Attention Texas Voters!!!

I was gonna write something on this but this said everything I was going to and more...watch and be scared.

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Ready To Rumble: Texas Bible Classes Draw Reactions

Last Friday the Texas state board of education passed a measure allowing Texas high schools to teach bible classes, but did not provide guidelines for legal and illegal material. I am quite frequently wrong but this seems like an obvious disaster waiting to happen. Guidelines are very important for all class curricula, electives not withstanding. In fact, in the Spring of '09 the state board is going to be setting some interesting guidelines in the sciences classes which will effectively refute evolution by bringing in religion masked as academic freedom.

Mark Chancey, chairman of the religious studies department at Southern Methodist University offered some scathing words about the board's decision. "I predict we're headed for a constitutional train wreck. The people who suffer will be the educators and the students, and the people who will foot the bill will be us the taxpayers...the state board is sending them into a minefield without a map." Thank you Mark, that's what I've been saying about this, are there really that many people here that don't?

John Ferguson, Baptist minister, first amendment lawyer and professor at Howard Payne University in Brownwood what say you???

"It's deeply distressing," said John Ferguson, a Baptist minister, first amendment lawyer and professor at Howard Payne University in Brownwood.

State board members, who balked at establishing state standards because they might be too difficult to write, were wrong, Ferguson said. How can small school districts develop sound standards, he wondered?

"I'm not sure where these small districts with the six-man football teams in West Texas are going to come up with constitutional Bible scholars to help them craft these (standards)," Ferguson said.

The reason and rationality in this issue just came from a Baptist minister, take cover, the world may end soon.

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Bible Classes Ok'd in Texas Public High Schools

Uh-oh, get ready to ramp up the religious persecution and name-calling from all sides of the pew, the Texas State Board of Education gave final approval on Friday to establishing Bible classes in public high schools, "rejecting calls to draw specific teaching guidelines and warnings that it could lead to constitutional problems in the classroom."

These classes will be taught as electives (3% of schools districts offered Bible courses during the 05-06 school year according to the Texas Freedom Network) and the guidelines simply require that there will be religious neutrality and will not endorse or disfavor one religion. This of course is a very broad definition of what is and isn't allowed, leaving the door open to prejudice problems. Ed Brayton, on his trip to Netroots Nation in Austin, says he found at least one school in Texas which "has a Bible course that teaches Hamitic racism." For those of us outside the know, this is the claim that Ham was cursed by Noah and that the descendants of Ham (read: all black people) are therefore intended by God to be slaves. Technically I don't think that breaks the guidelines of promoting one religion over another, but it definitely promotes something that was supposed to be erased from our public education long ago, racism (and in the name of religion, wow these guys must have missed the "do unto others" talk in that big ol' book).

Get ready for the lawsuits to start flying. The ACLU is going to have a field day taking some naive teachers and school districts to court, and as I detailed in my posts last week concerning Louisiana's dip into the religious public education swamp someone is going to have to pay for these lawsuits. That someone will the be the taxpaying citizens of that school district, so I think it would be in the best interest of those who pay taxes to fund education to demand that strict guidelines detailing what is and is not allowed by law.

Here's one of my favorite quotes on the whole situation by Jonathan Saenz, a spokesman for the Free Market Foundation (via the Daily Texan). "It's important to remember that there's no way to guarantee that anything anyone does in a school will be constitutional...The other side is almost demanding some assurance and guarantee that nothing will happen that will be unconstitutional, and that's impossible."

You make a good point Jonathan, let's just throw out the guidelines on lethal force by police officers because it would be impossible to guarantee an officer won't cross the line into unauthorized force. What a childish argument, and one that leaves the burden of defining constitutionality with the courts, courts that cost a lot of money and will bleed dry the already suffering bank account of our state's education system.

Taken in concert with the shady practice of 11th-hour changes to the English curricula guidelines, severing ties to the National Association of State School Boards, and the upcoming vote to allow intelligent design into our state's classrooms and you have a good picture of how this state board operates. The driving motives behind these people are not the education that the students will receive or how to better prepare them for life outside of the home shelter, but simply injecting their dogmas into each and every subject they can.

