Disaster relief

Today we have three stories from the "I Swear I Am Not Making This Up" department, all of which revolve around various natural disasters.

In the first, we are featuring a repeat performance by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "Firefighter Prophet."  You may recall that Taylor was in Skeptophilia only two weeks ago, when he claimed that Satan's followers were using chemtrails to stop us from "tuning in to God's frequency."

This time, however, he's outdone himself, which is no mean feat given the fact that most of what he says sounds like he's spent too much time jumping on a pogo stick in a room with low ceilings.  Just two days ago, Taylor felt like he had to comment on the outbreak of tornadoes in the American Midwest, and tweeted the following:

Coincidence that Missouri was hit with Tornadoes right after they signed the abortion bill?  That same line of storms had Tornado warning in DC yesterday right before Trump gave ok for declass.  The enemy is trying to intimidate.  It won’t work, your [sic] a defeated enemy!  Victory!

So, Satan is sending tornadoes to intimidate the Christians (and also Donald Trump, who is about as Christian as Kim Jong-Un), and coincidentally sends tornadoes to places that already get lots of tornadoes, during the part of the year that's the peak season for tornadoes?  You know, intimidation-wise, I think Satan would be more advised to do something unexpected, like having a volcano erupt in downtown Omaha, or a blizzard in Miami, or a hurricane in Utah, or something.  Saying, "Fear my wrath!  I will make sure that what always happens to you continues to happen!" really lacks something, evil-wise.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

Next we have news out of Kentucky, where the "Ark Encounter" museum, designed to convince children that the mythological explanations of a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders somehow supersedes everything we know from modern science, has run into a legal snafu.  Apparently they are suing their insurance carriers because of refusal to pay out a claim...

... for damage from flooding.

I like to think of myself as a compassionate guy, but my exact reaction when I read this was:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, snort, choke* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

So you need help covering the expenses of damage from a two-day rainstorm?  I thought this particular design was good for at least forty days and forty nights.  And besides, don't they call natural disasters like this "Acts of God?"

Seems a little presumptuous to expect compensation from something like that.

Or maybe, if you apply Mark Taylor's "logic" to this situation, it was just Satan trying to intimidate Ken Ham et al.  In which case Ham should just yell, "Your [sic] defeated, Satan!  Victory!" and call it good.

Last, we have an actual warning sent out by the Lawrence (Kansas) Police Department, that you should not try to stop a tornado by shooting at it.

Which you would think would be obvious.  After all, air is pretty impervious to bullets, and a tornado is basically just a big spinning blob of air.  Plus, there's the problem that since it's spinning really fast, if you shoot into it, you're likely to find that five seconds later, the tornado has flung the bullet right back at you.  After all, tornadoes are capable not only of massive devastation, but of whirling quite heavy objects up into the air, which is why if your house is hit by a tornado, it not only has to withstand the strength of the wind, but being hit by an airborne Buick.  Whipping a little thing like a bullet around, and hurling it right back at Bubba and his friends, would be child's play.

It's kind of amazing to me that anyone would have to make a point of telling people not to do this.  What's next?  "If you're trapped by a flood, beating the rising waters with a stick is not going to help."  "Do not attempt to stop a lava flow by spraying it with insecticide."  "You should seek medical help rather than trying to cure your diseases by drinking bleach."

Wait.  People actually did have to be warned about the last one.  Never mind.

You know, maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I do not recall bizarre stuff like this happening when I was a kid.  I'm thinking that once again we have evidence we're living in a giant computer simulation, but the aliens running it have gotten bored and/or drunk and now are just fucking with us:

"Let's see what happens if we make a narcissistic, nearly illiterate reality TV star lose the popular election, but win the presidency anyhow!" 

*aliens laugh maniacally and twiddle a few knobs* 

"Oh, hell yeah!  That was great!  How about, let's have people in England attempt to generate popular support for left-wing candidates by throwing milkshakes at politicians!" 

*aliens do tequila shots, more knob-twiddling, more laughter* 

*Ha!  Did you see Nigel Farage's face?  Oh, hey, I've got one.  Let's come up with a song that's super annoying, more annoying even than "Copacabana" and "The Piña Colada Song" put together.  Only we'll target it to kids, but we'll get everyone to play it because there'll be a really stupid video to go with it.  It'll be called "Baby Shark."  That and "do do do do do" will be about the only lyrics." 

*aliens fall off their chairs laughing*

Well, I suppose as long as someone is amused by how absurd humans are.  On the other hand, our species's reputation for idiotic behavior probably wouldn't be harmed any if Mark Taylor would just shut the hell up.

