died near the scene of the crime.  He had been fired upon by a local resident as he fled the church, and was later found in his car, dead of a gunshot wound.  It is at present undetermined if the bullet that killed him came from the resident's gun, or if it was a self-inflicted wound.

Devin Patrick Kelley

Wiser heads than mine have already taken up the issue of stricter gun control, especially in cases like Kelley's.  Kelley was court martialled in 2012 for an assault on his wife and child, spent a year in prison, and was dishonorably discharged.  All I will say is that I find it a little hard to defend an assault rifle being in the hands of a man who had been convicted of... assault.

I also have to throw out there that the whole "thoughts and prayers" thing is getting a little old.  If thoughts and prayers worked, you'd think the attack wouldn't have happened in the first place, given that the victims were in a freakin' church when it occurred.

But that's not why I'm writing about Kelley and the Sutherland Springs attack.  What I'd like to address here is how, within twelve hours of the attack, there was an immediate attempt by damn near everybody to link Kelley to a variety of groups, in each case to conform to the claimant's personal bias about how the world works.

Here are just a few of the ones I've run into:

• Someone made a fake Facebook page for Kelley in which there was a photograph of his weapon, a Ruger AR-556, with the caption, "She's a bad bitch."
• Far-right-wing activists Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones immediately started broadcasting the claim that Kelley was a member of Antifa.  This was then picked up by various questionable "news" sources, including YourNewsWire.com, which trumpeted the headline, "Texas Church Shooter Was Antifa Member Who Vowed to Start Civil War."
• Often using the Alex Jones article as evidence, Twitter erupted Sunday night with a flurry of claims that Kelley was a Democrat frustrated by Donald Trump's presidential win, and was determined to visit revenge on a bunch of god-fearing Republicans.
• An entirely different bunch of folks on Twitter started the story that Kelley was actually a Muslim convert named Samir al-Hajeeda.  Coincidentally, Samir al-Hajeeda was blamed by many of these same people for the Las Vegas shootings a month ago.  It's a little hard to fathom how anyone could believe that, given the fact that both gunmen died at the scene of the crime.
• Not to be outdone, the website Freedum Junkshun claimed that Kelley was an "avid atheist" named Raymond Peter Littlebury, who was "on the payroll of the DNC."

And so on and so forth.

Look, I've made the point before.  You can't stop this kind of thing from zinging at light speed around the interwebz.  Fake news agencies gonna fake news, crazies gonna craze, you know?  Some of these sources were obviously pseudo-satirical clickbait right from the get-go.  I mean, did anyone even look at the name of the site Freedum Junkshun and wonder why they spelled it that way?

And for heaven's sake, Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones?  At this point, if Cernovich and Jones said the grass was green, I'd want an independent source to corroborate the claim.

So it's not the existence of these ridiculous claims I want to address.  It's the people who hear them and unquestioningly believe them.

I know it's easy to fall into the confirmation bias trap -- accepting a claim because it's in line with what you already believed, be it that all conservatives are violent gun nuts, all liberals scheming slimeballs, all Muslims potential suicide bombers, all religious people starry-eyed fanatics, all atheists amoral agents of Satan himself.  It takes work to counter our tendency to swallow whole any evidence of what we already believed.

But you know what?  You have to do it.  Because otherwise you become prey to the aforementioned crazies and promoters of fake news clickbait.  If you don't corroborate what you post, you're not supporting your beliefs; you're playing right into the hands of people who are trying to use your singleminded adherence to your sense of correctness to achieve their own ends.

At the time of this writing, we know next to nothing about Devin Patrick Kelley other than his military record and jail time.  We don't know which, if any, political affiliation he had, whether or not he was religious, whether he was an activist or simply someone who wanted to kill people.  So all of this speculation, all of these specious claims, are entirely vacuous.

Presumably at some point we'll know more about Kelley.  At the moment, we don't.

So please please please stop auto-posting these stories.  At the very least, cross-check what you post against other sources, and check out a few sources from different viewpoints.  (Of course if you cross-check Breitbart against Fox News, or Raw Story against ThinkProgress, you're gonna get the same answer.  That's not cross-checking, that's slamming the door on the echo chamber.)

