I’m glad to see that there have been generations of people on the job, explaining the science of evolution, and defending it from weird attacks from the Scopes Trial all the way up to Sarah Palin. That said, there are some attempts to deal with the cultural conflict between biology and fundamentalist religion that seem more interested in making everybody happy than in dealing seriously with the problem.

So, I’m happy to see that the Natural History Museum in London has developed a series of online and offline events in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. I’m groaning, however, to see events like the debate entitled Can science ignore faith?

“Religion and science are both valued cultural endeavours that are called upon when looking for answers, inspiration and guidance. They have often been seen as being in conflict with one another but despite this they are both strong elements in society. Join us for a drink and a lively debate as we attempt to explore the relationship between science and Christianity and discuss if there is a middle ground that could allow both sides to reconcile their differences.”

Notice that slip? The topic of the discussion moves from “faith” and “religion” in general to Christianity in particular.

The idea of reconciling the differences between science and Christianity may make people who hate conflict feel better, but it’s inherently absurd. Science and Christianity have overlapping spheres of interest, despite what many anxious coddlers have suggested, but they have inherently opposing agendas and techniques.

For science and religion to come to a middle ground with each other, reconciling their differences, would wreck science and most of religion. Science cannot be science if it needs to have its differences with an ideology reconciled, and a religion that changes with the facts of the world couldn’t maintain a distinct, coherent identity. Perhaps, as some Unitarian Universalists would claim, coherence isn’t necessary for religious identity. I suspect that most religious people would disagree with them.

Asking the question Can science ignore faith? is a weird question because, as science, it clearly can. Successful scientific work goes on all the time without religious input, and there’s never been any example of scientific research that could only work with an element of faith involved. Faith isn’t involved in science, if science is science.

The Natural History Museum might as well have asked:

Can science ignore animated cartoons?
Can science ignore cupcakes?
Can science ignore glitter?
Can science ignore hand puppets?
Can science ignore skateboarding?
Can science ignore folk music?
Can science ignore Mexican jumping beans?
Can science ignore lint collectors?
Can science ignore pet rocks?

Yes science can.

- A United Nations summit working toward an international agreement to work against climate change begins today and lasts through December 12. The agreement is supposed to be created in its final form by this time next year.
- The United Nations meetings come in the context of reports that indicate that greenhouse gases reached their highest ever recorded level last year.
- Some nations, such as Ireland, are still fighting the process of reaching a climate change accord. Who knows what part the lame duck US government will take in these current talks?
- Activists in Europe can use the Time To Lead web site to file comments urging a strong international commitment to meaningful reductions in emissions. Greenpeace urges people to upload their photographs to be shown in a slideshow of people supporting climate change at the UN conference.
- Opponents of action to confront climate change have developed a new tactic: To claim that environmental action to deal with climate change is too expensive given the worldwide economic recession that threatens to turn into a depression. Investment in public works projects to create clean-energy infrastructure could be just the thing to jump start the world economy. Then again, the damage caused by climate change harms the economy, but anti-environmentalists have always been a rather irrational lot.
- Emblematic of more grassroots opposition to clean energy comes in the form of the people in southern Wales who just defeated efforts to build a wind farm near their town. Windmills are “monstrosities”, say the people who seem quite happy with all the other modern changes to their landscape - deforestation, big roads, noisy cars, etc.
- New photographs show that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, a giant chunk of ice in Antarctica, is getting ever closer to crumbling and falling into the sea.
- The resulting rise in sea level would make things even worse for people in Venice, who are suffering the worst floods there in 22 years.

Wow! Zoom! Great! Bike lanes in Bloomington, Indiana, right? I’m not so sure. During that and subsequent drives on College Ave. this weekend, I saw cars using that right-hand lane just as they used the other lanes, driving at the same speed, taking up the same space. Bicycles weren’t given the right of way in that lane. And it’s not just a de facto culture of driving thing: according to the city Bloomington, that’s the way it is. The Bloomington bike map makes sure to stipulate that “No assurance of safety of legal right-of-way is implied by the publication…”.