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

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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

Endorsement of coercion

Some days, I really don't understand my fellow humans.

The latest example of my complete incomprehension comes because of a case that was just decided in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, wherein a self-styled Satanist had brought a lawsuit against the United States government to have "In God We Trust" removed from currency, on the basis of its being an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  The lawsuit was thrown out a couple of days ago.  The court's ruling said, in part, "a reasonable observer would not perceive the motto on currency as a religious endorsement."

I read the entire story with an expression like this on my face:

Let's just review what the phrase "In God We Trust" means, shall we?

It means "we trust in God."  I.e., God exists.  I.e., Christianity is right.  I.e., endorsing a particular religious viewpoint.

The ruling went on to say, "The inclusion of the motto on currency is similar to other ways in which secular symbols give a nod to the nation’s religious heritage... similar to the phrase 'One Nation, Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance."

No, the phrase is not a "nod to religious heritage."  Depictions of the Puritans founding the colony of Massachusetts is a "nod to religious heritage."  But then, so would depictions of the witches being hanged in Salem, so maybe that's not where we want to go, either.

What escapes a lot of people about all this is that the motto of the United States was changed in the 1950s from E Pluribus Unum -- "Out of Many, One" -- in order to show the godless commies what for.  Same for adding "One Nation, Under God" in the Pledge.  Neither of these has a long historical timeline, and only appeared when the Christians started feeling threatened and required that everyone state their belief in God whether or not a person thought it was true.

The mandate for the phrase to appear on currency comes from a bill introduced by Representative Charles Bennett of Florida in 1955, wherein Bennett argued that "In these days when imperialistic and materialistic communism seeks to attack and destroy freedom, we should continually look for ways to strengthen the foundations of our freedom."

Including, apparently, the freedom to believe anything you want as long as it's Christianity.

I also take issue with the suggestion that the founders of the country intended this kind of coercion with respect to religion.  Take, for example, what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1777:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

James Madison concurred, observing, "Torrents of blood have been split in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion."

Even more to the point, Jefferson wrote, "What has been the effect of [religious] coercion?  To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the earth."

And more fundamentally, I wonder why the religious want religion to appear on currency.  Isn't there the whole "render unto God what is God's, and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" thing in the Gospel of Matthew?  And as far as the Pledge goes, what earthly purpose can the "one nation, under God" phrase serve?  If you say it but don't believe it, you're lying.  If you already believe it -- well, you already believe it.  Why is a public affirmation in a secular space required?

The bottom line is that you are free to participate in any religion you want to.  Even as a staunch atheist, I have no desire whatsoever to constrain what you believe, or how you express those beliefs.  But that tolerance comes to a screeching halt when you try to coerce me, or anyone else, to adhere to your beliefs simply because people of those beliefs are currently in the majority in the United States, and hold nearly all the positions of power.

I suppose it's heartening that even the people in favor of it recognize they're on such tenuous ground that they have to make such outright ridiculous statements as "'In God We Trust' is in no way a religious endorsement" in order to defend it.  What's unfortunate is that we have to spend our time and resources arguing about this stuff, when there are considerably more pressing matters to attend to, such as the fact that our president seems to regard the Constitution as a list of suggestions.

If he's actually read it, which I'm beginning to wonder.

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

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Miraculous backfire

I walk a pretty fine line, here at Skeptophilia, between criticizing ideas and ridiculing the people who hold them.  And I'm sure that I've stepped across that line more than once, given my fondness for the word "wingnut."  But I do try to focus on people's words, actions, and ideologies rather than launching broad-brush ad hominems.  That way lies Ann Coulter, and heaven knows we wouldn't want to go there.

Wait, was that a personal ad hominem?

Dammit.

Anyhow, any time you write something and post it or publish it, you take the chance that you're going to cause some negative responses.  And the problem is that there's a range of negative responses people could have to what a blogger writes, from "disagreement" to "offense" to "so offended I'm going to sue your ass off for libel."  And this is the predicament that Stephanie Guttormson has found herself in.

Guttormson is the Operations Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, and is the kind of person who has slim tolerance for bullshit.  She has a YouTube channel called "Think Stephtically," and she has taken on all manner of psychics, faith healers, and their ilk.  And now, she has gotten herself into (in my opinion, entirely undeserved) hot water over her criticisms of Adam Miller, who claims to be a faith healer and miracle worker.