Otherwise you are not only falling for nonsense, you are directly contributing to the divisiveness that is currently ripping our nation apart.

As the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman put it: "You must be careful not to believe something simply because you want it to be true.  Nobody can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself."

Blinding me with science

Call me naïve, but on some level I still can't quite believe we've gotten to the point in the United States where our elected officials pride themselves on ignoring science.

The latest example of this kind of idiocy is the chief administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who in my opinion was appointed to this position in order to give him the leverage to dismantle the EPA entirely.  That he hasn't done so yet -- although steps have been taken, in the form of cutting part of the staff and muzzling the remaining ones -- is more a testimony to the complete inability of this administration to accomplish anything, good or bad, than it is to a lack of will.

But Pruitt has made it mighty clear what his attitude is.  If there was any doubt of that, consider his statement last Thursday, given during an interview on a Texas radio program: "Science should not be something that’s just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C."

In other words: those damned ivory-tower scientists should keep their noses where they belong, in their electron microscopes and particle accelerators and reaction flasks, and stop trying to use what they know to accomplish anything practical.

I find this stance to be nothing short of baffling.  If we don't use science -- i.e., facts and evidence -- to drive policy, what the hell are we supposed to use?  Party affiliation?  Guesses?  The Farmer's Almanac?  Our daily horoscopes?

How have we gotten here, to the point that science is considered somehow disconnected from the real world?  Where people say, "If the scientists messing around in their labs say one thing, but the folksy musings of non-scientists say something else, I'm gonna believe the non-scientists?"  Part of it, I think, is the fault of us science teachers.  The fact that a governmental leader -- of the Environmental Protection Agency, for fuck's sake -- can say something like this and not be immediately laughed into an embarrassed silence is more of an indictment of our public school system than anything I can think of.  We've for years largely taught science as a list of disconnected facts and vocabulary words; no wonder that our students grow up to think of science as something weird, hard to pronounce, and not quite real.

But it's worse than that.  Our leaders, and pundits on television and talk radio, have trained us to disbelieve the facts themselves.  Never mind such incontrovertible hard evidence as the melting of the polar ice caps (just last week, a ship made it for the first time across the northern sea route from Norway to South Korea, without an icebreaker).  Never mind the thousands of pages of worldwide temperature data, the shifting of migration times for birds, the changes to the timing of flowering and leaf-out in northern deciduous forests, and even a recent study that in the northeastern United States, snowshoe hares are no longer growing in a white coat in the winter -- they're staying brown all year, because now that there's no reliable snow cover, being white in January is poor camouflage.

But none of those facts matter when compared to the ranting of people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, not to mention Donald Trump and his proxy at the EPA, Scott Pruitt.  Ironically, Pruitt's statement, delivered last week in Texas, came as a category-4 hurricane was bearing down on the Texas coast, and has so far delivered an estimated 15 trillion gallons of water -- and it's not done yet.  It's being called a "500-year storm."

I'm trying to figure out how many storms in the past ten years have been labeled that way.  I've lost count.

And yet Ann Coulter is still discounting any possibility that this storm could be the result of anthropogenic climate change.  "I don't believe Hurricane Harvey is God's punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor," Coulter tweeted yesterday.  "But that is more credible than 'climate change.'"

Thanks for weighing in, Ms. Coulter.  I'll give your opinion serious consideration once I see your degree in climatology.

Or, for that matter, in any scientific field.

But that kind of har-de-har-har statement from a layperson is somehow given more weight than all of the academic papers, solid research, projections, and predictions -- than all of the actual facts -- generated by the smartest and best-trained people in the world.

Hurricane Harvey prior to landfall [image courtesy of NASA]

As far as Scott Pruitt, he couldn't resist the opportunity to follow up his statement about how we shouldn't "throw science around" to generate policy with a dig at President Obama, who at least listened to scientists, even if he didn't always give them the attention they deserved.  "[Climate change] serves political ends," Pruitt said.  "The past administration used it as a wedge issue."

