Vote for Darwin by Friday

Every time someone tries to drag Florida's miserably vague educational science standards into the 20th century -- never mind the 21st century -- the creationist lunkheads rise up to drag it back again to Bishop Usher's famously bogus date of 4004 B.C.

Any and every hominid in the world has through Friday, October 14 to cast his or her vote for the newly proposed Florida science standards at this polling place. A vote for the new standards is a vote proving that Florida at long last has evolved. Darwin would be proud.

Homo Sapiens Hanky-Panky

The Christian Science Monitor, among others, earlier this week reported the exciting news that two scientific teams working in Europe and the U.S. are well on their way to finishing "a rough draft" of the entire genome of Neanderthal man.

[U]sing the 38,000-year-old remains of a 38-year-old male, found in a Croatian cave, each group now says it has rebuilt, or sequenced, long segments of Neanderthal DNA - the twisted, ladder-shaped molecule in the nucleus of cells that holds an organism's genetic blueprint.

The technique is not only yielding new insights into Neanderthals, reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature and Friday's issue of Science, it's also likely to prove an important tool in teasing out secrets about how plants and animals evolved, researchers say. DNA "is the ultimate forensic record of evolution," says Sean Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "There's never been a more exciting time to be an evolutionary biologist."

The disturbing part in all of this is what looks like a new wrinkle in an old debate. Not the debate about what happened to Neanderthal man. The one about why Homo Sapiens, sapiens men can be such brutes to women.

Although the genome is far from complete, the teams have used the data to test questions about the history of humans and Neanderthals. One centers on the contentious issue of whether the two species interbred during the 10,000 to 20,000 years they shared the same territory in Europe and western Asia. Several paleo-anthropologists hold that the fossil record points to some interbreeding.

Dr. Rubin's group says that the genetic information his group has gathered so far shows no signs of interbreeding. The second team, led by Dr. Paabo of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, suggests genes may have been mixed, but only in one direction - from male humans to Neanderthal females. [emphasis added]

Get it? Today's New York Times editorial calls it "hanky-panky." Others might call it rape.

"Jesus Camp" Reviewed

"His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping."

-- Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1955)

The late short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor once said, "My audience are the people who think God is dead."

O'Connor was herself a devout Roman Catholic. Most emphatically, she did not think that god was dead. Yet, when she wrote with sympathy and dark humor about the violent extremism of primitive Southern fundamentalists, the purposes and vision of her art often were misconstrued by reviewers, academics, religionists, and sometimes even her own family.

The grotesque, tormented fanatics she wrote about 'cannot possibly exist' was a common complaint in her time. She invented them simply for exaggerated effect, others suggested. The Protestant rural South that O'Connor depicts is 'demented', some argued; if the deranged people of whom she writes exist at all, fellow citizens of Milledgeville, Georgia, claimed, they certainly are not found in any numbers.

If those criticisms of Flannery O'Connor's work had any small merit then, they surely do not now. America has caught up with Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Doubters have only to see Jesus Camp, now playing at Gulf Breeze Cinema 4.

The film, as Kirsten A. Powers efficiently describes, is a documentary "which chronicles a North Dakota summer camp where kids as young as 6 are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in 'God's army... .'" Without benefit of narration, we simply see and hear what can only be described as brain-washing techniques used by adult evangelicals on their own adolescent children.

They home school them against evolution. During church services they lead prayers to a cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush. Before meetings they recite a 'pledge of allegiance' to a flag resembling the pop-culture version thought to have been carried into the Christian Crusades. And, at summer camp the children are dressed out in camouflage and practice military maneuvers with wooden swords while giving Heil Hitler-like straight-armed salutes.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady abruptly begin the film Jesus Camp in a nondescript Missouri motel meeting hall off an interstate highway exchange. It's the kind of room that might easily be the site of a weekend company training session for Xerox repairmen. Instead, we see it filling with dozens of suburban soccer moms and their adolescent children whom they've hauled along for a weekend Play-and-Pray that apparently doubles as a recruiting session for "Kids on Fire," a fundamentalist summer camp.

The camp, we learn soon enough, is run by Becky Fisher in a remote part of North Dakota. Fisher is a Pentecostal minister of the charismatic variety that talks in gibberish called "tongues" and lays hands on people to "heal" them. She would be right at home in an O'Connor story.

A woman of gargantuan girth, Fisher is seen early in the film haranguing the children and their mothers about the evils of modern America. Among these she includes, without hint of irony or self-awareness, people made "fat and lazy" by too much fast food. Secular humanists in the audience will laugh. The true believers in Fisher's audience would not even see the reason.

As Fisher explains candidly to the camera, her church is training the children to be religious warriors who will "take back" the U.S. government. They are using, she says, techniques pioneered by Muslim religious extremists. 'Except," she adds with a smile, "we're right."

Before going to camp, the documentary invites us into the neat, average-looking suburban homes of some of the children's families. 'We don't believe in evolution,' Levi, a 12 year old boy recites for his mother by rote during a home schooling session at the kitchen table. Then he adds, unprompted, 'Galileo was right to renounce science, too.'

A cute ten year old girl dances to "Christian Rock" so frenetically in her pink-on-pink bedroom that she works up a sweat. Then, she worries aloud that some who see her may mistakenly suppose she is "dancing for the flesh" instead of for god.

The boy Levi could be a stand-in for Francis Marion Tarwater, O'Connor's troubled orphan in The Violent Bear It Away. Tarwater's crazy grandfather had prophesied that he would become a prophet in his own right and this haunts the boy throughout the novel. Levi hankers to become a minister, too. At camp we see him assiduously practicing his sermonizing skills, measuring each new phrase he has thought up for its emotional impact on a future audience. ('Use your youth until you're in your thirties,' Rev. Ted Haggard advises him, 'and by then you'll have content.')

The view we are given into this seemingly normal exterior world with an appallingly primitive spiritual core is not entirely monochrome. At camp, one articulate eight or nine year old openly confesses his doubts about god and the bible because, he says, there seems to be no evidence for either of them whatsoever. He is quickly shamed. After Becky Fisher sternly says, "We don't have phonies in the army of God," the boy winds up tearfully confessing to the sinful bent of his intellectually curious mind.

In the absence of any narrator of the film, Pensacola's own Mike Papantonio -- an Air America talk show host as well as a prominent local lawyer -- provides the only counterpoint to what we witness. In occasional cut-aways, we see him in the studio from time to time declaiming on the air against Jesus Camp and, near the end of the film, debating or interviewing Becky Fisher -- it's hard to tell which.

The film's subjects, however, more often than not expose their own fallacies. Therein lies any fun for the audience.

Nowhere is this so more than when the film makers follow some of the Jesus Camp families on a pilgrimage to the Rev. Ted Haggard's megachurch in Colorado Springs. You can see a cutting from the documentary for yourself on YouTube.