Perhaps my expectations have been set unreasonably high by my youthful visit to the Netherlands and by my six-year youngish stay in Tucson. In these places, separate dedicated bicycle lanes from which cars are forbidden are a common sight. In most American states, bicycles have the same right to a right-hand lane of traffic as any car. What does painting bicycles on a lane of traffic accomplish if cars are allowed to drive on it as usual, anyway?

There is a PR value to such designations: I am reminded of a narrow street in Durham, North Carolina on which cars regularly drive 50 miles an hour. The street ended with a vertical lip, making crashes by bicyclists more likely, and there was no dedicated space, not even a shoulder, for bikes to occupy. City officials nevertheless affixed a cheery metal “Bike-Friendly City!” sign to a pole on that street. Did the message make people feel better about using bikes around town, regardless of the difficulty? Does the Bloomington Bike Map look better having a College Ave. “bike path” to give the impression of improved downtown accessibility? Probably.

Call me a stickler, but if I were the Grand World Bike Map Drawing Pooh-Bah, I would stipulate that a “bike lane” is a visible lane just for bikes. Anything else and it’s just a regular old “lane.” If city planners want to have a pretty color-coded bike map with “bike lanes” on it for their city to attract visitors and new residents and “bike-friendly city” designations, they’d have to set aside money in their transportation budgets for actual bike lanes. You know, make an infrastructure commitment beyond the purchase of a gallon or two of paint.

Since when is the Department of State a “national security” post? It’s the job of the Department of State to handle foreign relations - our interactions with people outside our borders. I see how that role could be related to security, but it isn’t a security role in itself. The security of the nation would be within the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. Must the Department of State be security-centered as well?

When the government organization that deals with the outside world is regarded as a security institution, it’s a sign that our nation is incapable of thinking about what lays beyond its borders without feeling insecure. That’s a serious weakness in our national character - a weakness that Barack Obama ought to be confronting, not confirming.

The Department of State will serve us best when it is focused on reaching out, sharing and cooperating with the world, instead of regarding everything unAmerican as a threat.

The first thing that bothered me was the purpose of this medication, as described in the advertisement. The ad changes the wandering, forgetful mind of a child into the singular mind of an achiever. However, it’s perfectly normal for a child of the age pictured in the ad to leave a backpack on the bus, or to fight with a sibling, to forget homework, and to provoke calls home from a teacher. That’s all part of growing up.

I know that there are small numbers of children who have real, serious ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) symptoms. The symptoms described in this advertisement don’t rise to that level at all, but the advertisement suggests to parents that they medicate away this ordinary level of mind-wandering, so that their children can make their teachers happy, and stay focused on their assignments.

What will that child miss as a result of living life on a straight line instead of wandering path? Some of the most important thinking in life is not a simple matter of receiving an assignment, and following directions to its completion. Our minds wander for an important reason - to enable us to acquire information that others have not yet gathered, and to allow us to bring previously known facts together in unexpected ways.

We started Irregular Times because we’re dedicated to the ideal of irregular thought. The people who contribute to this site find it difficult to remain within the strictly defined rules and roles for living commonly held as ideal. We see the value in a disorderly life, but that doesn’t mean we have any disorder.

Turning the page, the advertisement for Concerta grew even more disconcerting. There, on two full magazine pages, were the legally-required notices about the side effects of Concerta. Among possible side effects such as death from heart failure are those you see here,to the right.

This medication, which is supposed to help your kid get on the straight and narrow path to life, can actually provoke them into depression or swings between mania and depression, hostility, and paranoid hallucinations. Those kinds of psychological side effects are not going to help any child fit in and follow along.

A more honest advertisement for Concerta might look like this:

The underlying idea of Concerta seems to be that it can bring the children who take it into concert with the expectations of society so that they can work in concert with their peers and in concert with the desires of the adults in authority over them. I know that life can be difficult for nonconformists, but I wouldn’t attempt to enforce conformity upon my children if its not what they wanted for themselves.

Children all struggle. They shouldn’t have to struggle with life-threatening, sanity-imperiling side effects of medication. They shouldn’t be exposed to such risks unless other dangers are even greater. Losing a backpack on the bus, forgetting homework, and getting a phone call from a teacher don’t even come close to this threshhold.

Looking at this advertisement in detail provoked me to question the worth of a medication like Concerta. So, why would the company who made concerta bother spending money on such an advertisement? Wouldn’t that be counterproductive for sales?

