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2010 may very well be the best year skeptics have ever had, and we’re only two months in!

Why, you ask? Because the Ministers of Parliament in the UK have decided that homeopathy is a waste of the National Health Service’s money.

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Homeopaths get taxpayer support in the UK to the tune of £4M per year (and probably more), money which goes to prescriptions and four homeopathic hospitals — hospitals which I assume are incredibly tiny, so that their cures are stronger.

Ha! See what I did there?

Anyway, the taxpayers’ money is being wasted because homeopathy is pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s water, pure (ha!) and simple, and has no efficacy beyond that of a placebo. Myriads of tests have shown this beyond any reasonable doubt. And, in fact, homeopathy is dangerous because it can divert people away from taking real medicine, which can have very serious repercussions.

I am thrilled with this news! Now, this does not mean homeopathy will promptly be defunded. It looks like there will be more reports and such, and the NHS will have a response to the MPs in a couple of months. But it’s a major step, and a good one.

My stance on climate change is clear: the scientific evidence that we’re getting warmer is overwhelming, and the most likely cause is that it’s human-produced. The first is fact, the second is a conclusion based on a lot of evidence.

Climategate showed us that the noise machine is in full swing; nothing in those emails takes away from the fact that there are multiple and independent lines of evidence that we’re warming up. And the talking heads on Fox and other right-wing media saying that the harsh winter is evidence against global warming shows how dumb of an argument they’re willing to make.

But it’s not just the stuffed shirts in the media making their own reality as they go along; some people in the government are trying to legislate it. Climate change deniers in both Utah and South Dakota have passed resolutions essentially condemning the science and reality of climate change. In Utah it was just a broadside at the science; in South Dakota it’s aimed at a "balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools."

Yeah, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Besides the creationist analogies, the South Dakota resolution sounds like something out of 1984:

WHEREAS, the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide;

Wrong! The Earth has been warming overall, and the last decade was the warmest on record, with records going back to 1880.

WHEREAS, there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place;

Wrong! The troposphere is warming.

WHEREAS, historical climatological data shows without question the earth has gone through trends where the climate was much warmer than in our present age.

Yes, and the Earth went through a period of heavy bombardment from asteroids and comets a few hundred million years after it formed. Just because something happened once doesn’t make it safe.

WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as "the gas of life";

Wow. I mean, wow. Let’s lock these guys in a room filled with CO₂ for an hour or two and see how much life is left in them. And I love the "many scientists" line. You know what? A whole lot more scientists call it a greenhouse gas.

Wow.

WHEREAS, more than 31,000 American scientists collectively signed a petition to President Obama stating: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, or methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate…"

This petition has been thoroughly debunked before; it’s nothing more than an attempt to muddy the waters by deniers.

However, my absolute favorite part of the South Dakota resolution is this next bit. Are you sitting down? Good:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED [...]
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can affect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and

Wait, what? Did those guys in the South Dakota legislature actually say astrological?

Geez, no wonder they can’t figure out that global warming is real. They think they’re reading their horoscopes! It makes me wonder if they just want the planet to warm up so that their state has milder winters.

It angers me that the science of so many topics has been warped and mutilated by people with a political agenda. I have no such agenda, except to speak the truth as I see it. I make no money if global change is real, I get no power, no thrill. In fact, the idea of a substantially warmer planet scares me, if not for myself, then for my daughter and everyone destined to live in that environment.

The politicians who would vote yes on these resolutions are doing so out of a near-religious belief that global warming is not real — they’re the otter in that picture. Contacting them probably won’t help; I suspect that if every last constituent they had contacted them, they would still cleave to their beliefs.

But I urge people to write their congressional representatives anyway. And spread the word; if these two states deny reality this blatantly, then others will follow. Bet on it.

So:

And if other states follow suit, they may doom all of us.

I’m happy to say that the Colorado State Judiciary Committee has "indefinitely postponed" the Religious Bill of Rights for public schools.

Yay!

They said, and I quote:

After consideration on the merits, the Committee recommends the following: SB10-089 be postponed indefinitely.