In the film, Haggard interrupts a sermon to stick his face into the camera and make inappropriate jokes about 'knowing what you did last night' and pretending to demand blackmail to keep 'your secret.' Embarrassed when he saw the scene later on celluloid, Haggard accused the film makers of having had "an agenda" -- which Ewing and Grady vigorously denied.

We don't have to wait for End Times to know how this one turned out. Haggard resigned from the church a little over one week ago after admitting he was a "deceiver and liar" who was "guilty of sexual immorality." It was he, not the filmmakers, who turns out to have been burdened by "a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life."

Secular humanists will find in this film ample proof of the rank hypocrisy that seems endemic to the current crop of religious revivalists. But they will also see a powerful spiritual commitment to changing American political and public life -- by marrying their church to our government. It seems to be a spirit as imperishable in their lives as it is antithetical to the American tradition and constitutional law. No matter how many of them may be unmasked as hypocrites, sinners, or cynics, one comes away from this documentary convinced they will persist... and persist... and persist.

As Neva Chonin wrote in her review of "Jesus Camp" for the San Francisco Chronicle, "The film offers one answer to why the country's Evangelical minority packs such a political wallop, and it's frighteningly simple: They're efficient -- and ruthless."

The real-life Jesus Camp closed last week (not the movie). supposedly a casualty of the documentary. But don't think for a moment the camp "counselors" have quit. Any day, now, they'll be coming toward the "dark city" near you.

Dinosaur Trial Begins

The long-awaited trial of Dr. Dino has commenced. The jury has been sworn, the lawyers have delivered their opening statements. Today the evidence begins to pour in.

Angela Fail filed a workman-like story for the Pensacola News Journal. Very Journalism School, very balanced, very fair, very... well, prosaic and boring:

"Opening statements began Tuesday in the trial of Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo. Between them, the Hovinds are charged with 58 counts of tax fraud involving their Creation Science Ministry. The ministry includes Dinosaur Adventure Land on North Palafox Street, a creationist theme park dedicated to debunking evolution."

"Dedicated to debunking evolution?" Debunking? Kent Hovind is a mountebank who made millions off the ignorance and fear of an uneducated, timorous public by selling them the hallucinatory notion that the bible proves dinosaurs inhabited the earth at the same time as mankind. He no more 'debunks' evolution than the Wizard of Oz proves monkeys can fly.

Ms. Fail does okay setting up the prosecutor's story:

"Heldmeyer said from 1999 to March 2004, the Hovinds took in more than $5 million. Their income came from amusement-park profits and merchandise -- books, audiotapes and videotapes -- they sold on site and through phone and online orders, she said. About half the money went to employees."

Then she blew it by not reporting the context: what Hovind sells isn't "merchandise" -- it's pure baloney sandwiched between slices of claptrap and bunkum.

Angela! Loosen up, have some fun. More to the point, let us have some fun. Give us the smell of the courtroom, the smirk in the corner of that juror's pursed lips, the sight of the lawyer who takes mincing steps across the courtroom floor like someone whose shoes are too tight.

Wake up, Angela! This could be a career maker for you. Sure, it's a tax fraud case. Sure, you're looking ahead at a string of dreary days while soporous accountants and vapid IRS agents dutifully drone on and on about numbers without end. But your own trial reports shouldn't be equally torpid.

Take a clue from H.L. Mencken's timeless coverage of the Scopes "Monkey Trial." Look behind the curtain. Follow "the squirming and jabbering mass" out to the Hills of Zion. Tell us "to what extreme lengths the salvation of the local primates has been pushed." Let us know if the prosecutor's speech about taxing churches had the same effect as if she "had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan."

It might not conform to the usual journalism rules. Then again, apparently this isn't the usual kind of case. The defense attorneys already are complaining that when they executed a search warrant "IRS agents stepped outside their authority... interrogating employees and confiscating records and money."

Holy moley, no! Armed with a court-authorized search warrant, the agents actually "confiscated" potential evidence? How low can they go?

There seems to be enough hokum in this courtroom to fill a museum of natural history -- you know the kind we mean. A museum that shows dinosaurs in their natural habit grazing at the fast food window.

Fundamentally, Just as Stupid

From Live Science.com we learn that, "A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower."

The news is based on a report in the current issue of Science (subscription required), publishing the results of a 30-year survey by researchers who combined the data from public surveys about evolution conducted in 32 European countries, the United States, and Japan between 1985 and 2005. The basic question asked was --

"Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals -- Is this true, false, or are you not sure?"

[Click graph to enlarge]

So, what accounts for the rank stupidity of most Americans? According to Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University, one of the co-authors of the study, "American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close."

Indecent Trial Reporting

"Investigative reporters don't have a sense of humor. They can't afford one."

As we 'noted' the other day, after the latest round of reductions-in-force at the Pensacola News Journal, the unfortunates who remain in Gannett Corp.'s employ are being required to double-up, or worse, in journalism assignments. Increasingly, it seems, editors are sending them far afield from their usual beats to cover subjects about which the reporters couldn't care less -- or aren't competent to handle.

This doesn't make for an informed readership. But we have to admit, it is entertaining to watch.

Take two of today's front-page courtroom related stories. The first one was covered by Michael Stewart, one of the few left at the PNJ who justly might be considered a skilled investigative reporter. He was assigned to waste his talents reporting on the federal court prosecution of the "Christian" proselytizer Kent ("Dr. Dino") Hovind.

The second story was handed off to Nicole Lozare, who formerly malpracticed her trade on Pensacola Beach. This week, she was dispatched to the state courthouse to cover the trial of Janelle Bird, the 25 year-old school teacher who is accused of bedding a 15 year-old student of hers.

Time was when the Pensacola News Journal, aware of the rich veins of public policy -- not to mention local lunacy -- to be mined in the depths of local courthouses, hired actual trial-wise reporters for such stuff. No longer.

Neither of today's reporting assignments make much sense.

We've mentioned the Dr. Dino story before. Hovind and a fervent band of college students from Pensacola Christian College for some time, now, have been shaking down credulous simpletons by thumping on the Bible and telling them dinosaurs and mankind shared the earth together a few thousand years ago. Now, "Dr. Dino" and his wife have been charged in a 58-count indictment with failing to pay nearly half a million dollars in income taxes, employer Social Security withholding, and Medicare employment deductions.

Hovind raked in the money and stiffed the callow college kids at "Dinosaur Adventure Land," a pathetic backyard of a house he festooned with ridiculous-looking yard ornaments and playground equipment resembling cartoon dinosaurs. Then, he started charging money to see them and buy his propaganda books.

Now, "Dr. Dino" claims all that money really belongs to God and he is merely guarding it from the Darwin-loving grasp of the IRS.

The latest twist in this hilarious tale is that Hovind, based on various cockamamie constitutional arguments, is demanding that the federal court return his passport while he's out on bail so he can fly to South Africa next month. The trip was planned, as Stewart writes, so Dr. Dino could "'square off against several luminaries who hail from different scientific disciplines,' according to the Web site for Power Ministries."

