Monday Medley

• Why Conservatives Still Won't Admit That Charleston Was A Racist Crime
  

  Aurin Squire at TPM lists several prominent GOPers (e.g., Jeb Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Gov. Nikki Haley, a WSJ columnist [anonymous and invisible if you don't have a subscription], etc.) who use words like "I don't know [why it happened]," "unimaginable," "we don't know the motivation," "senseless tragedy," etc., and responds to these protestations of incomprehension:
  

  Given the history of the South, along the rise of both active shooters and gun access, we can't call what happened Wednesday night a “senseless tragedy.” In fact, the Charleston church shooting is full of savage sense. Thanks to complicity at best, and outright racist at worst, the “inconceivable” is still feasible. The fear tactics that were once localized in the dark backwoods of our political landscape now reach every phone and laptop. ...

  We DO know the motivation, the act is NOT inconceivable, we CAN imagine, and Repub's will find there's no use in pretending we don't or can't.
  
  
• Sixth greatest extinction event in the history of our planet is underway
  

  (Be sure to click through to the underlying paper and at least read the abstract, in which the authors justify this statement: "These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.")

  Yes, it IS happening, as demonstrated under fairly strict criteria. Yes, humans ARE causing it. Will H. sapiens survive it? The abstract doesn't explicitly say, but you may live to find out!
  
  
• Supreme Courts rejects appeal of decision overturning NC's mandatory ultrasound abortion law
  

  (At last, some good news, however limited: because the Supreme Court rejected an appeal of this lower court's decision, women who reside in North Carolina cannot be forced by state law to obtain an ultrasound (an unnecessary, expensive and possibly inaccessible procedure) as a precondition for obtaining an abortion.)

  Now if they can only find a clinic that has not closed and get transportation to it...
  

And now two that hardly require any explanation, considering the nature of many of today's police forces:

• Florida police murder black computer engineer as he listens to music; attempted cover-up exposed
  
  
• Police crush, kill man begging for his life, screaming he was suffocating until his ears turned blue
  
  

"Monday, Monday..."

Miscellany

The Courts:

• How 5 SCOTUS Judges Are F*cking Americans Out Of Fair Elections - Here's The Latest Ruling
• Court throws out GOP's Virginia House gerrymander

Revolt against the US Chamber of Commerce:

• The revolt against the U.S. Chamber's stunning betrayal of Main Street America

The Republican Scotts:

• Scott Walker says $7.25 an hour is a living wage 
• Scott Brown gets a little too personal on women's health

Science:

• US scientists find evidence for group selection of spider colonies in the wild

Ancient Art:

• Indonesian Cave Paintings Rewrite History of Human Creativity

(Sorry I'm absent so much lately. Real life intervenes...)

You Say You Want No Evolution, Well, You Know...

Drawing: Capt. James Cook voyage 1768-1771
(scientific, pre-Darwinian)

... you're too late to change that world. An old friend of mine from middle school through college, a fundamentalist Christian who home-schooled his kids, nonetheless taught them that facts cannot be debated. No doubt he and I differed on what establishes an assertion as a "fact." But a Missouri legislator has decided to test that concept in the most aggressive way possible: he has proposed a law that would

... require the school district or charter school to notify the parent or legal guardian of each student enrolled in the district of:

(1) The basic content of the district's or school's evolution instruction to be provided to the student; and

(2) The parent's right to remove the student from any part of the district's or school's evolution instruction.

The late lamented Stephen Jay Gould once presented a touring lecture appearing (among many other places) at Rice University in Houston. The title of the lecture began "The Fact of Evolution..." and concluded something like "as Explained in Darwin's Theory," or something similar. The distinction is absolutely critical to the understanding of science education: some things are facts established beyond a reasonable doubt by physical evidence and/or experiment, on the one hand, and on the other, some things are theories created by human minds, explanations of facts consistent with all known established facts.

For example, "evolution," in the sense of "descent with modification" is such a fact: the fossil record proves to any observer with an unbiased mind that later life forms derived from earlier ones. By contrast, "Darwin's theory of evolution," a very specific explanation of the mechanisms by which the established physical fact of descent with modification took place, is a theory. Theories are debatable; indeed, in a scientific context, theories can even be replaced with better theories more consistent with known facts, including new facts learned over time. Facts, on the other hand, in general are not subject to wholesale replacement.

Occasionally, as with the onset of quantum physics, facts previously established are found to be in error to a degree or in a manner that requires a re-evaluation of their particulars. But the whole of physics did not collapse with the first evidence for quantum mechanics, nor was Newton's work literally replaced by Einstein's, Bohr's etc. Some ID creationists are quick to shout "A-HA! Newton was never right in the first place! No eternal truths there!" Perhaps not, but Newton's work was good enough for humankind to navigate from the Earth to the Moon and back, to place satellites in geosynchronous orbit, etc., even if it took Einstein's work to insert the relativistic corrections to make your GPS work properly.

Such deliberate misconstructions might be merely silly, and one might legitimately simply mock people who insist on them. But in today's America, some of those people have in mind to establish their "higher [religious] truths" in our system of public education, by statutory law. Such people must be stopped.

In America, people are free to establish their own religions according to their own beliefs, however nutsy those beliefs may be. People may even form their own schools within the context of their religion, and teach their own kids all sorts of unsupported or even contrafactual things. But religion is not science, ever, even in the best of cases, and the First Amendment to our Constitution assures us that our government may not establish a religion, and that is exactly what the introduction of religion-based "science" contrary to best available present-day scientific thinking into government-sponsored schools amounts to.

Enough is enough. If the courts will not put a stop to this willful distortion of our kids' science education, the show is over, and we might as well strike the set and close the theater.