So in this topsy-turvy bizarro world we're in, to use facts, evidence, and science is creating a politicized "wedge issue," and to ignore them is the way to create sound policy.

The whole thing leaves me wanting to scream obscenities at my computer, which I actually did more than once while writing this.

Honestly, I think the only way this will change is if the American people wise up to the extent that all of these ignorant clowns get voted out of office, or if we're struck by an ecological catastrophe so immense that it becomes impossible to deny what's happening.  I'm not secretly hoping for the latter, by the way; but our track record of waking up to reality before serious damage is done is hardly encouraging.

For now, all we can do is watch and wait, and hope that the chickens come home to roost in the 2018 election.  But I'm not particularly optimistic about that, either.

Unity in diversity

A couple of days ago, NPR ran a piece about conservatives who are leaving liberal areas so they can live amongst like-minded folks.  The article, by Vanessa Romo, is entitled "Texas Becoming a Magnet for Conservatives Fleeing Liberal States Like California," and tells the story of people like 36-year-old Tim Stokes, who is upping stakes and moving along with his pregnant wife and three children.

The reason, Stokes said, is that he is tired of "feeling like an outsider" in his hometown.  He's a Republican, has staunchly supported conservative causes, and has the sense of being marginalized in a community that is largely liberal Democrat.  And he's not alone; the article projects that by 2050, twenty million people will have left their home states to be in places that align better with their political stances and religious beliefs.

It's not that I don't understand this.  I tend to have a liberal bent (which, I'm sure, will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia), although I try to avoid politics when I can because I find arguing about it to be rather pointless.  I live in an area where liberals outnumber conservatives, although if you continue down the highway where I live toward the south and the city of Watkins Glen, the numbers flip completely.  During the last election, if you took the road past my house, you could see the blue Clinton signs thinning as the red Trump signs increased in numbers, mile after passing mile.

I get that it's nice to have like-minded folks near you.  Believe me, being a liberal atheist from southern Louisiana, I know what it's like to feel like you're on the fringe in your own home, and the situation must feel similar for conservatives in strongly liberal areas.

But I think what Tim Stokes and his family (and, apparently, a great many other people) are doing is unequivocally a bad idea.

We need to be around people who disagree with us, who challenge and question us.  I'm not saying we should seek out hostile interactions, or (worse) provoke them; but I contend that if you live in the contented, self-satisfied little bubble of only hearing the opinions you already have reflected back at you, you will never have the opportunity to suss out places where your thinking is wrong-headed -- or things that you haven't thought about at all.

Fortunately, there are influential people who are saying exactly this.  George Fuller, the (conservative) mayor of McKinney, Texas (near Dallas), said of what Stokes and others are doing, "I think instead of just trying to kind of put together pockets of the like-minded, I would think energy is better spent trying to figure out how to live and exist together and find productive solutions going forward versus insulating yourself from different thoughts and ideologies."

Norman Rockwell, Golden Rule (1961) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is it exactly.  If there's one thing I've found to be consistently true, it's that it's much easier to demonize someone if you have no personal contact with them.  Over and over, I've seen stories of the devoutly religious who hated LGBT individuals -- until a child or a friend came out to them.  They're forced into realizing that the labels and the hatred allow them to ignore the humanity of an entire group, and that they're being presented with a choice between love and narrow-minded bigotry.  (I realize those situations don't always end this way, and there are cases where the bigoted choose to embrace their prejudice instead; but it's encouraging the number of times it's gone the other way.)

In fact, prejudices of all kinds evaporate when you take the time to get to know people different than you are, and realize that your commonalities far outweigh your differences.  And if you segregate yourself voluntarily into a little echo chamber where everyone looks like you, votes like you, and attends the same church as you, you'll never have the chance to do what Kathryn Schulz calls "moving outside of that tiny, terrified little bubble of having to be right about everything."

In fact, I'll go a step beyond that; you should not only be accepting of opportunities to interact with people who aren't like you, you should seek them out.  The leaders of our country are, by and large, accelerating the polarization of the American people, pushing us into believing that anyone who isn't like you is either a hopeless idiot, or else an evil creature dead-set on destroying the very fabric of the United States.