In two YouTube pieces -- "Adam Miller, Con Artist" and "Adam Miller, Charlatan Antics, Childish Tactics" -- she took Miller's claims apart piece by piece.  Devotees tried to strike back, with commentary such as the following:

I have had work done by Adam Miller for the last 2 years 12 years of nagging pain in my back, INDEED he is a healer this woman is a hacker and knows nothing about spirituality.  Adam and Eve Miller are the real deal back off and allow those their gifts to heal on.

Well, I might point out first that there's a difference between a "hack" and a "hacker," but the more trenchant response is the one that appeared immediately after the above post:

I brushed my teeth yesterday then crossed the street.  Today I forgot to brush my teeth, and was hit by a car crossing the street - IF only I had brushed my teeth, I wouldnt have been hit by a car.  Right?

(Y)our example demonstrates (amongst others) the logical fallacies of cherry picking, and correlation is not causality.  THAT is why we have scientific methodologies - to weed out those claims by people such as Adam when not supported by the evidence.

Spot on, of course.  But the problem with people like Miller is that they never just retreat in disarray when they're shown up -- they lash out.  And that's what Miller has done.  He has sued Guttormson for copyright infringement (she used some clips of Miller's schtick in her own videos) and for "actual harm caused to Mr. Miller as a result of Guttormson’s infringement and statutory damages."

The lawsuit probably doesn't stand a chance of being found in Miller's favor; but the problem is, Miller is wealthy (another indication of how many gullible people there are in the world) and can afford the cost far better than Guttormson can.  So Guttormson has started a GoFundMe drive to pay for her legal costs from this frivolous lawsuit -- to which I hope you will be able to donate.

But what Miller may not have realized, given his apparent unfamiliarity with critical thinking, is that there is a phenomenon called the Streisand effect.  It involves someone objecting to negative publicity, and their objection bringing far more attention to that publicity than it otherwise would have had.  It got its name, of course, from singer Barbra Streisand, who became furious over an aerial photograph of her house that had been taken by an obscure California photographer, and sued him to have it destroyed -- resulting in the photograph being circulated worldwide, appearing in countless articles and blog posts, including on the Wikipedia page about the Streisand effect.

Gives new meaning to the phrase "pick your battles."

Barbra Streisand's house, posted here just because I can.  [image copyright © 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org, and courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So let's see if we can invoke the Streisand effect here.  Miller wants his day in court?  Fine.  How about we skeptics pull together, and not only support Guttormson's GoFundMe drive, but circulate and repost her two videos in which she criticized Miller?  When I looked at them this morning so I could link them to this post, they had only 11,000 and 2,400 views each.

That is far too few.

So take a look at Guttormson's YouTube videos (links posted above).  Post them on Twitter and Facebook and wherever else you can think of. They're well worth watching on their own merits, of course; she's hilarious, and her biting commentary on Miller's content and delivery style got some belly laughs from me.  Besides the pleasure of watching Miller's lawsuit completely backfire, it'd be nice to see more people exposed to this kind of skeptical approach of woo-woo claims.

Funny to think, then, that the efforts of a guy who claims to "work miracles" might be to bring much wider attention to a woman who works to demolish such claims.  Now wouldn't that be a miracle?

NASA, lawsuits, and jelly doughnuts

One of the questions you seldom hear asked, either of skeptics or of their counterparts, is, "What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?"

It was asked at the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, and it may have been the most telling moment of the whole thing; when Ken Ham said, "Nothing could ever convince me I was wrong," and Bill Nye said, "All it would take is one piece of hard evidence," it pointed out both the fruitlessness of debating people like Ham, and also the fundamental difference between a scientific viewpoint and a non-scientific one.  If you are a scientist, one piece of reliable evidence that your previously-held understanding is wrong would be sufficient to force a review of what you thought you knew.

I say "review" rather than "revision" because the one thing this leaves out is the quality of the evidence.  There are still the possibilities of measurement error, uncontrolled variables, and researcher bias to consider.  And factoring in these is no mean feat.  However, this is why peer review exists -- and why anecdotal reports, of the sort that are usually trotted out to support various woo-woo claims, don't sway me much.  If you want me to sit up and take notice, then go the traditional route of peer review.  Once you've done that, we can talk.

Of course, the problem is that a lot of woo-woos don't like peer review because they perceive the cards as stacked against them.  And this is when the whole issue takes on the added dimension of a systematic coverup.  In the first chapter of his wonderful book Voodoo Science, Robert Park tells the story of Joseph W. Newman, who claimed that he had circumvented both the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics by inventing an "energy machine" that could solve the world's problems by outputting more energy than was put into it -- in effect, a Perpetual Motion Machine With Benefits.  Scientists rolled their eyes and walked away, prompting Newman to blame his failure to get a patent on a conspiracy against him.  And while no one who understood any physics did much more than scoff, he gained considerable traction amongst people who love to see the Underdog take on The Man.