Go forth and spread the good news, plant the seed and it will flourish, become fishers of men, speak to all nations of the world. Those are all from the Bible about spreading the word and works of christianity (as written by the creator himself, if you like) and nowhere does it say invade the politics and enslave the people to your beliefs. Get ready for it because it is coming.

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Texans To Arm Colleges

Get ready to pack some heat!!! That's right, the same legislature that brought you 3 years of refusal to fund state education and runs to Oklahoma to avoid voting is ready to do some actual work and allow Texans to bring firearms onto any college campus.

Apparently the law "addresses personal protection," says state Rep. Joe Driver, R-Garland, head of the House committee that considers gun bills. "People who do things [like the Virginia Tech shooting] basically know they are walking into a gun-free zone.

"They are cowards...facing people not allowed to fight back."

This sounds like a great idea, providing citizens protection from the crazies out there, and allowing justice to be presented and served from the cold steel of an 18 year old hand. The problem I have is that I already pay for protection on campus, its called the police. And not only do I have the police patrolling the area, there is a whole division, called campus police, that don't even leave the campus. Why would you give students guns on campus and not these guys?

I think there are other issues here as well besides the fact that we already have protective services on campus. One is the inherent irresponsibility of college students, surely a phenomena that transcends most cultural backgrounds. Give an 18 year old his own place with no parents or attendance policy and eventually mistakes in judgment will be made. This same lapse in judgment transforms from a fleeting indiscretion into a lifelong legacy with something as permanent as a gun shot as the vehicle. I don't trust the college kids in my town to drive safely, be able to cross the street properly, or know when their drinking is out of control.

Another concern I have is for the police. If you show up in a classroom with four people in a shootout who is bad guy? Should you just kill everyone who is shooting, or is there one attacker and 3 responders? Imagine being the cop that has to call the parents for that conversation. "Yes ma'am there was a shooting at your son's school today. Our snipers made a tactical decision to eliminate the targets without endangering our ground forces and unfortunately your son was deemed a target due to his possession of a firearm, have a good day."

Also, in my search so far I have found 4 shootings at college campuses since 1995, in that same period I count over 30 shootings at a high school campus. Would the same solution work for high schools then? Just allow all of the 15 year old freshmen to carry and that would end all of the violence at the school. Come on people, you owning a gun isn't going to stop someone who has decided that they are going to end their life and take people down with them. These are special cases, planned out and mapped for execution and the desired outcome. Every one of these shootings has ended in a hail of bullets from the police which ends the life of the shooter, the psychological deterrent that you may die cause other people have guns is obviously not a factor to these people.

For full disclosure I carry a concealed weapon and have been a proud gun-owner for years, but there is a reason we pay the police to protect us, because they have the training and experience to dole out protection in the form of lethal force, the same can't be said for teenagers.

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Hypocrisy Smells Bad

Yesterday there was a pretty good comment war on this article I posted yesterday, concerning the vaccine-autism misinformation out there. I got a few comments concerned that I don't consider the mercury/vaccine/mitochondrial disorder/antivax flavor of the day to autism connection serious. In fact I do, and fully support continued funding on vaccine research and their singular and cumulative effect on multiple subpopulations of the world. But mercury is gone and every study has either shown inconclusive or negative causation results so I don't like people spreading unnecessary fear about a highly complicated and extremely important public health pillar.

But here's what gets me, the same people telling me that vaccines cause autism and that the government should more highly scrutinize vaccines aren't up in arms over Bush's CO₂ and ozone policies. Here's a real fact, in a study of 13 Italian cities (200,000 inhabitants) 0.6% of total mortality (over 500 deaths, equivalent to about 6,000 years) was attributed to ozone levels over 70μg/m³ (micrograms/meter cubed). Using a little math we can put that in a number we use over here in the US at 58.13ppm (for you science nerds who wanna check my math I used the density of dry air at 20C and 101.325kPa). I hope I didn't lose everyone with the science and math cause here comes the important information.