We have to work tirelessly against this mindset.  And, for cryin' in the sink, don't you think we'd get it by now?  We're a nation that in the past has prided itself on being a "melting pot."  I'm a good example; I have in my ancestry recent immigrants from the southeast of France, Jewish refugees from Alsace, Cajuns exiled from Nova Scotia, Dutch settlers who came to New Amsterdam in the 1600s, and Scottish peasants who ended up in the hill country of southwestern Pennsylvania.  Virtually all of us are the product of such amalgams.  And yet, the way things are going, we're rapidly heading toward a society where we not only don't interact with people who aren't like us, we almost never see them.

So do yourself a favor.  Find some people of different ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, or political values, and sit down with them to have a conversation over your favorite libation.  Don't just talk; listen.  Chances are good that you'll find out that this person, so different than you are, just wants the same things you want; a secure home, food on the table, a safe environment to raise children, the freedom to speak without judgment, the freedom to be who they are without fear of censure, ridicule, or violence.

And who knows?  Maybe you'll come away not only having learned something, but having made a friend.

Politics in the pulpit

New from the "Wow, You Really Didn't Think That Through All That Well, Did You?" department, we have: Texas Governor Greg Abbott signing into law a bill that will prevent the government from subpoenaing pastors based upon what they say in the pulpit.

This is yet another one of the so-called "Religious Freedom" laws, designed to give carte blanche to anyone who does anything as long as it's part of their religion.  Want to discriminate against someone?  Claim that your religion considers the person a sinner.  Want your kid to get out of having to learn about other cultures or other beliefs in school?  Claim that your religion considers the knowledge of such information a threat.

Or, now: want your pastor to be able to stump for a political candidate?  Claim that preventing him/her from doing so is allowing the government to "pry into what goes on in churches."

That, at least, is how Governor Abbott sees it.  Upon signing the bill, Abbott said:

Freedom and freedom of religion was challenged here in Houston, and I am proud to say you fight back from the very beginning... Texas law now will be your strength and your sword and your shield.  You will be shielded by any effort by any other government official in any other part of the state of Texas from having subpoenas to try to pry into what you’re doing here in your churches.

Which brings up a problem that I think about every time someone starts snarling about how much better it was when we had prayer in schools.  My first question would be, "What kind of prayers?"  Because generally the religion people want in schools -- and in all the arenas of public life -- is just one religion, namely their own.  It's curious how a lot of the same people who would love to see prayers to the Christian god reinstituted in public schools pitch an unholy fit when students even learn about Islam, and would probably spontaneously combust if students were told to bow down and pray to Allah.

Which is the problem with Abbott's new law.  Are the pastors who are now protected from subpoenas based on what they preach only the Christian pastors?  Because this law could easily be invoked to protect extremist Muslim mullahs preaching "Death to America" from their pulpits.  The whole idea of separation of church and state is that you are free to subscribe to whatever religion you choose, or no religion at all, and all religions are treated equally under the law.  What Abbott clearly intends here is that Christian churches have rights that other institutions do not have.

And the reason Abbott and the bill's author, Senator Joan Huffman of Houston, came up with this is abundantly clear.  There is an increasing push by evangelical Christians to consolidate their power in order to influence political races.  They wielded considerable clout in the last presidential election; without people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. throwing their support behind Trump, you have to wonder if the election might not have gone the other way.  Some preachers went even further, and said that if you don't vote for Trump, you are committing a sin because you're going against God's Chosen One.

How a narcissistic, sociopathic, adulterous compulsive liar ever got to be God's Chosen One is beyond me.  But there you are.

Myself, I have no problem with a church getting involved with politics, as long as it brings with it the price of losing tax-exempt status.  Once churches become the religious arm of a political party, they should be paying taxes on donations the same way any other political organization does.

But Abbott would probably consider that "religious persecution."

So this is a law that is inherently unfair in intent, almost certainly will be unevenly enforced if it's enforceable at all, and is likely to be challenged in the courts in any case.  Another exercise in governmental waste of time, solely to grandstand a little and appease Abbott's hyperreligious base.

Because, apparently, our elected officials have nothing better to do.

Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's

A lot of what you hear talked about under the heading of "religious freedom" seems to me to boil down to "reasonable expectations of what a particular profession or institution's responsibilities are."

Take, for example, the kerfuffle last week over a Killeen, Texas public school administrator's choice to take down a poster of Linus (of Peanuts fame) that included the biblical quote he recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord.  That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."  Dedra Shannon, the school nurse who had put up the poster, said she was told "it had to come down because it might offend kids from other religions or those who do not have a religion" and that the administrator's decision was "a slap in the face of Christianity."

When I saw this posted on social media a few days ago, it was accompanied by a comment to the effect that diversity and tolerance are apparently all fine except when they apply to white Christians.  Todd Starnes, who wrote the Fox News article I linked above, clearly agrees.  "Those who holler about tolerance are the least tolerant of all," Starnes writes.  "Public schools are supposed to be in the education business and Ms. Shannon was simply educating students about the true meaning of Christmas."

My question is why on earth public schools should be in the role of teaching religion in the first place, except insofar as it has an impact on history and literature.  Imagine, for example, if a teacher decided to teach children the "true meaning of the holiness of the Qu'ran" and put "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet" on the door of the classroom.  My guess is the same people who flipped out about the removal of the Linus poster would flip out in the other direction (and rightly so).

Schools are not in the business of religious instruction.  And why should they be?  Don't churchgoers get enough religious instruction in their churches?  You wouldn't go to the doctor's office and object when they didn't give you advice on your investments -- it's outside of the purview of their responsibilities.  Likewise, it's not the job of a public school to give students instruction about the "true meaning of Christmas."

Then we have the story about Linda Harvey, founder of Mission: America and host of a radio show of the same name, who lamented last week that she had nowhere to shop now that so many businesses have stood up for equal treatment of LGBT individuals.  Harvey said:

For any Christian who wants to spend hard-earned dollars with family-friendly, Christian-affirming retailers, restaurants and service providers, the list is growing shorter all the time.  I stopped shopping at Macy’s in 2011 after learning about the retailer’s grossly unjust policy against women. 

Macy’s management said ‘yes’ to a transsexual young man’s demand to change in the women’s dressing room and rejected a Christian employee’s attempt to block his inappropriate access, even firing her because of her principled actions...  Then there’s Target.  Where to start?  Selling ‘gay pride’ T-shirts a few years back was bad enough, but Target is now ‘proudly standing’ with homosexuals and cross-dressers who want to change America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act to add ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. 

Joining Target in supporting this anti-American, pro-deviance legislation are Amazon, General Mills, Google, Facebook, Paypal, Levi-Strauss and others.

Well, first, saying "I am not going to discriminate against LGBT people" is not synonymous with saying "I am anti-Christian."  No one at Target, or Macy's, or anywhere else is trying to convince anyone of anything except that you should buy what they're selling.  All they said is that they're going to make sure that the rights of their workers and customers are protected regardless of their sexual orientation.

So she, too, is expecting an institution to do something that's outside its purview -- expecting department stores to adhere to Christian values, as if retail outlets were branch offices of the local church.  The point is that the stores are saying they'll serve anyone; what Harvey wants is not only to follow her own code of ethics, but to mandate that everyone else does, too.

The same kind of thing applies to B&B and bakery owners who won't serve gays, and strict Catholic pharmacists who won't sell people birth control.  None of those people are in the business of dictating others' ethics and morals; they are in a service job and therefore should expect that under anti-discrimination statutes, they would be expected to serve any customer who comes in.  And in fact, a B&B owner, baker, or pharmacist who went into the business unaware that they would have customers who differed from them in terms of religion or sexual preference is, in a word, dumb.

C'mon, a pharmacist who didn't know he was going to be expected to sell birth control pills and condoms?  Really?

But all of this is cast as part of the more general War on Christianity, as if telling people "you can't act in a bigoted fashion" is some kind of infringement of their rights to practice their religion.

It comes down to the general rule that you are completely free to attend the church of your choice and adhere to any and all rules the religion requires, but you are not free to expect that businesses and public institutions adhere to any of it.  So honestly, Linda Harvey is completely within her rights not to patronize Target et al.; but expecting that department stores are going to be venues for "Christian values" is a little ridiculous.