He'll hurry back for the trial. Yeah, sure. As long as God buys him a return ticket.

Much as we appreciate his talents, this courtroom story doesn't deserve heavy artillery like Michael Stewart. It needs a comedy writer.

As is well known in the world of journalism, investigative reporters don't have a sense of humor. They can't afford one. Otherwise, they'd be giggling all the way through the interviews with crooked public officials, hypocritical politicians, and randy religious leaders caught with their hands in the till or up the skirts of parishioners.

As for the Nicole Lozare story, the inappropriateness of sending her to cover a court trial of any kind should be evident to anyone who knows her work. She lacks the substantive knowledge, listening skills, and critical thinking ability to report on anything more serious than a beach bathtub race.

But -- who'd a thunk it? -- Nicole does have a talent. As a steamy romance writer! Get this lede:

Tears rolling down her face, a former teacher who faces up to 60 years in prison testified there was nothing lewd and lascivious about her relationship with her 15-year-old student -- just love.

Janelle Bird, 25, said she loved him so much that, despite a Pensacola Christian College education that preached against premarital sex, she gave him her virginity.

"Gave him her virginity?" If that's a quote from the defendant's testimony, you'd think Nicole would have given her readers some sort of clue -- like quotation marks, for instance. Perhaps she feared that doing so would make it seem, to borrow Lynn Truss' words, like "a kind of linguisitic rubber glove, distancing [herself] from vulgar words [she] is too refined to use in a normal way."

Apart from the steamy prose, obscurantism, and the (yet another) example of Lozare's carelessness with quotations, she seems to have missed entirely the story-behind-the story. According to Lozare, the teacher --

didn't deny that she had sex with the teen nearly a dozen times in August and October. But she denied that it was lewd and lascivious.

Now, here is where a real trial reporter might have done some good. What on earth is the defense doing? Why would the accused teacher take the stand and testify so explicitly to her long-running affair with a 15 year-old male student? Why would the defense lawyer let her? Don't they watch Law & Order?

These are questions we imagine most readers are asking themselves today. They have to ask because these questions don't seem to have occurred to Nicole Lozare.

Could it be that the Florida Supreme Court has "reserved" approving a standard jury instruction for "lewd" and "lascivious" to share with juries? Might it be that the state's statutory definitions of those words are vague and even contradictory? Even on-line dictionaries offer what some could argue are incompatible definitions of lewd ("lustful" or "indecent") and "lascivious" ("expressing lust" or "salacious").

Add to that the fact that the whole of the "common law of England" -- we're talking over seven centuries of judicial decisions, now -- is expressly made part of Florida criminal law by the very first section (775.01) of the Florida Criminal Code, and you can begin to see there may be some method to the madness of having the defendant testify that, sure, she had an affair. So what?

At the least, there seems to be enough confusion in Florida law over what "lewd" and "lascivious" mean that even a linguist would have trouble reaching a reasoned judgment. Even if the jury eventually throws out whatever definitions the court may give it and concludes -- as Justice Potter Stewart once did about what constitutes obscenity -- that they know lewd and lascivious when they see them, it's a good bet there will be protracted appeals to higher courts.

Is that what the defense has in mind? We can't be sure. The reporter covering this trial isn't saying.

Dr. Dino, Tax Free

"If the leaseholders' tax suit fails, maybe we can have another go by declaring beach life a religion and Pensacola Beach the promised land. After all, there is plenty of scriptural support."

Jennifer Liberto reported in yesterday's St. Petersburg Times that the Florida legislature is seriously considering passing a new statute which would award a property tax exemption to "A biblical theme park in Orlando where guests pay $30 admission to munch on "Goliath" burgers and explore reproductions of 2000-year-old tombs and temples... ."

"So far," Liberto reports, "there doesn't appear to be any organized opposition to the bill, which sailed through a Senate committee Tuesday with no debate."

The Senate bill is being promoted by state senator Daniel Webster R-Orange County) , who is chairman -- chairman! -- of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A similar bill is being sponsored in the Florida House by Rep. Frederick Brummer (R-Orange County), chairman of the House Tax and Finance Committee.

Obviously, these two guys are heavy hitters in the mental ward known as the Florida legislature. They also must be colossal dumbbells.

Even the "director of ministries" for "Creation Science Evangelism" recognizes the proposed exemption "should be a little more broad in scope and not even limit it to Christians. That seems a little discriminatory."

It isn't clear to us, either, why one faith-based theme park should be exempt from taxes and tens of thousands of others not. There's just as much scientific evidence that Mickey Mouse married Minnie after getting her pregnant as there is that the Earth was created in six days, with one day off for good behavior. Or, for that matter, that 72 virgins await you in heaven. There are countless other myths and magical thoughts from world religions that could become a tax-free theme park.

Creationist nuts already are starting to fall out of the trees in their haste to get aboard this legislative gravy train. Liberto reports that among them is Pensacola's very own alleged "religious theme park," Dinosaur Adventure Land (“Where dinosaurs and the Bible meet!”).

Dino Land, as it is known locally, is run by Kent ("Dr. Dino") Hovind. Hovind has been described by some as a "creationist and tax dodger". He describes himself as one of the leading authorities on "Science and the Bible." More than you'd ever want to know about him is available at Carl Marychurch's web site named, appropriately, Analysis of Kent Hovind.

The 'doctor' part comes from a degree awarded by something called "Patriot University" in Colorado. PU, so it has been reported, charges $100 for a Ph.D.

The "tax dodger" part stems from Dr. Dino's well publicized run-ins with the law , other bizarre court cases, and his attempted bankruptcy filing, which was dismissed for being filed in "bad faith."

In a November 2004 profile by Greg Martinez, Hovind's Dino Land was revealed to be not much more than a "converted backyard ... stuffed full of children’s games and playground equipment . . . and lots of fiberglass dinosaurs." The essential "theme" of this "park" is that the Earth is no more than 6,000 years old, God created mankind and dinosaurs at the same time, and Noah left the big dinosaurs behind to be drowned in the Big Flood but took a few small ones aboard -- which, we are assured, "explains Bigfoot."

Inside the visitor center, an investigator for Morris Dees' Southern Poverty Law Center -- the same heroic organization that put Richard Butler's "Aryan Nation" out of business in Idaho, as Firedoglake coincidentally reminisces today -- found a bookstore selling:

various books on "Evolution and the New World Order." (At least one of them, Fourth Reich of the Rich, alleges a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.) * * * Citizens Rule Book, popular among antigovernment "Patriots"; Media Bypass, an antigovernment magazine with strong anti-Semitic leanings; and titles by America's leading authority on tax-dodging... .