It's probably much the same sentiment that led to a guy named Rhawn Joseph to announce last week that he's suing NASA, claiming that the recent "jelly doughnut rock" situation was evidence of life on Mars -- but that NASA, in the way of Evil Government Agencies, was covering the whole thing up.

You might have heard about the "jelly doughnut," which made the news a couple of weeks ago.  It's a light-colored rock that appeared suddenly in the field of view of the Mars rover Opportunity where no such rock had been in earlier photographs.  The whole thing was certainly a shock -- any time you're doing remote sensing of another planet, and something plays now-you-don't-see-it, now-you-do, it makes scientists sit up and take notice.

[image courtesy of NASA]

To me, the rock doesn't look that much like a jelly doughnut; and NASA scientists called it, with marginally better justification, "Pinnacle Island."  But whatever you call it, it was sort of a mystery.  "Much of the rock is bright-toned, nearly white," a NASA spokesperson said, in a press release.  "A portion is deep red in color.  Pinnacle Island may have been flipped upside-down when a wheel dislodged it, providing an unusual circumstance for examining the underside of a Martian rock."

Well, as soon as I saw this, I knew that the woo-woos were not going to be able to resist wooing all over this story.  And it wasn't long before claims that this was alien life started to appear on fringe sites like Above Top Secret.  But now, we have someone going a step further, with a lawsuit against NASA that demands that they come clean about the nature of the rock.  Rhawn Joseph, a self-styled cosmologist, is demanding that the agency "perform a public, scientific, and statutory duty which is to closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism."

The problem, of course, is that it remains to be seen what NASA could do that would convince Joseph that this was just a rock.  Joseph himself seems to have somewhat dubious allegiances; he has written for the Journal of Cosmology, a journal that biologist and skeptic P. Z. Myers says "... isn't a real science journal at all, but is the... website of a small group... obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth."  As for Joseph himself, it's fairly significant that he was involved in a rather ugly shouting match with astronomer David Brin and JoC editor-in-chief Rudolf Schild over a paper Joseph had submitted for review to Brin which Brin said contained "glaring faults."

So Joseph is not, perhaps, someone with the highest credibility in the scientific world to begin with; but leaving that aside (as we must, because it's always important to separate the claim from the claimant), does he have a basis for suing NASA to force them to reveal what they're hiding?

In a word: no.  I mean, think about it.  What earthly (or Martian, to be more precise) reason would NASA scientists have to cover up evidence of life on Mars?  The first scientists to demonstrate the existence of extraterrestrial life will be instantaneously famous.  Especially, as in this case, if the living thing in question is large, multicellular, and capable of slithering quickly into the view of a remote camera.  Considering that NASA has been trying to figure out if there was life on Mars since the Viking probes of the 1970s, it's highly unlikely that they'd cover it up if some living creature just happened to photobomb Opportunity's surface photographs.

But that sort of logic is apparently not convincing to Joseph.  "The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre," Joseph said, in the text of the lawsuit.

You have to wonder how the folks at NASA are responding to all of this.  Considering the bullshit they have to deal with on a daily basis -- whether or not Nibiru is heading toward Earth, what the current position of the Comet Elenin is, what our likelihood is of being struck by a huge asteroid -- I can only imagine that they just rolled their eyes and said, "Oh, hell, not another freakin' lawsuit."

And of course, even if the lawsuit is settled in NASA's favor -- which I can only hope it will be -- it's doubtful that it will silence Joseph and his supporters.  As I've commented before, once you've decided that everyone is lying to you, there is no piece of evidence that will be sufficient to convince you.

It is the salient point, really, and the acid test for whether you've left the realm of science.  If ever you are asked, "what would convince you that you are wrong?" and your answer is "nothing ever could," you are no longer doing science.  You are off in the rarefied air of woo-wooism -- and it might just be time for a u-turn.

Human rights for chimps

There's now a lawsuit making its way through the U. S. judicial system demanding "legal personhood" for chimpanzees.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

A non-profit organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed three separate suits in a New York State court claiming that chimps are "a cognitively complex autonomous legal person(s) with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned."  The suits were filed on the behalf of four chimps who are so "imprisoned" -- two by private, licensed owners, and two by research labs at the State University of New York in Stonybrook.

