You’re about to travel through another dimension, a dimension not of logic and reason, but of political influence and deep pockets. Your are journeying into a land where up is down, and more pollution is less pollution. If you could read that signpost through the smog, you would know you’ve entered the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Twilight Zone

In the past two days, there have been three major reports concerning the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) that makes me wonder what kind of wacky weed these guys must be smoking.

First, there were two yesterday concerning Alabama’s air quality. In the first, we learn of the State of Alabama’s proposal to codify ADEM’s illegal practice of allowing the largest air polluters in Alabama to exceed the maximum limits set by the US Clean Air Act.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has been seeking federal approval for the rule change since 2003, when ADEM’s Environmental Management Commission adjusted the existing smokestack law at the behest of major air polluters in the state, including the power, paper, chemical and cement industries.

The rule change that’s mentioned is one in which ADEM routinely allows some large polluters in the state to exceed the limit of soot they discharge into our air by an average of 2%. In 2005, the ADEM practice was ruled illegal in federal court, although ADEM and other State entities have been in negotiations with the EPA to allow the practice (which is actually still occurring). Interestingly, ADEM is selling this proposal as an effort to improve air quality, and Alabama Governor Bob Riley is in a buying mood:

Riley’s office argued that the new rule change “ensures that air quality (in the state) will continue to improve.” The governor’s e-mails also state, “we are not asking for a relaxation of air quality regulations. In fact, Alabama has proposed more stringent standards for our state.”

Dear Mr. Governor, allowing more pollution isn’t actually more stringent. You see, pollution is generally bad, so any standards that allow more of it would actually be less stringent. I know the whole more/more thing has a cool syntactic symmetry, but sometimes you have to leverage the actual meanings of words to make your arguments less insane.

When you think about how ADEM and the Governor’s office could claim that allowing more pollution into Alabama’s air would improve Alabama’s air quality, you have to ask yourself just what would motivate seemingly bright and intelligent people to act so stupidly. It turns out that there’s a clue:

… the rule change the judge objected to came about because the state’s biggest power providers – including Alabama Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority – and other industrial polluters asked for it.

Oh, right. If big polluters ask for it, it must be a good thing.

In the second report yesterday, we learned about ADEM’s failed attempt from the 1990′s to block the use of electronic pollution monitoring equipment, in favor of using trained monkeys to spot excess soot emitted from smokestacks. OK, trained monkeys may be a bit over the top, but given that ADEM wants to use “trained smoke readers” instead of more reliable and precise monitoring instruments, the metaphor is completely appropriate.

The report points out that critics of this Monkey’s Eyeball method makes it impossible to effectively monitor and enforce federal clean air standards. The EPA, for it’s part, would rather have something called “credible evidence” of whether a company was complying with clean air limits. ADEM, however, would prefer the Monkey’s Eyeballs to modern measuring instruments, because they think it would be impossible to requiring polluters to meet clean air standards.

And finally, there was a report today about how ADEM testing over the past year show high levels of mercury contamination in some species of fish. Mercury contamination has been linked to several birth defects and developmental disabilities, and the ADEM is pointing out that this is a particularly good year to avoid eating largemouth bass caught in south Alabama. Of course, what is missing from the report is the fact that the largest source of mercury contamination in lakes and streams is industrial air pollution that eventually falls as contaminated rainwater, pollution that is commonly emitted from coal-fired power plants like the ones that ADEM is OK with emitting more soot.

So – there you have it – the perfect storm that is the ADEM twilight zone: ADEM wants us to believe that more pollution will give us better air quality. They also want us to believe that trained monkeys are capable of monitoring soot emissions as well as automated instruments. And finally, they want us to make sure we don’t eat the contaminated fish.

Bush spokesman Tony Fratto said Leahy is “more interested in headlines” than in reaching accommodation with the White House and passing spending bills and other legislation. “Every day this Congress gets a little more out of control,” Fratto said.

Getting out of control?

It shouldn’t be surprising that some members of the President’s inner circle have a dimmer view of Congress, now that it isn’t simply rubber-stamping White House policy. It is, though. Surprising, that is, that members of the administration would let their attitude toward Congress slip like this. Rather than an equal to the Executive branch, the Legislature is apparently seen as something that falls under Executive control. Indeed, how else can one explain Fratto’s comment outside of an expectation that Congress, up until recently, has been very much under the control of the White House? How else can one explain the near total submissive obeisance of the Congress before the White House in the years between 2001 and 2006, without some measure of inequality between these two branches of government? How else does one explain the imperial attitude of Bush administration officials in the absence of an increase of Executive powers and a coincident decrease of Legislative powers?

I’ll tell you: You can’t.