It isn't particular clear to us why Florida should grant a tax exemption to one myth-based religious theme park and deny it to others. But Pensacola Beach residents should pay attention, anyway.

If the leaseholders' tax suit fails, maybe we can have another go by declaring beach life a religion and Pensacola Beach the promised land. After all, there is plenty of scriptural support, starting with Genesis 1:6:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

Water on two sides. Firmament in between. Sounds to us like it ought to be a tax-free Holy Land Theme Park.

--------------

Dept. of Amplification
Sharp-eyed Bryan points out in the reader comments, below, that just this week Dino Land was ordered shuttered by a state circuit court judge. The story was carried in today's PNJ, of all things.

Here's a snippet:

Owners of the park, which shows how dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth just a few thousand years ago, did not obtain a building permit before constructing the building in 2002. They have argued in and out of court that it violates their "deeply held" religious beliefs, and that the church-run facility does not have to obtain permits.

After almost four years of litigation, the judge disagreed and said the county has the authority to close the building until the owners comply with regulations.

The judge also fined two church leaders $500 each per day for every day the building is used or occupied. If church officials continue to refuse to comply with local ordinances, the judge may decide that the building can be razed, Allen's ruling said.

County commissioners showed no sympathy to members of the Creation Science Evangelism ministry who spoke out Thursday night at a commission meeting about the county's actions.

"Scripture also says 'Render unto Caesar what Caesar demands.' And right now, Caesar demands a building permit," County Commission Chairman Mike Whitehead said.

Whaddaya bet we haven't heard the last of Dr. Dino and 'Caesar' Mike Whitehead?

What Will King George Do?

"President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life."

-- SF Gate, Aug. 2, 2005

Uh-oh.

Now that federal judge John Jones III has ruled that Intelligent Design is a "sham" that cannot constitutionally be taught in science class, will King George W. Bush use his unlimited powers to ignore law and have the judge hauled off to Gitmo until the war on terrorism is over?

Choice Excerpts From Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board

"The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial."

-- Ruling of Federal Dis. Judge John E. Jones III, p. 137-38, Dec. 20, 2005

More Choice Excerpts
(legal and scholarly citations omitted)

We initially observe that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” U.S. Const. amend. I. The prohibition against the establishment of religion applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. (p. 10)

* * *
After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID [i.e., "Intelligent Design"] arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. (p.64-65)

* * *
Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. * * * This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension, revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. * * * Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth. * * * While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science.

This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method. * * * Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify. (p.65)

* * *
It is therefore readily apparent to the Court that ID fails to meet the essential ground rules that limit science to testable, natural explanations. * * * Science cannot be defined differently for Dover students than it is defined in the scientific community ... .

ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed. This argument is not brought to this Court anew, and in fact, the same argument, termed “contrived dualism” in McLean, was employed by creationists in the 1980's to support “creation science.” The court in McLean noted the “fallacious pedagogy of the two model approach” and that “[i]n efforts to establish ‘evidence’ in support of creation science, the defendants relied upon the same false premise as the two model approach . . . all evidence which criticized evolutionary theory was proof in support of creation science.” We do not find
this false dichotomy any more availing to justify ID today than it was to justify creation science two decades ago. (pp. 70-71)

* * *
[T]he concept of irreducible complexity is ID’s alleged scientific centerpiece. Irreducible complexity is a negative argument against evolution, not proof of design, a point conceded by defense expert Professor Minnich. * * * Irreducible complexity additionally fails to make a positive scientific case for ID, as will be elaborated upon below. (p 72)

* * *
As expert testimony revealed, the qualification on what is meant by “irreducible complexity” renders it meaningless as a criticism of evolution. In fact, the theory of evolution proffers exaptation as a well-recognized, well-documented explanation for how systems with multiple parts could have evolved through natural means. Exaptation means that some precursor of the subject system had a different, selectable function before experiencing the change or addition that resulted in the subject system with its present function. For instance, Dr. Padian identified the evolution of the mammalian middle ear bones from what had been jawbones as an example of this process. By defining irreducible complexity in the way that he has, Professor Behe attempts to exclude the phenomenon of exaptation by definitional fiat, ignoring as he does so abundant evidence which refutes his argument. (pp 74-75)

* * *
Indeed, the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is based upon an analogy to human design. Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, ID completely fails.

Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems.

Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies. (pp 80-81)

* * *
Accordingly, the purported positive argument for ID does not satisfy the ground rules of science which require testable hypotheses based upon natural explanations. ID is reliant upon forces acting outside of the natural world, forces that we cannot see, replicate, control or test, which have produced changes in this world. While we take no position on whether such forces exist, they are simply not testable by scientific means and therefore cannot qualify as part of the scientific process or as a scientific theory. (p. 82)

* * *
After this searching and careful review of ID as espoused by its proponents, as elaborated upon in submissions to the Court, and as scrutinized over a six week trial, we find that ID is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community. ID, as noted, is grounded in theology, not science. Accepting for the sake of argument its proponents’, as well as Defendants’ argument that to introduce ID to students will encourage critical thinking, it still has utterly no place in a science curriculum.

Moreover, ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID. (pp 88-89)

* * *
To conclude and reiterate, we express no opinion on the ultimate veracity of ID as a supernatural explanation. * * * It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science. (p 89)

* * *
Although Defendants attempt to persuade this Court that each Board member who voted for the biology curriculum change did so for the secular purposed of improving science education and to exercise critical thinking skills... are a sham, and they are accordingly unavailing, for the reasons that follow. (p 130)

* * *
Moreover, Defendants’ asserted secular purpose of improving science education is belied by the fact that most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID is. To assert a secular purpose against this backdrop is ludicrous. (p 131)

* * *
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. (p 136-37)

* * *
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. (p 137)

* * *
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources. (p 137-38)

'To See Ourselves Truly'

"'To the extent that the furor over evolution represents a cultural crisis in America - and only in America - it is a crisis of credulity, not faith, a crisis rooted in neglect and ignorance."

-- Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, Nov. 19, 2005

Suddenly, we're seeing a lot of Florida newspapers make mention of the Darwin Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Undoubtedly, this has a lot to do with growing expectations that Florida Republicans are planning a mass pandering to public ignorance by firing up a "debate over the role of religious faith in science class," as Florida Politics, noted two days ago. The fighting ground was prepared late this summer when Jeb Bush appointed "creationist wingnut Cheryl Yecke as the state chancellor of K-12 education," as Florida Blues and others (documented by Mark Lane) have observed.

Apparently in response, a new Florida blog named Florida Citizens for Science was born almost immediately. It's backed by "a group of concerned citizens, businesspeople, parents and educators who are committed to maintaining excellence in public school science classrooms in the state of Florida."

The battle is not yet joined, however. As the Miami Herald reported late last week, state officials have decided to delay "for at least a year" a review of state educational science standards for "how to address humanity's origins."