The lawsuits are extremely likely to be thrown out, and it has nothing to do with whether or not holding chimps in such situations is ethical or not.  They are not human -- and the framing of most laws are explicit in giving rights to humans ("men and women," or "people"), not to non-human animals.  The organization filing the lawsuits might have been better off making the claim based on animal cruelty laws; that an animal as "cognitively complex" as a chimp is undergoing abuse simply by virtue of being imprisoned, even if nothing is explicitly done to hurt it.

It does open up the wider question, though, of what our attitude should be toward other species.  The whole issue crops up, I think, because so many humans consider themselves as disconnected from the rest of the natural world.  I find that a great many of my students talk about "humans" and "animals" as if humans weren't animals themselves, as if we were something set apart, different in a fundamental way from the rest of the animal world.  A lot of this probably comes from the fact that much of our cultural context comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which Homo sapiens wasn't even created on the same day as everything else -- and is, therefore, the only being on earth with sentience, and an immortal soul.

Once you knock down that assumption, however, you are on the fabled and dangerous slippery slope.  There is a continuum of intelligence, and sentience, in the animal world; it isn't an either-or.  Chimps and the other anthropoid apes are clearly highly intelligent, with a capacity for emotions, including pain, grief, loss, and depression.  Keeping such an animal in a cage is only dubiously ethical, even if (as in the case of the chimps at SUNY-Stonybrook) you might be able to argue it on a "greater good because of discoveries through research" basis.

But if we have an obligation to treat animals compassionately, how far down the line would you extend that compassion?  Spider monkeys are less intelligent than chimps, by pretty much any measure you choose -- but not a lot less.  We keep pigs in horrible, inhumane conditions on factory farms -- and they are about as intelligent as dogs.  Down the scale it goes; fish can experience pain, and yet some people will not eat chicken on the basis of its causing another creature pain, and yet will happily devour a piece of salmon.

Douglas Hofstadter, the brilliant writer and thinker who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and I Am a Strange Loop, proposes a "unit of sentience" called the "huneker."  (He named the unit after James Huneker, who said of one Chopin étude that it should not be attempted by "small-souled men.")  He is well aware that as neuroscience now stands, it's impossible to assign numerical values to the quality of sentience -- but, he says, few are in doubt that humans are more sentient, self-conscious, and intelligent than dogs, dogs more than fish, fish more than mosquitoes.  (Hofstadter says that a mosquito possesses "0.0000001 hunekers" and jokingly added that if mosquitoes have souls, they are "mostly evil.")  But even though he is talking about the whole thing in a lighthearted way, he bases his own decisions about what to eat on something like this concept:

At some point, in any case, my compassion for other “beings” led me very naturally to finding it unacceptable to destroy other sentient beings... such as cows and pigs and lambs and fish and chickens, in order to consume their flesh, even if I knew that their sentience wasn't quite as high as the sentience of human beings.

Where or on what basis to draw the line? How many hunekers merit respect? I didn't know exactly. I decided once to draw the line between mammals and the rest of the animal world, and I stayed with that decision for about twenty years. Recently, however — just a couple of years ago, while I was writing I Am a Strange Loop, and thus being forced (by myself) to think all these issues through very intensely once again — I “lowered” my personal line, and I stopped eating animals of any sort or “size”. I feel more at ease with myself this way, although I do suspect, at times, that I may have gone a little too far. But I'd rather give a too-large tip to a server than a too-small one, and this is analogous. I'd rather err on the side of generosity than on the other side, so I'm vegetarian.

Although I agree with Hofstadter, I've never been able to give up eating meat -- and I'm aware that the choice is based mostly upon the purely selfish consideration that I really enjoy it.  We belong to a local meat CSA that raises the animals under humane, free-range conditions, which assuages some of my guilty feelings when I'm eating a t-bone steak.

The issue is not a simple one, but I've tried to make my decisions based upon an effort not to cause needless suffering.  Locking up a convicted murderer probably causes him suffering, but refusing to do so on that basis is hardly a reasonable choice.  Ending an animal's life in a quick and humane way to provide me with dinner is, in my opinion, acceptable as long as the animal was treated compassionately while it was alive.  And I extend that qualifier of need all the way down the scale.  I'll scoop up spiders in cups and let put them outside rather than stomp them.  There is no need for me to kill harmless spiders -- however far down the sentience scale they may be.

In the case of the "imprisoned" chimps, there is almost certainly suffering, and (as far as I can tell) little need.  Unless research is of immense and immediate value to humanity, an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a chimp should not be used for it.  There are a great many reasons not to keep animals like chimps in captivity.

Calling them "persons," however, is not one of them.