And that’s why more and more people, from all across the political spectrum, are starting to seriously consider impeachment proceedings against this President and Vice President. They have usurped power that does not belong in the Executive branch, and in so doing, and diminished our republic and have done harm to the Constitution of the United States of America.

I, for one, hope the Congress remains more than a little out of control.

[Thanks to Lisa for the Bill Moyers link!]

Indeed, OE puts the power in student’s hands”

We believe that today’s students are smarter than for which [sic] they are given credit and that rather than being told what to believe, they have the ability to explore the range of possibilities and figure out what to believe on their own.

Presumably, from all this exploring the range of possibilities and communication of student’s views, some sort of truth will emerge, much as Shakespeare’s works were expected to emerge from having a bunch of monkeys typing on computers. Much like the flawed infinite monkey theory, what you get on Overwhelming Evidence looks a lot like something excreted from a monkey.

Case in point, is this post on Respectful Insolence, about a looney OE post about the Steorn Infinite Energy Machine. Hmm … infinite energy, from nowhere. If that sounds familiar, it should, because the idea of infinite energy has been around forever. Recently, we had a huckster here in Alabama touting his own perpetual energy car. That a ID blogger would fall for an infinite energy scam, claiming that it not only shows that current understanding of thermodynamics is completely wrong, but that it somehow supports the religious “theory” of intelligent design, is enough for Orac at Respectful Insolence to conclude:

However, the stuff posted there is so out there, so idiotic, that I’m still not entirely sure that OE isn’t a huge hoax put on by “materialists” in order to mock ID creationists!

Now, there’s a conspiracy worth theorizing about.

While science has been something of a plaything for Republicans for years, it is interesting that in 1972, during the Nixon years, Congress created a non-partisan scientific consultancy, called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) that was mandated to assist Congress with understanding

the complex and highly technical issues that increasingly affect our society [ref]

The OTA served for almost a quarter of a century, providing Congress with unbiased scientific advice on a broad variety of topics. It wasn’t always so, however. There was valid criticism early that the OTA was too allied with liberal ideals. So the OTA restructured itself, as Bruce Bimber of UCSD notes in his interesting essay, The Death of an Agency:

After having experimented with other approaches to securing a stable market for its work, the agency adopted a concrete strategy of neutrality that involved balanced solicitousness of Republican and Democratic interests. The agency severed ties between its staff and legislators’ offices, avoided making specific recommendations or endorsing policy alternatives, began consulting with Republican legislators at the very beginning of its studies, soliciting their input and interests, and employing balanced expert review panels comprised of various groups and organizations with an interest in the issues under study.

The strategy of neutrality, which in various forms the other three congressional agencies were also pursuing, paid off very early, silencing criticism by the mid-1980s and earning the agency allies among Republican ranking minority members in the House and Republican committee chairs in the Senate. [ref]

As a result of the conservative sweep of Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich came to power. With that power, Gingrich Republicans needed a symbol of their willingness to keep their “Contract With America”, and thus closed the OTA in 1995. The principal reason given for the closure of the OTA was to reduce the size of the federal budget, although with an annual budget of about $2 Billion, it’s difficult to see how cutting the OTA really saved any money. Of course, conservatives had a special hate for the OTA. It turns out that it’s more difficult abuse science and scientific knowledge for political or ideological gain when the Congress has access to its own, non-partisan, scientific analysis and advice. OTA reports about Acid Rain, Global Warming, Food Safety, and Automobile Pollution for example, provided the Congress with even-handed scientific information that potentially threatened the bottom line for some large energy, agri-business, and manufacturing concerns. In order to leverage science to the best interest of its conservative supporters, Gingrich Republicans couldn’t allow dispassionate, objective scientific advice to be widely available to members of Congress. It had to be their science.

As a direct result of the closing of the OTA, Congress has largely relied on partisan think-tanks to provide scientific analysis and policy decision making. Indeed, this was predicted in an October, 2005 article that appeared in Science News, Bruce Bimber was quoted, saying:

“Congress will have to increase its reliance on people with a stake in the outcome. And that’s bad news.”

Bad news indeed. Congress now has to wade through politically-motivated, think-tank-driven, fringe science in order to make policy decisions. Gone are the days of objectivity and consensus. Instead, we now have a virtual industry of well paid science “advisers” from both the left and the right that must battle it out, mano a mano, to be heard in either the Senate and House chambers. As you might expect, the winner is usually the scientists with the deepest pockets and the most connections. I bet you can also guess who the losers are.