Education officials were planning to revise the standards next year, but a spokeswoman for state education Commissioner John Winn said Wednesday that delays in updating math and language arts standards have pushed science into 2007 or 2008.

* * *
That delay will postpone the debate over how to teach evolution, creation and intelligent design until after Gov. Jeb Bush's successor is elected next year.

Or, put another way, the attack on science will begin just as Jeb Bush publicly launches his 2008 campaign for president.

What better way to distract the public mind from the real issues of the day? There just isn't much of political pay-off trying to start an argument over "math and language arts" standards.

Michael Ruse, a Canadian biologist now teaching in Florida, professes to be "puzzled" over the ignorance of most Americans when it comes to evolutionary theory. As he wrote this past weekend in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

I cannot understand how anyone over the age of 12 can take seriously and literally the creation stories of Genesis. It is truly beyond me to fathom how someone can spend time and effort actually trying to work out the elephants' living arrangements on the Ark. Yet this is the sort of stuff I deal with daily on my campus.

You think I exaggerate? Survey after survey shows that more than 50 per cent of Americans do not believe in evolution. It is too embarrassing to say out loud how many believe that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

Puzzled he may be, but he still gets it. The evolution debate in he U.S. is not about science. It's about those politicians who would say to us --

Do not attempt grand plans of reform and progress. Concentrate on personal purity, so you will be among the chosen. Do not concern yourself with plans for universal health care. Stop the plug from being withdrawn from Terri Schiavo. Do not worry about the levees of New Orleans. Fight the good fight against the anti-Christ in Iraq. Care not for the gun-driven murder rate. Support the Second Amendment to the Constitution and the right to bear arms.

How does a Canadian realize this when so many Florida voters seem oblivious to how they are about to be hoodwinked? Ironically, Darwin himself offered the answer.

A couple of weeks ago Verlyn Klinkenborg -- scholar, author, ex-Iowan, gardener, professor, environmentalist, social critic, and member of the New York Times editorial board -- shared an insight from Darwin himself that was inspired by the museum exhibition. Klinkenborg had a chance to see the Darwin Exhibit in preview and came away, he wrote in the Times, "with a reawakened sense of Darwin's characteristic honesty and his extraordinary powers as an observer, qualities that are as much an attribute of the scientist as of the man."

The new exhibition called "Darwin" at the American Museum of Natural History portrays the making of the man and the scientist, and it reminds us how well and how fully evolution explains the life around us. It also captures the way Darwin's theory opened an entirely new window in the human imagination.

Even more than that, it seems, the exhibition provides a keen appreciation for how far-sighted Darwin was in devining the criticisms that would confront his theory, criticisms that still echo today:

The basic objections to evolution - the ones trumpeted by the proponents of so-called intelligent design - are essentially the ones Darwin described in the sixth chapter of ' Origin.' They have been given a new language, and new examples have been adduced. But Darwin did a surprisingly good job of forestalling his critics. He showed that most of the objections to his theory, then as now, were based on a misunderstanding of the evidence or the nature of his argument, or were owing simply to the fact that so much remains to be discovered about the workings of life on Earth.

The exhibit also reminded Kinkenborg about the warm sympathies for humanity that Darwin felt as he realized "how hard it would be for us to see ourselves truly."

How hard... to see ourselves truly. It always is.

¿Habla usted español tambien, Elsie?

With all the fuss over hurricanes, Supreme Court nominees, and the probable indictments this week of high-ranking Bush administration criminals, the
"intelligent design" trial taking place in Harrisburg, PA, is getting little attention from the mainstream media.

This is a shame. The entertainment value of watching biblical creationists scrambling to unearth some kind of probative evidence to back up their naked opinions -- which, of course, is what a court trial requires -- is a lot higher than, say, mundane photos of Judith Miller being let out of prison or Karl Rove being hauled off to one.

Almost daily some good reporting in the small town York Daily Record (home of the Dover, Pennsylvania school board) spins off into obscurity, unnoticed by most of the rest of us on Earth. Staff reporters Lauri Lebo and Michelle Starr are doing some mighty heavy lifting, trying to provide conventionally balanced 'on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand that' reporting when there isn't much "on the other hand" to it. Still, the Daily Record doesn't want to offend the local Neanderthals intelligently designed bible-thumpers. That's a job better left to columnist Mike Argento, who puts the case in context three times a week in his humor column.

A running transcript of the actual trial testimony is available on Talk Origins.org. The defendant school board members -- or at least those who remained on the board after the smarter ones quit in disgust or embarrassment -- began the defendant side of the case last week.

It's been a tough go so far. Quite a few defense expert witnesses seem to have bailed out after it became apparent they wouldn't be allowed merely to deliver one-sided Oral Robert-style lectures to a credulous audience, but instead they'd have to endure cross-examination by card-carrying Darwinian lawyers who know something about logic, reality, proof, and the scientific method. According to blogger Panda's Thumb, the first defense witness, Michael Behe, was so thoroughly discredited that his career may have been 'terminally demolished'.

"Will all the rest of the [defendant's] scheduled experts actually show up for a big helping of what Behe had?" Panda's Thumb asks. Unhappily enough for the school board, it seems a few will. In the end, the defendants may wish they'd all stayed home.

Yesterday, Defense Witness No. 2, Steven Fuller, took the stand. He's an obscure sociology professor who teaches "philosophy of the social sciences" at Warwick College in England.

Fuller wound up testifying "at the moment, evolutionary theory is a better explanation of the biological world." His only argument seems to have been that Darwinian evolution is so broadly accepted by so many scientists that "affirmative action" is needed to keep so-called 'intelligent design' notions from being "marginalized in cult status."

"[I]ntelligent design," the York Daily Record reports he said from the witness stand, "sits on the fringe of science."

And, that was a witness for the anti-Darwinists on the school board!

Fuller told the court that one of the problems of science is with the very definition of 'scientific theory,' which is the idea of well substantiated explanations that unify a broad range of observations. He said by requiring a theory to be 'well substantiated,' it makes it almost impossible for an idea to be accepted scientifically.

Get it? The problem with science is it requires that crackpot theories be subjected to rigorous scientific testing before they are palmed off on school students. What is education coming to?

As reporters Lebo and Starr correctly point out, in proposing that so-called 'intelligent design' theory be taught in school, "Fuller was actually proposing the definition for hypothesis — an untested idea... ." Or, as columnist Mike Argento puts it less politely:

What Fuller was suggesting ... is that science won't let intelligent design in merely because it doesn't meet the requirements of a scientific theory, as far as science is concerned.

In fact, he said to call intelligent design a scientific theory, you had to change the definition of a scientific theory. The last defense witness who did that said his definition of a scientific theory included astrology.

Fuller said intelligent design is, essentially, a half-baked idea, pretty much something the intelligent design guys have whipped up without doing much in the way of producing evidence.

And that's why it should be taught to ninth-graders in Dover.