That is essentially their way of killing the motion. What’s interesting to me is this statement (emphasis mine):

FINAL VOTE – Moved a substitute motion to postpone Senate Bill 10-089 indefinitely. The motion passed on a 4-3 roll call vote.

Curious, I looked up the parties of the committee members. Can you guess who voted how? Yup. The Democrats all voted to kill the bill, and the Republicans all voted not to kill it. Shocker, given this was clearly an attempt by the far-right religious groups to once again wedge their foot in the door, trying to make the government a theocracy.

They lost this time, but by a narrow margin. Had this gone to the floor — and extrapolating from the fact that this was voted on strict party lines in the committee — the bill would have lost anyway, since the party ratio is 21 to 14 Democrat to Republican. Still and all in this country, as we’ve learned we’re always one election away from change.

I certainly hope that, in this case, change is something we don’t have to believe in.

Tip o’ the powdered wig to Rachael Acks.

I have mixed feelings about NASA, as is obvious if you’ve read my posts about it. But I think that they have done a simply fantastic and amazing job given how small their budget is. You might think NASA gets a huge amount of money — a lot of people do — but in fact they get only a tiny fraction of the federal budget.

The New York Times made this very very clear recently when they posted an interesting graphic depicting the national budget allocations. Take a peek:

[Click to enporkbarrelate.]

Can you find NASA on there? It’s actually listed under General Science, near the bottom right. That rectangle’s not very big, is it? And NASA is only a part of that section, so the space agency’s lion’s share is starting to look more like a kitten’s nibble.

Now, wanna have fun? Close your eyes and click randomly on the graphic. Did you click on NASA? No? Shocker. But this gives you another way to think of the amount of money NASA gets, compared to, say, the military^*. Statistically speaking, your chance of randomly picking NASA’s footprint on that graphic are about 1 in 125.

I’m still working out what I think about Obama’s new plans for NASA. I’m happy about the increase he plans to give them, but we can easily afford to increase NASA’s budget by a lot more. We spend more on pet food every year in the US than we do on NASA. What we spend every year on tobacco products is five times NASA’s annual budget, so I’m thinking the money is out there.

It’s not a matter of finding the money. It never is, and never has been. It’s a matter of finding the money in a way that isn’t political suicide for a politician. And that, I suspect, is because those of us who support space exploration haven’t made it politically expedient for everyone else to support it, too.

I don’t have a remedy for that. I’m just a guy with a blog, so I blog about it, trying to show people that space is exciting, interesting, and worth a few more tax dollars a year. The more people who know that, really know that, the better off we are.

Tip o’ the change purse to Fark.

In the United States, we need a religious bill of rights about as much as we need a white people’s bill of rights, or a men’s bill of rights. That is, not at all: when 90+ percent of the country claims to be religious, you pretty much run the joint anyway. Worse, we hardly need something like this for public schools. There already are pretty clear laws about how religion can and cannot be treated in the schools.

Still, that hasn’t stopped people in Colorado from proposing just such a bill for public schools in the state legislature, a bill which may be presented to the Judiciary Committee as early as Monday, today. Note that this bill represents an act and not a law. Nothing in it is legally enforceable, as far as I can tell. Good thing, too.

The bill is ridiculous in a lot of ways, but two things stand out: one is that it simply isn’t needed — most of the rights it seems so concerned over are already guaranteed and under no threat at all — and the other is that it oversteps the bounds maintained by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Below are some choice bits of the bill, with what I think is my more reality-based opinion on them. The bill itself IS IN ALL CAPS, so you can read it as if the person is shouting at you if you’d like. I won’t bother debunking the basis claimed for the need for such a bill — they claim religion is under attack in this country, which is patently ridiculous. Instead, here is an example of a bit that is unneeded:

THE RELIGIOUS BILL OF RIGHTS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS AND THEIR PARENTS OR GUARDIANS SHALL INCLUDE, BUT NEED NOT BE LIMITED TO, A DECLARATION THAT A PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENT HAS AN INALIENABLE RIGHT TO:

(I) EXPRESS HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS ON A PUBLIC SCHOOL CAMPUS OR AT A SCHOOL-SPONSORED EVENT TO THE SAME EXTENT AS HE OR SHE MAY EXPRESS A PERSONAL SECULAR VIEWPOINT;

There are many such statements in the bill, and I’m cool with them, since all of them fall under a student’s Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. Stating this is like stating they should be allowed to breathe or have their heart beat. By putting that up front and center, the bill crafters make it seem like this freedom is in jeopardy. It isn’t.