At 58ppm over 500 deaths were attributed Ozone in 13 Italian cities.
This is live data for the ozone levels in Texas in ppm as of 3 pm. 12 out of the 20 monitoring stations reported measurements as high as those that caused 6,000 years of loss in Italian cities, and this is over a much larger population. Now here's the scary part of that important information.
Due to formatting problems (link to full map with legend) I couldn't get the legend up but the green area represents "Good" quality air. That's not what the previous map told me though, it told me that Italians living at that level were dying specifically from the exposure. How can levels of this sort be considered safe, and not only safe but good? There is some sort of hypocrisy going on here because a substance that has been proven (I just used one study of real world data for an example) to harm humans is allowed to persist at these levels. Anybody care to take a guess why?

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Happy Primary Day!

Get your butts out and vote if you're in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, or Rhode Island.

Gig' Em Obama!

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Are you Thirsty Yet? Give it 20 Years...

Drinking water, its something so inconspicuous that most of us take it for granted. If you think about it, there's nothing stopping you from turning on every faucet in your house and leaving them on while you go to work (besides the cost). Our ease of access to clean, public drinking water has diminished our concern for the quality of water as well as the planning and management of future water use.

Of utmost importance to those studying our water supply is the protection from point source and non-point source pollution and contamination. Every year we are dumping more and more hazardous or foreign materials into the water table and open reservoir system. This does not bode well for our future and here's why.

Water, just like oil, has a finite supply. There is the same amount of water on Earth now as when it was formed (you may drink water the Neanderthals drank). Freshwater, safe for drinking, has a much smaller supply. Of all water on the Earth 0.76% can be found as fresh groundwater, 0.007% is found as freshwater lakes, and 0.0002% is found in rivers. So our total pool for drinking water is only 0.7672% of all water found on Earth. That's only 2,548,339 cubic miles of water! And this supply is only getting smaller as it takes about 100 years for a water molecule to get from the ocean to a freshwater source. In the US we have 25 states under drought conditions, with 9 suffering from extreme to exceptional drought. Atlanta is going to have their wakeup call before anyone else as its been predicted their reservoir system will be drained in 10 years if rainfall doesn't increase or a more progressive management system isn't utilized.

So yeah the supply of drinking water is a small percentage of total water on the Earth, but who cares? Well I do for one, and here's a few reasons why.

Rocky Mountain National Park reports trout in 5 lakes have both male and female sex organs. These fish have never had a sex determination naturally that ended in hermaphrodites and the cause of this has been pinned on pollution in the water altering endocrine function in the fish. Fish are great biomarkers for the health of water reservoirs because they are constantly exposed to all contaminants and are an early warning sign of what water can do to us.

China recently has had great problems as it becomes industrialized as large plants are dumping toxic chemicals into their river systems (see photo above). Government oversight has been slow to respond to the threats and many people have lost access to public drinking water. In fact, China has 2 of the top 10 polluted places on Earth. Around Tianying the birth defect rate is so high that it passes stroke as the leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Just last month over 60,000 Chinese citizens had to rely on bottled water for their needs due to a massive runoff of a coal plant. And this isn't the first time this has happened in China, in November 2005 a spill of cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene, forced the government to cut off drinking water to 3.8 million people for 5 days.

Another aspect of all of this dumping is that all of the waterways in the world are connected. Throughout the water cycle a molecule will travel from ocean to precipitation to groundwater to rivers, and the cycle has no concern for national or international borders. Russia has had to deal with 3 large chemical spills in China that were washed into Russian territory by rainfall and river runoff.

But what about Texas?
The red areas of this map indicate polluted waters in Texas. It comes out to about 30% of surface water which is contaminated by some sort of pollutant. This could be bacterial blooms, toxins, heavy metals, or plastic based by-products. We need to stand up and protect our waterways before we are in a situation like Georgia.

Texas leads the nation in the number of treatment plants and industrial facilities that fail to meet pollution standards for the wastewater they dump into rivers and streams.