"You know," the columnist reflects, "I can come up with a lot of half-baked ideas that no one in their right mind would want to teach to kids in Dover. Let's see. How about this? Cows think in Spanish. Discuss.

Bird Flu Review

H5N1 - One of the Bird Flu Virus Strains - Is It Mutating?

"If [Bush] doesn't believe in evolution, than he shouldn't be the least bit worried about a new kind of bird flu or HIV, for that matter."

-- Richard Leakey

It's still back-page stuff in most newspapers, but the bird flu virus suddenly seems to be scaring the bejesus out of world leaders.

Background
The "highly pathogenic" H5N1 virus "was first identified in Italy more than 100 years ago." A new outbreak in poultry began in Southeast Asia in mid-2003.

According to the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) the recent outbreaks are "historically unprecedented in their geographical size and the number of birds affected." To date, at least 60 humans have died in four Asian countries, all apparently from direct contact with infected birds.

There are no reliable reports, yet, of human-to-human infection -- except perhaps for a few "one-off" incidents -- but that's what everyone is worrying about. As of February 2005, humans who were infected suffered a fatality rate as high as 70 percent.

"Great" Pandemic Risk
WHO considers the present risk of a bird flu worldwide epidemic "great" but also "unpredictable" in timing and severity. Says the WHO:

All conditions for the start of a pandemic have been met save one: changes in the virus that would make it contagious among humans, thus allowing easy and sustainable human-to-human transmission. The likelihood that this will happen is a matter of opportunity and probability.

The reason for this, as a report late yesterday in the Washington Post says, is that "the strain of avian influenza that has led to the deaths of 140 million birds and 60 people in Asia in the past two years appears to be slowly acquiring the genetic changes characteristic of the 'Spanish flu' virus that killed 50 million people nearly a century ago."

Indeed, recent laboratory analysis shows that the 1918 Spanish Flu virus and the new bird flu virus have always had "structural" similarities. Modern research on the 1918 virus, which was found in frozen graves in Alaska, establishes that the Spanish Flu virus at some point "changed to make it capable of attaching to human cells, thus allowing human-to-human transmission."

Sounding the Alarm

Rather suddenly, national and world political leaders are beginning to echo the same alarm health scientists have been banging at for more than two years. Here's a rundown of recent news over just the past week:

• Last Friday BBC News interviewed Dr. David Nabarro, the newly appointed influenza coordinator for the UN's World Health Organization (WHO). He warned that if the bird flu virus were to mutate in such a way as to become communicable by humans, as the Spanish Flu virus did, it would "kill between 5 and 150 million people" world wide. He added the liklihood of such a mutation was "high" and that the result would threaten not only massive deaths but worldwide disruptions in daily life.
  


• A few hours later, the Associated Press and other wire services reported that a WHO press spokesman in Geneva "made a surprise appearance" at a press briefing for the purpose of 'dampening' fears ignited by Nabarro's interview. But get this: "While he did not say the 150 million prediction was wrong, or even implausible, he reiterated that WHO considers a maximum death toll of 7.4 million a more reasoned forecast." Great 'dampening' job, there.


• The spokeman's 'dampening' doesn't seem to have slowed Nabarro down. A few days later, he told Canadian TV News, "A flu pandemic could fundamentally alter the world as we know it."


• The New York Times also reported on Wednesday that a week earlier a "closed-door briefing" of senators and congressmen was held in Washington D.C. and it sparked "fear of an outbreak" that was now sweeping "official Washington." One day later, "the Senate squeezed $3.9 billion for flu preparations into a Pentagon appropriations bill."


• Hours later, a Reuters news dispatch estimated that flu vaccines on hand would cover "less than one percent" of the U.S. population.


• On Thursday, Moscow time, Dmitry Lvov of the Russian Virology Institute told a virology conference there, "We are half a step away from a worldwide pandemic catastrophe." The Russian expert claimed that U.S. researchers possessed data suggesting that if a pandemic hits, "up to 700,000 Americans would fall ill" and he reasoned a comparable number would be infected in Russia. Given the current mortality rate of about 70 percent, Lvov said, "Up to one billion people could die around the whole world in six months."


• Also late Wednesday, Democratic Senate minority leaders questioned whether the Bush administration was ignoring the need to make preparations now against a potential epidemic. The same senators are proposing a "Pandemic Preparedness and Response Act" which would enable the U.S. to "prepare for a pandemic by finalizing, implementing and funding pandemic preparedness and response plans."


• Beginning today, the U.S. is hosting a 2-day 'avian flu' conference in Washington D.C. It's part of what appears to be a coordinated series of conferences throughout the world in countries like the U.K., Australia, Russia, China, Indonesia, and others.
  

Still Somnambulant
Not everyone in Washington is paying attention, however. Lorelei Kelly recounts today a telling incident that happened earlier this week as she was visiting a congressman's office:

I noticed the intern open a pack of wall posters from the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University. They were handsome, instructive public health posters about how to recognize bird flu and what to do about it. My mom is a public health nurse, so I looked at them covetously and then watched with dismay as-- PLOP-- they went into the garbage can.

Meanwhile, in response to what appeared to be a planted question by a New York Post reporter, George Bush said in yesterday's Rose Garden press conference that he's been wondering, "If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States ... how do you then enforce a quarantine?" Bush added, "One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move."

The idea that we should let the military, on top of all its other duties, protect us from flu isn't sitting well with conservative or liberal commentators. It is even less popular with medical experts. Some may even start wondering why we have a Homeland Security Department at all, if it can't handle natural disasters or epidemic bio-hazards.

Others are worrying over the recurrent problem of incompetence in the Bush administration. The guy Bush put in charge of anti-flu activities, Stewart Simonson, looks like just another political crony from the same campaign pot as former FEMA director Michael Brown. At least one congressman noted he's also a liar who's been asleep at the switch:

At a House Government Reform hearing on July 14, 2005, Mr. Simonson claimed he had sufficient funds to purchase influenza vaccine and antiviral medication for the nation. The next day, his office submitted a funding request to Congress seeking an additional $150 million for flu vaccine and antiviral medication.

Science vs. Faith
On the scientific front, the New York Times reported Wednesday that two scientific teams have managed to synthesize the genetic sequence of the 1918 virus and have now compared it with the bird flu virus in Asia." The result: today's bird flu virus "shares some of the crucial genetic changes ... in the 1918 flu."

The scientists suspect that with "changes in just 25 to 30 out of about 4,400 amino acids in the virus" the bird flu would become "a killer."

The good news is that computer modeling reported two months ago shows that a pandemic could be contained with "a combination of carefully implemented public health measures introduced soon after the first cases appear." The bad news is that the several strains of bird flu virus are becoming more pathogenic and resistant to common anti-virals.