I believe that we should reinstate the OTA. I’m not the first to say this, but I’m in decent company. Ralph Nader said it in 2004,

It is time to reinstate the Enlightenment for a Congress besieged as never before with decisions regarding genetic engineering, missile defense, privacy, citizen surveillance, nanotechnology, stagnant automotive technology, global warming and many other perils and promises. [ref]

In a recent post on the Bulletin Online, Laura Kahn echoes Nader’s call, and puts it as well as anyone could:

In contrast, OTA looked at science and technology from a broader societal context. It investigated the potenial unforeseen social, economic, and environmental consequences of a technology’s widespread implementation and communicated its findings in language carefully tuned to congressional audiences. OTA used a process in which committees of science and technology experts served as advisers rather than as the report’s authors. (NAS does not separate the two responsibilities.) OTA reports did not make specific consensus policy recommendations, but rather, sought the views of all the important stakeholders and then explained the possible consequences of alternative courses of action to help inform congressional debate.

This type of information is critical for Congress to responsibly implement and oversee policies dealing with alternative energy sources, biodefense research, and other complex issues. OTA would provide Congress the broad perspective needed to write the best possible legislation. Given our current domestic and global mess, we need all the help we can get.[ref]

To read any or all of the OTA Reports, check out http://www.wws.princeton.edu/ota.

As always, KO is brilliant. Here’s my favorite part:

Watergate—instantaneously—became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law of insisting—in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood – that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the Courts. Just him.

Just – Mr. Bush – as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy. These are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush—and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal—the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one—and it stinks. And they know it.

God’s time is infinite

It has been said that science is man’s effort to understand how God runs his business.

God is infinite. He always has been and always will be. Our finite minds find it difficult thinking of God as timeless. To understand God and his religious ways requires faith.

According to creation, God created all things in stages (and the evening “and the morning were the first day,” according to Genesis 1:5).

We are so used to thinking of days as being 24 hours of time. But go back and read the creation account again. We know the Earth’s rotation gives us 24-hour days. Yet, the sun and moon were not placed there until the fourth day.

This truth tells us that the first three days could have been millions of years of time. Remember, God is timeless. He has no beginning or ending. Our limited minds try to compact six days of creation into six 24-hour days.

Think about this, theologians, preachers and Bible teachers. Let us admit we were misled. According to this truth, scientists are justified in expressing time in terms of millions.

W. S.

Saraland

So, once again we find some yokel trying to resolve the whole Science/Religion dilemma. In this case, W.S. takes the tack of arguing that, since God is infinite, we cannot know how He measures time, so the dilemma is solved by quibbling over the meaning of a day. According to W.S., we cannot take the meaning of the word “day” in the Book of Genesis to literally mean what we know as an “Earth day”. One might hear some nerdy SciFi fans rejoice, as the word “hour” is not what we know as an “Earth hour” either.

So, W.S., if we cannot accept the creation story in the Book of Genesis literally, then what other portions of the bible must also be seen as metaphor or allegory rather than literal truth? Upon what criteria do you sift the literal from the metaphorical?

Ah, there’s the rub.

There are two grand pillars of blind faith. The first pillar is an unwavering belief in holy writ. The second is trust. As in, believers trust that someone will tell them what is literally true and what is metaphor, especially when that first pillar begins to crumble. That someone is usually a person that claims to be closer to God than the rest of the congregation. You know, someone with a vested interest in having their interpretation of convoluted biblical minutiae accepted as the real truth. A truthier truth than that proposed by religious rivals from within and without who claim the same position of privileged understanding of God and his or her mysterious ways. A better, stronger truth than that supported by direct observation and measurement of physical evidence. A more comforting truth than those derived from the laws of physics, or mathematical proof, or prior history, or predicted by sound theory building, or by rational and critical thought.

This second pillar, the appeal to some human authority, is what I believe exposes all religions for the frauds they are. Beneath the sweet facade of piety we find a dirty mechanism designed for social control. Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” What then of those to whom countless millions have freely given the power of their absolute trust? What then of those millions who stumble around as if drunk in a world darkened by a rejection of what their own better senses tell them, all the while believing they are God’s special little angels?

What then? Well, they’re running the show now, aren’t they?

John Adams also has a famous saying concerning power: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” If you look at our short US history, you’ll see that we’ve endured our share debacles that arose from misplaced public trust. The most glaring examples in recent memory run the gamut from McCarthyism, past Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of the military industrial complex and the ensuing Vietnam war, over the tarnishing of the presidency by both Nixon and Clinton, to the current era of warrantless wiretaps, secret government prisons, a blizzard of presidential signing statements, and a perpetual state of war against “evildoers”. During the whole time, American faith has not wavered one iota. During that time, many of our religious leaders have said, “Trust us” and we have forked over billions, because as a people, we tend to believe and trust in the invisible. In recent years, government has curried favor from religious extremists, granting greater power in exchange for the votes of their faithful, trusting congregations. As with other manipulative political strategies, this cozying up to the religious right works: power is maintained. The price of that power, however, may be more than we can pay while retaining the integrity of our federal constitutional republic.