A report by US Pirg, Troubled Waters, found that 318, or about 53 percent, of the state's major industrial and wastewater plants failed Clean Water Act standards in at least one of 12 reporting periods in 2005.

A 2003 state auditor's report that looked at 80 pollution cases backs that contention. The auditor found that state fines for the pollution cases totaled less than $1.7 million, but the facilities involved benefited more than $8.6 million by not complying with regulations.

And the problem isn't always industry. Check out this waterway in China meant to runoff to the local treatment plant. After a good rain everything in the trash leaches back into the water supply and continues to build to a toxic level. Over time this will effect the microflora and fauna which is the backbone to a healthy pond or stream environment. Without those primary producers and the oxygen their photosynthesis produces there is no way to sustain a large tissued animal.





And the problem isn't confined to the up-and-comers of the world. Right here in the US you can see scenes like this in Los Angeles. We need to wake up people and see what we're doing to the environment.

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Texans of Fort Worth, Parker, Ellis, and Johnson counties: Vote for Pat Hardy!

There's a school board election in District 11 of Texas that has a clear choice: Pat Hardy is the pro-science candidate, despite being a conservative, religious Baptist, while her opponent is a deranged lunatic who is quietly outspending her 12:1 while avoiding the public eye altogether. You do not want to vote for Barney Maddox — he is an "ill-informed nutcase".

What's weird is how people across the country and tuning in to see how this Texas thing goes. In Minnesota a fellow blogger covering the situation said, "we're affected by the outcomes of local school board races in Texas — allowing ignorant, raving lunatics to make textbook decisions there is going to shape the choices we get to make here." So if you know any Texans, spread the word: Barney Maddox is bad news.

As a little background, Texas, along with Florida, buy more textbooks than the rest of the nation combined so creationists are looking to change the Texas curriculum to include creationist information. Most likely to save costs, the book companies will print only the versions with creationist info and distribute it around the country. This is why many scientists and policy makers are watching Texas and Florida closely about this issue.

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Texas Energy Crisis

Texas again reigns supreme as the leader in CO2 production in the nation! This is just another award that embarrasses me being a native Texan along with our degradation of science principles in high schools (I'll cover this on Saturday) and being some of the fattest Americans. This report though hits on the underlying problem in the state; that our local and state governments are in bed with big industry.

So being a scientist I like to tease out all aspects of the facts in order to get a full picture of the information. I'll steal from a Newsweek article here:

If Texas were its own country, it would be the 48th most populous in the world, right between North Korea and Ghana. In terms of landmass, at 268,000 square miles it would be the 40th-biggest. Were the Lonestar State to secede from the union it would be the world's eighth-largest emitter of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, just behind Canada, with 630 million metric tons spewed into the atmosphere in 2005, according to new figures released this week by the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration. That's actually a reduction of 40 million metric tons since 2003, when Texas was the globe's seventh-largest CO₂ contributor. But even though the state is improving, Texas still outpaces the combined emissions of California and Pennsylvania, the states with the second- and third-highest CO₂ outputs.

Wow! We produce more greenhouse gas than the number 2 and 3 states combined?!?!? Of course Texas is the nation's largest energy producer, and has more cattle and oil refineries than any other state, effectively making us the power plant, gas pump and beef basket of the nation. So is industry totally to blame for this? Hell no, its us the citizens who really need to look at ourselves. Our 23.5 million citizens use 3,000 more kilowatt hours every year than the average American, and we like to drive large gas guzzling cars. According to the Texas DPS there are 20 million vehicles registered in the state, and a full quarter of them are pickup trucks (nationally 16% of vehicles are trucks). And this last year 61% of new vehicles were light trucks (nationally, 47%) .

A third of our emissions come from transportation and in such an expansive state little to nothing has been done by either local or state governments to ease this environmental pressure. As defined by the EPA's Clean Air Act more than half of all Texans live in areas where the air is unsafe to breathe.