However, if a teacher or other school official were to do this, that would be a different matter entirely. As we’ll see below.

[Students also have the inalienable right to] WEAR RELIGIOUS GARB ON A PUBLIC SCHOOL CAMPUS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CLOTHING WITH A RELIGIOUS MESSAGE;

Now this one’s interesting! I wonder how the folks sponsoring this bill would feel if a kid wore a "Satan rules my soul!" shirt to class. Or a turban.

Anyway, here’s where it gets sticky:

[A student may] EXPRESS HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SELECT RELIGIOUS MATERIALS WHEN RESPONDING TO A SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT IF HIS OR HER RESPONSE REASONABLY MEETS THE EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT;

Yeah, that word "reasonably" opens a can of worms. What happens when a creationist kid doesn’t want to say anything about evolution or the Big Bang? If I were a science teacher and a student said the Universe is 6000 years old, I would mark that answer as wrong (why? Because it is). That will lead to some fun with the parents, no doubt. Now again, the student already has the ability to do this. But this somewhat amplifies the situation, and will lead to students thinking they have a right to not be marked down for wrong answers if they are religiously-based. Think I’m overly extrapolating this? Think again.

But the biggest grievance I have with this ridiculous declaration is this one:

[A teacher shall] NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;

To be blunt, this is unacceptable. If you are a biology teacher and refuse to teach evolution, then you should be disciplined at the very least. If you still refuse to teach it, then you can either be given a different class to teach, or face termination. Teachers are obligated by their job duties to teach standards-based curricula, and if they refuse, they are in dereliction of their duty as teachers.

Teachers have certain religious rights, of course, but don’t have the right to not teach a kid something that is true because of their own religion. There are religions that teach that women are inferior, that blacks are inferior. Will a history teacher refuse to teach about the women’s rights movement, or the civil rights movement, because of their own beliefs? Some religions — I won’t name names here — believe that sexual education is eeevil. If you’re a health teacher and refuse to teach about reproductive health, then in my opinion you should face the consequences of your decision.

This is where I think declarations of rights like this are dangerous. It’s a slippery slope, and a steep one. And the most pernicious part of all this is it’s clear that the motivation behind this bill is not in the name of religious freedom and tolerance, it’s in the name of freedom and tolerance for one specific religion. As I point out above, I don’t think a radical Muslim would be treated the same way under this declaration as a Christian would. While that may be outside the scope of the bill, it’s important to keep in mind.

In the end, this bill doesn’t have the weight of law, but by simply proposing it — and enacting it, which will take time and materials — it’s a waste of taxpayer money, especially when the vast majority of what it’s stating is already within the existing legislation. If the religious groups are so worried about this sort of thing, then they should pay for this effort on their own time, and give out flyers in church. Doing this through the legislative branch — and, in fact, the whole bill itself — is a bad idea.

If this bill gets out of the Judiciary Committee it will be presented to the Senate for debate and eventually a vote. I’ve already contacted my local Senator about this. If you live in Colorado, I urge you to do likewise.

Remember:

Tip o’ the wall o’ separation to the Boulder Atheists

As promised, today President Obama released his planned NASA budget for the year. Not too surprisingly, it’s pretty much as the rumors indicated. There’s a lot to say here, and I have a lot on my mind, so please hear me out.

The Good News

The good news for sure is an increase of $6 billion over the next five years. It stresses new technology and innovation (to the tune of over $1.5 billion), which is also good. A lot of NASA’s successes have been from pushing the limits on what can be done. It also stresses Earth science, which isn’t surprising at all; Obama appears to understand the importance of our environmental impact, including global warming. So that’s still good news.