So there we are: we start with a proposal to mend the rift between science and religion by appealing to the supernatural time-perception of an arguably infinitely invisible imaginary being. What we end up with is the same – an America balancing on the razor thin edge between a rational secular democracy and a powerfully dangerous and irrational theocracy. Don’t be fooled my friends. There are some very bad and dangerous people around. Unfortunately, many of them smile like Ted Haggard, and are in positions of power that they wish to keep. And they will, with our help, and unwavering trust.

“They can have their votes of no confidence, but it’s not going to make the determination about who serves on my government.”

That’s right, he actually said, “my government.” It’s understandable that this president would make such a mistake. After all, for the first six years of his presidency, George Bush ruled as a king might have. With a friendly congress, most of his policies were rubber stamped. Surrounded by yes-men in his own administration, he was able to commit the U.S. to a war that will last long past his own tenure, whether through the boldness of his vision, or the narrowness of our own. His inner circle is virtually untouchable, inept though never held accountable, very nearly broken though never really able to introspect any problems.

Remember, He’s the decider. His job is to make sure the job gets done. He’s a commander guy. He’s all about swooping in, balls out, while wearing a borrowed flight suit and proclaiming, “Mission Accomplished”, “Heckuva Job, Brownie” and “43 doesn’t need to worry about it.” That’s how Bush rolls.

Apparently this isn’t the first time Little Lord George publicly stated that this was His government. Back in February, 2006 Marty Kaplan at The Huffington Post noted:

But no, he said “my government.” I don’t think that’s just a garden variety Bushism, a trivial malapropism. I think it goes right to his understanding of who he is, and who we are. It’s not a Freudian slip; it’s an Orwellian siren, an anti-democratic red alert.

The founding documents of our nation talk about the government, our government, a government, any government. If my is used, it’s said on behalf of the citizens, not their rulers.

But W really believes that it’s his government. He doesn’t see himself as a steward, a trustee, a caretaker, someone who temporarily gets to steer the ship of state because of the momentary consent of the governed and an enduring set of rules. No, he believes it’s his ship, his state, his rules — his and his ideological fellow-travelers.

I really think George Bush believes this is His government, entrusted to him by divine right to do with as he pleases. Without a doubt, this has certainly has been his government to break. His mess. His legacy of failure, death, and declining American prestige. The rest of us are going to be stuck with trying to fix his various boondoggles after he’s gone back to clearing brush on his Texas ranch. We will ultimately be successful, because we Americans really do know how to fix things, and regardless of what George Bush believes, this is actually our government. We just lent it to him.

A Gallup poll released Monday said that while the country is about evenly split over whether the theory of evolution is true, Republicans disbelieve it by more than 2-to-1.

Republicans saying they don’t believe in evolution outnumbered those who do by 68 percent to 30 percent in the survey. Democrats believe in evolution by 57 percent to 40 percent, as do independents by a 61 percent to 37 percent margin.

As Jon Stewart might say, “Republicans, meet me at camera three”.

OK, Republicans, we understand that you’re devout. We understand that you love God. That’s simply beautiful, it really is. Regardless of that, you have to stop cherry-picking the facts. Evolution is a fact, just like some of those other facts that are somewhat less controversial, like Heliocentrism. OK, this is less controversial now. The church no longer arrests and executes people who believe that the sun is at the center of our solar system because there’s just simply such an abundance, a cornucopia if you will, of observational evidence, that no rational person would claim otherwise.

The same is true for the facts of evolution: That species emerge and change over very long periods of time. That some species that used to exist, no longer exist. Further, it is a fact that humans appeared relatively recently in the history of our world.

The facts are irrefutable. They are written in the very bedrock of our planet. They are there for everyone to see, everywhere: older species in strata below newer species. Never an exception. No human jawbones have ever been found in a Tyrannosaurus nest. No dinosaurs after 65 million years ago. No Australopithecenes after about 2 million years ago. No homo sapiens before about 500,000 years ago. None. Anywhere.

Now, while you can certainly take a religious position on the explanation of evolution, you cannot take a religious position on the existence of evolution. In other words, you can certainly disagree with the leading scientific Theory of Evolution, which explains how such facts as we observe everywhere in the world came to be (and does so quite nicely, thank you very much), but you can only disagree with the facts of Evolution to the same extent that you can disagree with the fact that the sun is at the center of the solar system, or that Pasteurization helps preserve foods, or that DNA codes genetic information for all species on earth.

We need to remember that, as Stephen Jay Gould said, there’s a difference between a fact and a theory, and Evolution is both:

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

If you’re planning on rejecting the Theory of Evolution, you know, the scientific mechanism that Darwin proposed almost a century and a half ago, you have to follow the rules. The rules are simple. Come up with a better explanation for the Fact of Evolution. Just make sure it doesn’t require anything beyond what we can expect from our normal, natural, very nonmagical world.