Keep in mind that my reaction came after a sustained examination and consideration of the print ad. What the maker of Concerta is counting on is that most readers of Better Homes and Gardens won’t examine and consider the advertisement in detail. Most readers will look quickly at an advertisement like this, pick up the top two or three ideas that they can perceive most quickly, and then move on.

In other words, the makers of Concerta are counting on parents to have a short attention span and a problem focusing on details.

The image seen above tells a human story that’s emotionally compelling to parents who feel out of control of their children. It’s communicated visually as well as linguistically, with graphic elements that steer a lazy reader’s eye from one thought to another.

The two pages of information about side effects don’t have those same cognitive aids. They’re in simple black and white text, with little embellishment to catch the eye and n visual cues to assist a reader in understanding the risks of taking Concerta.

Most people aren’t rational, logical dedicated interpreters of media. Pharmaceutical advertisers know that, and so can be confident that, as long they give give separate and unequal contexts to the benefits and risks of the medications they sell, their medications will keep on selling.

Well, the really weird thing is we’ve done this sort of thing before. We haven’t learned from our previous mistakes. America’s reaction to war has always been bipartisan, and it’s always been severe and xenophobic. We’ve always picked a group and picked on that group. If you go back to the First World War, we picked on German Americans. We then had the Red Scare: we picked on socialists, communists, anyone who was differerent, anarchists, you name it. Then along comes the Second World War and we interned Japanese Americans and threw away the keys. What we did to them was just unfathomable, but we did it and everyone cheered and the Supreme Court said, “Yeah, go right ahead, it’s no big deal.” When you fast forward to 9-11, we started doing it all over again. We started picking on Muslim Americans. We did Palmer raids (which were in World War I) invasions of people’s lives and we did that all over again with the Patriot Act. We don’t learn our lessons.

I’m not optimistic on this. I’m optimistic on a lot of things, a lot of things that Amy talked about, but I have little optimism in this regard. The Patriot Act and the stuff that went along with the Patriot Act, which in my mind is just a walking, talking Fourth and First Amendment violation, is not likely to change much under the Obama administration. I mean, the Democrats were part of the cheerleading when this thing went through in 2001. It was almost unanimous, just amazing that no one read the Patriot Act in the first place and then just cheered as it went through. If you look at what’s gone on since then, the Democrats have not complained about this stuff.

For example, there’s a professor in South Florida. His name is Sami Al-Arian, who went on the O’Reilly Factor back in 2001 and criticized Israel; his statement was something like “Death to Israel,” which was a very common slogan, a very common Palestinian chant. Following that, the Justice Department descended upon Al-Arian, who was a legal resident and alien, a computer scientist at the University of South Florida. They locked him up in solitary confinement where he remained until a trial three and a half years later. The Justice Department lost miserably in that trial; there were 40 some-odd counts against Al-Arian and several alleged co-conspirators, and not one returned a conviction. There was a hung jury on a couple of points and for that reason the Justice Department kept Al-Arian in jail, and he remained in jail until just last month. You know what? Nobody among the Democrats criticized the Bush administration’s approach to that.

If you look at John Walker Lindh, if you look at Jose Padilla, all these alleged terrorists who’ve been prosecuted, who’ve been driven insane by solitary confinement and torture, how much criticism do you see out there from Democrats? You don’t, and that’s what scares me. All of this crazy stuff that the Bush administration put in place — and mark my word, it’s crazy, the stuff that George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales and Cheney came up with is just constitutionally crazy. Their arguments make no sense. Yet they made the arguments and it took years and years for the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, to say, “You’re nuts! You can’t make that argument work!” And the political branches? They did nothing.

So I really don’t see the Obama administration doing much in this regard. Just think of the criticisms that were leveled on Obama during the campaign. You see people in Ohio even saying, “Well, he’s a black Muslim, I can’t vote for him.” Well: “How dare you not vote for him because he’s black?” and Obama’s response was, “Well, I’m not a Muslim!” I was waiting for Obama to say, “How dare you use religion as a factor in picking your next president?” Shouldn’t we have been just as outraged when someone said, “Well, he’s a Muslim?” But we weren’t, and I really fear for the Muslim American community in the coming years. I worry that the Democrats — and I don’t want to lay this all on Obama, I want to lay it on the Democrats — I really worry that the Democrats are not going to do much with this.