The very very good news is that half that money — half, folks, 3.2 billion dollars — is going to science. Yeehaw! The release specifically notes telescopes and missions to the Moon and planets. That, my friends, sounds fantastic.

Bye bye Constellation

Now to the other aspects of this budget. As I have written before, this new budget axes Constellation:

NASA’s Constellation program – based largely on existing technologies – was based on a vision of returning astronauts back to the Moon by 2020. However, the program was over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies. Using a broad range of criteria an independent review panel determined that even if fully funded, NASA’s program to repeat many of the achievements of the Apollo era, 50 years later, was the least attractive approach to space exploration as compared to potential alternatives. Furthermore, NASA’s attempts to pursue its moon goals, while inadequate to that task, had drawn funding away from other NASA programs, including robotic space exploration, science, and Earth observations. The President’s Budget cancels Constellation and replaces it with a bold new approach that invests in the building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration…

[Emphasis mine.]

I can’t say I disagree with much that’s written there. A lot of it is based on the conclusions of the Augustine commission, a blue-ribbon panel of experts appointed by Obama to look into NASA’s future plans and make recommendations.

The Space Station

The budget calls for extending the International Space Station beyond the 2016 timeline, perhaps for four more years. I would say this is a bad idea, BUT the budget also asks for extending the ISS’s scientific capabilities. I would be happy to see that; ISS is very limited as a science platform. However, the dang thing is already built and in orbit, so it makes sense to spend a little bit more (I was surprised to see only about $180 million for this) to make it useful scientifically. If that becomes the case, then a lot of the issues I have with ISS go away.

Incidentally, the budget calls for a guaranteed $600 million for the next five Shuttle missions to ISS, even if a launch slips into FY11.

Back to the Moon?

So, where does this leave us as far as going back to the Moon? It leaves us delayed, again. That sucks. However, as I have pointed out before, Constellation was already a mess. Behind schedule, over budget, and starved of funding. It was a mandate from the Bush White House, but never got the money it needed from them or Congress to ensure it could be done (this didn’t work when it was attempted from the Bush Sr. White House/Congress either).

I don’t want a repeat of the Apollo program: a flag-and-footprints mission where we go there, look around, and then come home for another 40 years. I want to go there and stay there. Apollo was done as a race, and the goal of a race is to win. It wasn’t sustainable. We need to be able to figure out how to get there and be there, and that takes more than just big rockets. We need a good plan, and I’m not really sure what we had up until this point is that plan.

Building a heavy-lift rocket that can take us to the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids is not really easy. It’s not like we can dust off the old Saturn V plans and start up the factories again. All that tech is gone, superseded, and we might as well start from scratch with an eye toward newer tech. This budget is calling for that, as well as relying heavily on private companies.

Commercial space

And about that. I’ll say this again: private companies have not yet put a man in orbit, but Space X, as an example, is close to doing so. Once the Shuttle retires later this year, private companies will be putting humans in space before NASA will have the capability to do so again [UPDATE: please see my comment below; the above statement about companies beating NASA is correct]. I am no fan of paying the Russians or other countries to do this for us, and going the route of civilian space makes sense.

Now, Space X doesn’t have the heavy lift capacity that an Ares 5 or other planned NASA rocket might have had… but with routine launches to space covered by private companies, NASA can concentrate on what it should: innovation, pushing the limits, paving the road. Once the road is laid, let others use it.

So I don’t see this as doom and gloom. I see this as 1) putting science and innovation first, and 2) freeing NASA up to do what it does best: explore the boundaries.

Here’s what I think. Warning: political complaining ahead.

Remember: the way we’ve been doing things for 40 years has gotten us literally in circles. It’s perhaps long past time to shake things up and try something different. In my previous posts on this (see Related Posts at the bottom), people are complaining that Obama is killing our Moon plans and gutting NASA. That’s simply not true. I think this may very well save NASA and our future manned exploration capabilities, if this is all done correctly.

As for that, and having said my piece that I think this is a good idea, it may not matter: the other thing to remember is that this must pass Congress first. I honestly don’t think that will happen. For one thing, two many Congresscritters have too big a stake in NASA to let go; if you don’t believe me, read this article where Alabama Congressmen complain about the new budget. When Republicans whine about privatizing something, you know you’re in for a fight, and it’s not like Congressional Democrats haven’t been all that useful in backing up Obama’s plans.