When mutations along the evolutionary line of a virus threaten nearly a quarter of the world's population, it probably isn't a good time to be fooling around with 'intelligent design' nonsense, which as yesterday's testimony in Pennsylvania demonstrates is merely an eleventh-hour editor's synonym for creationism. Surrendering to old myths and wishful thinking isn't going to prevent a pandemic.

As famed anthropologist Richard Leakey said recently:

"Anyone who believes in intelligent design cannot be that intelligent. Your Mr. Bush appears to believe in it. If he doesn't believe in evolution, than he shouldn't be the least bit worried about a new kind of bird flu or HIV, for that matter."

Partly because we can't be sure which of the several bird flu viruses might eventually mutate to cause a pandemic, we do not yet have a reliable vaccine to prevent avian flu, but in the U.S. laboratory experiments have begun. [Update: Earlier this week, Australia independently commenced human trials in the field of another bird flu vaccine developed there.]

In the meantime, the Center for Disease Control is recommending the usual precautions including vaccination of the elderly and children with this year's vaccine against the more common and less lethal human flu strain expected in the coming few weeks and months, plus treatment of infected victims with known anti-virals -- which have been allowed to lapse into short supply.

There is one more modest piece of good news. As the Atlanta Journal reports, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) "persuaded his Senate colleagues last week to add $4 billion to an unrelated appropriation measure to pay for stockpiling millions of doses of the antiviral medicine Tamiflu. But the final appropriation still awaits action by a Senate-House conference committee."

Good for Harkin. As that old soldier's adage might have it, "Pray if you must, but pass the appropriation."

Clary's Political Wind

Even though the wind zones are based on science, exceptions were made, particularly in the Panhandle. Steve Pfeiffer, a Tallahassee attorney who once chaired the Florida Building Commission, explained: "There are scientific wind speed zones and there are political wind speed zones."

-- Palm Beach Post, Dec. 19, 2004

We live in a disgraceful age when science, integrity, and reality are struggling not to be swamped by factless faith, corporate greed, and a priori ideology. As the Union of Concerned Scientists puts it:

Across a broad range of issues — from childhood lead poisoning and mercury emissions to climate change, reproductive health, and nuclear weapons — the [Bush] administration is distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict its policies; manipulating the underlying science to align results with predetermined political decisions; and undermining the independence of science advisory panels by subjecting panel nominees to political litmus tests that have little or no bearing on their expertise; nominating non-experts or underqualified individuals from outside the scientific mainstream or with industry ties; as well as disbanding science advisory committees altogether.

Stem cell research is curtailed, global warming ignored, clean water laws diluted, sex education perverted, family planning handicapped, and even teaching evolution of the species in science class is under attack.

The assault on science isn't confined to the current gang in Washington. We have our own home-grown luddites here in Northwest Florida. Near the head of the pack is state senator Charlie Clary (R-Destin).

Clary is a physician, to be sure, and therefore one from whom you might have expected more rather than less scientific rationality. But Clary also is a politician.

In the year 2000, when the state building code was adopted by the Florida state legislature to replace a hodge-podge of local and county building standards, state senator Clary tacked on a little-noticed amendment that exempted a dozen Northwest Florida counties. Thus, local builders were left free to continue erecting homes and businesses a mile or more inland from the coast which are not as hurricane-resistant as state standards would have required.

The Palm Beach Post alluded to this sordid political manuevering last winter. Four years earlier, it observed, state senator Clary --

saw to it that the Panhandle, from Franklin to Escambia counties, was permitted wind-resistance requirements that extended no more than 1 mile inland. Beyond that, new homes would not be required to have hurricane shutters, impact-resistant windows or special engineering to keep them intact in hurricane winds. Engineers had recommended shutters an average of 4 to 5 miles inland in the Panhandle. Clary supported builders' argument that no Category 4 (131-155 mph) hurricane had hit the area since 1886. "History's shown us that we're doing the right thing," he told reporters at the time.

This year, even as Panhandle area residents were still picking through the Hurricane Ivan debris that gave the lie to the state senator's argument, Clary stubbornly continued to insist that lesser building standards were good for the Panhandle. To the Palm Beach Post he claimed, "the exempted safeguards wouldn't have helped much... surging water and not wind caused the worst damage."

Try telling that to residents of north Pensacola, Gulf Breeze, Milton, Bagdad, Century, or any number of other inland cities and towns. It should be a tough sell next year when Clary hits the campaign trail for reelection.

In 2005, a bare majority of the legislature managed to commission a "study" for the purpose of determining whether "Clary's Exemption" should be removed. In last Saturday's Gainsville Sun, Lloyd Dunkleberger describes the coming collision between fact and faith:

You're more likely to be hit by a hurricane if you live in the Florida Panhandle than any other region of the state, with the exception of Southeast Florida.

Yet, when state lawmakers passed a new building code in 2000 - that took effect two years later - they carved out an exemption for 12 Panhandle counties.

The toughest building standards, designed to protect homes from flying debris in hurricanes, only apply to construction within a mile of the coast in those regions. Now, following Hurricane Dennis last month and the more-devastating Ivan that struck the region last year, some are raising new questions about the Panhandle exemption, which stretches from eastern edge of Franklin County to the Alabama-Florida line. Lawmakers debated the exemption during their 2005 session.

* * *

[I]t's clear that the Panhandle is a major hurricane target. Based on data from the National Weather Service, 27 hurricanes have hit the region since 1900. Only Southeast Florida has seen more storms, with 28.

But proponents of the Panhandle exemption argue that while the region has more than its share of hurricanes, the area has historically avoided the most powerful and devastating storms. The Panhandle storms have all fallen below 131 mph winds, which is the minimum level for a Category 4 storm. In contrast, Southeast Florida and Southwest Florida have been hit by eight storms since 1900 that are at least a Category 4.

The leading "proponent" of the exemption, Clary, also argues that tougher building standards will raise the cost of housing. As local residents know all too well, though, that's a phony calculation that doesn't take into account the cost and heartache of fighting with property insurance companies, repairing, and rebuilding every few years.

On average, according to Hurricane City, Pensacola gets "brushed or hit every 3.05 years" by a named storm and suffers a direct hit "every 8.93 years." In just the last ten years we've seen four major hurricanes make landfall in the immediate Pensacola area, and several lesser tropical storms do substantial wind damage. Weather experts now are saying at best they think we have entered a "multi-decadal cycle" of increasingly strong, more numerous, and more damaging tropical storms.

On average, [NOAA lead meteorologist Gerry] Bell said, "we can certainly expect to see more hurricane damage" as the active cycle continues for the next 10 to 20 years. "We expect more hurricanes striking the United States."

At worst, a new study by M.I.T. Professor Kerry Emanuel suggests global warming is leading to "an upward trend in [hurricanes'] destructive potential, and -- taking into account an increasing coastal population -- a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century... ."