So I guess if you believe that tolerance of diversity equates to intolerance of the majority, you'll never be without something to be offended by.  Me, I'd rather try to get along with the people around me than constantly harp on the fact that everyone isn't like me.  All in all, I think it's a much happier way to be.

Inquiries into inquiries about inquiries

I'm increasingly appreciating the quip that if "con" is the opposite of "pro," then "congress" is the opposite of "progress."

At the moment I'm thinking of Lamar Smith, the Texas Representative who chairs the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology despite being an anti-science climate change denier who back in 2014 said the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "said nothing new," despite its predictions of massive sea level rise, extreme weather, and catastrophic drought if nothing is done to rein in fossil fuel use.  Of course, what Smith meant by that was that the IPCC didn't say, "Ha ha!  We've been kidding all these years!  Climate change has nothing to do with fossil fuel use!"  Which is what he was hoping, given that he's proven himself over the years to be nothing more than a hired gun for Exxon-Mobil.

Rep. Lamar Smith [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Don't believe me?  In 2015 he started lashing out at climate scientists who were funded through government grants as an attempt to muzzle climate research and put a chill on anyone thinking of writing a paper further illustrating that climate change is anthropogenic (which it is).  He had a subpoena issued to Kathryn Sullivan, chair of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stating, "NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda."  Which is ironic given that Lamar Smith and his cronies suppress data to advance their own extreme pro-fossil fuel agenda.

Earlier this year, Smith went even further, launching a witch hunt against scientists even for communicating with each other about the topic.  He issued a subpoena for any internal documents containing words such as "global temperature" and "climate study," better to identify and harass scientists who were still trying to, you know, do science.

So it was no real surprise when the story hit two days ago that Lamar is at it again, this time launching an investigation to “examine Congress’s investigative authority as it relates to the committee’s oversight of the impact of investigations undertaken by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts at the behest of several environmental organizations.”  Or, as Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard put it, he's investigating the House of Representatives' ability to investigate investigations.  This came about because those attorneys general (and also the ones in California and the Virgin Islands) have launched inquiries to look into Exxon-Mobil's efforts to suppress research linking fossil fuel use to global warming, much as in a previous generation Big Tobacco suppressed research linking cigarette smoking to cancer.  Lamar Smith and his cadre of science deniers are desperate both to discredit climate research (and the researchers who do it) and to sever any link between climate change and the runaway use of fossil fuels, and if they can't do it by harassment via subpoena, they'll do it by tying up congress in endless inquiries into inquiries about inquiries.

Smith hasn't arrived at his strategy just 'cuz.  He has the backing of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a virulently anti-science group devoted to casting doubt on anthropogenic climate change, which calls itself "non-partisan" even though it receives the majority of its funding from Koch Industries, Crownquest Oil & Gas, AEP Texas, ExxonMobil, VF-Russia, Texas Western Energy Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, Chevron, and Henry Petroleum LP.   He is deep in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, and has no compunctions about using his position to forward their agenda.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has dismissed Smith's investigation as being a "small group of radical Republican House members... trying to block a serious law enforcement investigation into potential fraud at Exxon."  The problem is, Smith is in a position where he can do this kind of bullshit and get away with it.  He, and others like him, have sown such doubt in the minds of the American public about climate change that your typical American citizen can look outside and see record-breaking temperatures in 2016, which broke the record from 2015, which broke the record from 2014 (and so on ad nauseam), and still claim it isn't happening.

What I'm wondering is how the hell we can get this guy out of his position as chairman of the committee in the House of Representatives that oversees science.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, the man doesn't believe in science.  Having Lamar Smith chair this committee is like having a creationist appointed to chair a university's Department of Evolutionary Biology.

The whole thing leaves me with that awful feeling that is a combination of anger, desperation, frustration, and disgust.  The fact that this smirking weasel of a man is currently driving national climate policy -- or, more accurately, putting our climate policy on a leash to the fossil fuel industry -- makes me wish that there was a stronger word than "appalling."