And you think this type of health hazard would spur the government to enact change but Texas stands as one of only 15 states without a climate action plan. And of those 15 states 11 have bills under consideration, but Texas has yet to even begin to consider a plan! And here's how serious our governor is about climate change, last year he said "Al Gore's mouth is the country's leading source of carbon dioxide, not Texas." And bless the good Aggie's heart, you know he's just looking out for big business in his state, but at some point Texas is going to have to break the co-dependence on the oil industry for policy and money.

So how is big industry affecting Texans energy policies? Well last year the Texas Association of Manufacturers and Houston-based Exxon Mobil successfully lobbied against a bill that would have provided tax incentives for businesses and homeowners who install solar panels. The state legislature even voted down a bill that would have increased taxes to provide for a light rail system in the state. The Texas Oil and Gas Association and Texas Automobile Dealers Association spent $12 million to successfully defeat a bill by an Austin Democratic senator that would have set up a task force to study climate change. And in 2006 TXU announced it would build 11 coal plants to supplement the 18 Texas already has. The state government even fast tracked the application process to ensure the public had little to no time to comment on it. Luckily a coalition of 40 cities and local governments blocked the plans and TXU was bought out. An upcoming documentary by Robert Redford, "Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars" will detail the fight against big industry.

But things aren't all bad. Texas continued to push wind power and added $3 billion in wind generation last year. Legendary oilman Boone T. Pickens has invested billions of his own money to build the largest wind farm in the world in the Texas panhandle which should begin construction in 2010.

And even though the state government has dropped the ball, local governments are making a push towards renewable energy sources with Austin leading the way. Austin mayor Will Wynn put forth a plan to have the city run 100% on renewable energy sources by 2012, that's only 4 years!!! The plan also calls for every new single-family home to be zero-net-energy-capable by 2015!

The push for innovation in these areas will come from local governments and their citizens who demand that energy production be adjusted to uncuff the state from the oil industry. Big business has little interest in these goals as witnessed by GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz who during a closed door meeting with journalists in Dallas said, "Global warming is a total crock of shit. I'm a skeptic, not a denier … I’m motivated more by the desire to replace imported oil than by the CO2." Wow, talk about a real desire to help not only our neighbors but our planet.

I for one am planning to make myself less oil dependent in the next 5 years and for many reasons. One will be the cost of oil consumption. Basic economics tells us that as supply decreases (we keep taking out oil, but no new supplies are being created) and demand increases (humans have used 1 trillion barrels of oil since 1859, more than 93% of it since 1973) prices will skyrocket.


I am unwilling to use a vendor who's cost of service has tripled in the last 7 years and has a 62.8% medium or worse risk of delivery failure. I'm unwilling to rely on an industry which can cut off 97% of its supply for political, weather and policy demands.

Ordinary citizens are starting to listen as well. A family friend of ours has recently added 78 wind turbines twice the size of the Statue of Liberty to his farm outside of Sweetwater, TX. He gets paid abou $500 a month for allowing the turbines on his land and his new favorite catch phrase is "that's just money you're hearing." The New York Times even picked up on this story and has made Louis a local celebrity with farmers and city dwellers alike asking how they can get in on some of the money. This is a very telling movement as always has been the case with human reason, if there is incentive your ideals will change to meet the reward.

So go out and make a difference Texans, this is our damn state! Don't let the businesses and suits in Austin tell you how the energy policy should be, be heard and make a stand. Contact your local politicians and tell them how you feel. I myself have had good conversation with Senator Ogden concerning two separate energy bills which the congress will see this year. I encourage all of you to get out and shoot a quick email or phone call to these guys, its their freakin' job to listen!

Senate District 5--Senator Steve Ogden
District Address: 3740 Copperfield Dr., Suite 103
Bryan TX 77802
Phone: (979) 776-0521

House District 14--Representative Fred Brown
District Address: 1920 West Villa Maria Road, Suite 303
Bryan TX 77802
Phone: (979) 822-9797

And our national representatives:

Congressional District 17--Congressman Chet Edwards
111 University Drive East, Ste. 216
College Station, TX 77840
Phone: (979) 691-8797

Senator John Cornyn contact.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson contact.

*All of these Congressman have email addresses on their linked pages. I encourage you to slip a little note that this sort of stuff is important

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