Dress it up as he will, the suspicion lingers that state senator Clary's objection to strengthening the state building code in Northwest Florida doesn't have much to do with public safety, sound building practices, housing market prices, hurricane history -- or science. Instead, it looks more like an old-fashioned political pay-off for corporate campaign contributions.

In 2002, when Clary last stood for election, the real estate industry was among his top campaign financial supporters. He collected at least $65,508 in cash contributions from real estate, construction, and developer lobbies (not counting other gifts identified only as coming from "lawyers and lobbyists," many of whom likely serve the same interests). That's nearly twice as much as the contributions Clary received from his fellow medical professionals ($33,200)!

Check it out at Follow the Money. So far, it seems, Clary's "political wind zone" has triumphed over scientific wind speed.

As storm recovery efforts continue some 11 months after Ivan, Panhandle voters ought to start asking themselves whether they can afford to send "hurricane Charlie Clary" back to Tallahassee for another term.

Evolving News

It was pretty much 'All-Schaivo All the Time' around Florida blogs this week.

South of Suwanee has the best roundup, including a must-read link to an online interview with Florida's own Matt Conigliaro, whose Abstract Appeal blog has long provided the most reliable and objective reporting on the case.

But Florida blogs were talking about a few other subjects, too...
* * * * *

Robert C. of Interstate4 Jamming took time out from the week's other news to report "rumors are rampant in DC that White House advisor Karl Rove is encouraging Congresswoman Katherine Harris (R - Longboat Key) to avoid tossing her hat into the ring as a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Bill Nelson when it comes up last year." The White House is said to fear that Harris is a polarizing figure likely to inspire more Democrats to vote in next year's congressional elections. Harris' office says she'll announce her decision in June.
* * * * * *

Via Florida Politics we're told by the Orlando Sentinel that debates over the annual state budget should hit the floor of the Florida Legislature next week.

"Both House and Senate are expected to increase spending and, perhaps, propose tax cuts following an April 11 meeting of state economists to settle on a final estimate of tax revenues expected for the coming budget year. That group is likely to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the bottom line.
* * *

Even without new money, however, the final budget has historically been larger than either chamber's, as top lawmakers insist on cherished programs that had initially been in one or the other version but not both.

* * * * *

Mark Lane of FlaBlog highlights some $200 million in subsidies for professional sports approved, so far, by legislative committees. $30 million will go to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, $60 million to the Florida Marlins, and $200 million for the Orlando Magic.
* * * * *

Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings announced this week the state has been awarded federal funds to experiment with a "faith based" juvenile delinquency program. Up to 200 juvenile offenders "of any faith" can sign up, but the Government already has decided the program administration "will be Christian-based."

Blogwood is not impressed. To see why, just follow the links at the end of his aricle.
* * * * *

A gas price survey was started by Bark-Bark, Woof-Woof. "[A]long Coral Way," he says, self-serve regular gas is going for "$2.17 to $2.25." In faraway Traverse City, Michigan, it's reached $2.28. Readers are reporting in with their own local prices. So far, San Francisco seems to be the highest, at $2.78 for premium grade.

* * * * *
Miami law professor Michael Froomkin expands on news reports this week about a small plane pilot who's licensed to fly but can't use any airports because he's been placed on a secret blacklist, probably by mistake, and the Government offers him no way to know why, contest the reasons, or appeal. Even agreeing to inform for the FBI on fellow flight school students didn't help.

The professor comments:

"That’s right. Mr. Nice Guy was so desperate to get off the US government blacklist that he became an informer on his fellow students. And even that wasn’t enough.

So we have secret arbitrary blacklists that make you berufsverbot. We have people crawling to the secret service offering to be informers to save their careers. Will the next step will be secret denunciations. Almost certainly. If it goes on long enough then, in time, stoolies will have to meet their quotas for denunciations or get in trouble. Yes, I’ve seen this movie before. It wasn’t pretty. But last time the actors had Russian and East German accents."

* * * * *

The good professor might want to check out Dred's report on the so-called "academic bill of rights" tromping its way through the Florida legislature. The proposal is sponsored by Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala), a Baptist funeral director turned citizen law-maker.

Some say the bill would effectively authorize any student to sue a professor with whom he may disagree. That ought to stop all those ivory tower types from promoting dangerous ideas from the Age of Enlightment like evolution, the earth is round, everyone is entitled to due process of law, and a preposition ain't nothing good to end a sentence on.
* * * * *

Speaking of evolution, Anger Management has identified a shark hunter who almost qualified for the Darwin Award, which is handed out periodically to those who "accidentally kill themselves in really stupid ways," thus improving the human genome.
* * * * *

Evolution also has the attention of Why Now?Based in Cinco Bayou, that Florida blog snagged an interesting ABC News article on "laughter" research.

An Ohio professor and his students --

are finding there is a long evolutionary trail to our odd noises of amusement, and the latest proof comes from ticklish rats.

You've probably never heard a rat laugh, and there's a good reason.

Jaak Panksepp, of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and his students found that the rodents emit gleeful "chirps" when playing, but only at ultrasonic tones five times higher than the human ear can hear. Once Panksepp hooked up an ultrasonic detector to listen in on rats in his lab and started tickling the animals, he realized the effect on them was dramatic.

* * *

The fact that rats have a form of laughter suggests it has been around for a very long time. Scientists have estimated that the common ancestor of rats and humans lived some 75 million years ago.

Not long enough, apparently. Another researcher and his students have been hanging out in shopping malls, "surreptitiously watching people in the act of laughter."

Among other things, what they found:

"[M]ore often than not, the person doing the laughing is not the one listening, but the one doing the talking. Plus, he learned what people say before laughing is often not even remotely funny."

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Florida ranks dead last in high school graduation rates and near the top in violent crime, Florida News reminds readers. So he's outraged that the state legislture this week defeated a proposal to raise the age for compulsory school attendance to 18.

"In fact, of the ten most violent states in the nation, eight are also ranked in the bottom ten in high school graduation rates.

If low graduation rates lead to high crime rates, doesn't it make financial sense to keep kids in school longer?

No doubt. The average annual cost to house a prisoner is between $20-30,000, not to mention the costs to victims and communities. The annual cost of educating a child in Florida is roughly $7,000."

That's the problem, of course. The proposal to save money as well as young people simply makes too much sense to pass the Florida legislature.
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Another thing to do, one might conclude from Sticks of Fire, is to get sexual predators away from elementary schools. A statehouse bill named in honor of Homosassa's Jessica Lunsford would commit more than $13 million to electronically tracking convicted sexual predators who are on probation. Angry proposals to castrate them also may play well with constituents, but they would be of doubtful constitutionality.
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Hot Wax Residue has more on budget choices facing the Florida legislature, including Jeb Bush's proposal for a "do-over" vote on the class size amendment and a cut in the "per drink" alcohol tax.

Apparently, the governor thinks cheaper booze will help the state attract big business.

Do you also suppose scientists would find that tax cuts on alcohol would make them laugh more?