I think in the future, in the coming years, we’re going to see a lot of religious discrimination tied in to the War on Terror. I don’t think the Patriot Act, though it’s been modified and softened, is going to change a great deal either. I can’t imagine the incoming administration is going to give up all the intelligence techniques that the Bush administration has developed. I hope he does, but I don’t think he will. That intelligence is like candy; it’s maybe like cocaine. Once you get hooked on it, it’s really hard to get away from. I worry that we’re going to see more of it. If you don’t know what’s going on now, the Bush administration basically says it can read your e-mails, it can listen to your phone calls. Period. It’s tried to couch it and say, “Only if you’re talking to terrorists!” Well, how do you know that you’re talking to terrorists until you listen to the conversation? They’re listening to your conversations, and I think that’s going to continue in the future. I don’t think that originated with George W.; I’m sure Nixon did it, but Nixon got caught and we told him not to do it again. We haven’t quite gotten around to that yet with the new wave.

As I listened, however, I knew that the NPR reporters were missing an important part of the story. I knew that because I lived for about 5 years near both communities, and I know something of their stories. When it came to Newton, NPR got it mostly right. On Amana, however, NPR left out a chunk of the story so huge, and so prominent, that it seems like an intentional omission - an effort to retell a more simple, and palatable, story.

First of all, the Amana appliance company wasn’t based in Amana so much as it was based in the Amana Colonies. The Amana colonies are seven villages, not just one. They were settled by an anabaptist sect of German-speaking people who established their communities according to a communal model. The Amana company may have ended up as a standard capitalist corporation, but it started out as a socialist, community-owned-and-operated organization.

I don’t want to go the way of NPR, and simplify the story too much, but the fact is that the Amana company was hugely successful under the socialist model, and ended up diminishing under a capitalist operating framework.

Why did the NPR story not mention this important economic background to the story? It would be difficult for any serious journalist visiting and writing a story about the Amanas to fail to discover the communal foundation of the Amana company and the community in general.

The Weekend Edition story did mention that the people in the Amanas were suffering less than the residents of Newton, because the Amanas have a strong tourism industry. Yet, the reporter didn’t say why that tourism industry is strong in the Amanas. Tourism to the Amanas is strong because the Amana Colonies have a distinctive cultural heritage, ethnically and socially, due to the villages’ communal history.

Someone listening to the NPR story about Newton and Amana in Iowa wouldn’t know about this important difference between the communities, and wouldn’t understand an essential part of economic conditions resulting from the communities’ very different histories.

I can’t help but think that NPR wasn’t just failing to report on an aspect of the economic past in America - but was failing to discuss an option for America’s economic future as well.

If you’re made of money, you can buy an expensive framed ceramic tile or an even more expensive print on handmade paper, but there are more modest items for sale as well. In my visit I didn’t purchase a thing, just marveling at the layers of color or distinct borders between color in the various productions ranging from completely abstract designs to the stylized representations of natural objects. The people in the studio that day take part in the ceramic and papermaking, and so they were enthusiastic and detailed in showing off old wooden printing presses and rolls of wire woven to create watermarks. Call ahead to 740-779-3300 to arrange a visit so you’ll be sure someone is in the shop.

For links to plans of action around the Earth on December 6, visit the Global Climate Campaign. In the US, visit the Climate Crisis Coalition and Greenpeace USA for a list of local actions.

Just this week, a lawsuit by General Motors and Chrysler, seeking to require Rhode Island to accept inefficient cars, was thrown out of court. The judge called the lawsuit “vexatious” and a “waste”.

Why should Congress give any aid to an industry that continues to resist the idea that it needs to provide people with cars that get reasonable gas mileage? Government bailout money to Detroit would be used, in effect, to pay the fees for lawyers seeking to interfere with important state and federal regulation. We’re facing an environmental crisis, and an energy crisis with wildly careening fossil fuel prices that wouldn’t have the power to harm our economy if America’s engines ran more efficiently.

Until the Detroit corporations call off their lawsuits, they shouldn’t expect to hear anything at the negotiating table but laughter.