We’ll see how this goes. If it’s business as usual with Congress, then I suspect it may be a lot like the health care plan all over again: lots of spin and noise, lots of knee-jerk reactions because it’s Obama’s plan, lots of "compromise" that’s really just watering down something to make it worse, and then a budget will be passed that won’t be able to get anything done.

I’m pretty damn tired of that, and I’m going to do something about it. I’ll write my Congressmen, and I’ll tell them that the time for bending over backwards is long gone. It’s time to grow a spine, time for boldness, time for innovation. Whether people like it or not, this is the new budget being proposed, and if Congress wheedles over it, then yeah, NASA really will be screwed, and we’ll spend the next four decades circling our planet and gazing at the Moon, wondering when we’ll ever go back.

Perhaps it’s fitting that this news is released on the anniversary of the loss of Columbia — it’s been seven years since that day when the orbiter broke up upon re-entry. A very good case can be made that complacence played a big role in that event. When it comes to space exploration, we must never rest on our laurels, we must never have the arrogance to think we have it all under control, and we must never forget that to explore means to push ahead into unknown territory. That is the lesson of Columbia.

The Moon, Mars, and all of space await us. This new budget may not be perfect, but I strongly suspect it’s the best we can do, and far, far better than the course we currently have laid out. If we don’t push for this now, we may never go back.

A ship may be safe in the harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.

I am very, very pleased to write about two wins for the military and skepticism today:

Story the first:

Remember the company that made millions by selling totally worthless bomb-sniffing magic wands to the military, detectors that were used at checkpoints in Iraq to search cars, and which failed to detect the terrorist bombs used to kill 155 people in October and 120 more in December last year?

Yeah, well, Jim McCormick, the head of the company that sold those useless dowsing rods, just got arrested for — oh, let me savor typing these words — "suspicion of fraud".

Wait, wait. That felt so good to write, let me do it again: Jim McCormick, who sold provably worthless dowsing rods to the military, has been arrested for suspicion of fraud.

Ahhhhh. That was just as good to type the second time.

This has been reported in The Register as well as The Times Online, which mentions Randi for an added bonus! The BBC has an in-depth analysis of this as well.

In the courts, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But in this case, we have scientific evidence that the kits sold by the company are 100% garbage, and I hope this guy gets everything he deserves.

And is McCormick penitent? Of course not! With apparently no sense of Teh Stoopid, he said:

We have been dealing with doubters for ten years. One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.

Holy wow. Serously, dude? I mean, really? Here’s a clue, Mr. McCormick: it’s not that your dowsing rods lack doodads and flair and blinking lights. It’s that they don’t frakking work, and because the Iraqi military swallowed your story people have died.

I hope that’s clear now.

Story the second:

Our second news item is also quite satisfying, and also has a bit of the cluelessness from a company that sells things to the military. Trijicon, the company that inscribed references to Bible quotations on rifle scopes sold to the military, has announced that they will no longer inscribe them, and will provide kits to the military to remove the references in existing scopes.

Very cool. The military has rules forbidding proselytizing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rifle scopes were in clear violation of this. Of course, the company did this because of their concern over our troops and for the appearance of the military overseas, right? About that, the President of Trijicon, Stephen Bindon, said this:

Trijicon has proudly served the U.S. military for more than two decades, and our decision to offer to voluntarily remove these references is both prudent and appropriate.

As I read that, it translated in my head as, "We did this because we were suddenly getting tons of bad press, and had to do something about this PR disaster, so we can can make it look like we’re being all altruistic and everything." Here’s another free hint to the head of a company selling stuff to the military: don’t thump your own chest and say how cool you are when we all know better. Simply admit your mistake, and let people know you’re honestly sorry. Telling everyone what a great move this was on your part is maybe just a wee bit oily.

So I’m really thrilled that rational and critical thinking has had two victories today. The fight continues, because the forces of irrationality are always, always on the march. So, for those of us fighting for reality: